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The Brian Jonestown Massacre | Bringing It All Back Home Again

Retro rock'n'roll with a twist.
EP, Which?/TVT

Tekst: Scott Finnell

Publicatiedatum: 07 januari 2002

Ah, fair December... home to the winter solstice, a date on which the various culture complexes north of the equator have celebrated rebirth for thousands of years. The arrival of the shortest date of the year marks the turning point of winter, when the sun (and the Northern Hemisphere) begins its long journey back to summer. Today, at least in the countries of the West that have inherited the Christmas tradition, we celebrate the holiday with an orgy of consumption fit for Federico Fellini's most depraved wet dreams. Ever eager to satisfy our lust, music labels engage in the art of the re-release, breathing life into the dead old albums of the past. You would have to search for many moons to find a more timely album to illustrate the evils of re-release than The Brian Jonestown Massacre's 'Bringing It All Back Home Again'. To be blunt: This album is the Lord of the Underworld, the Queen of Death; it is Osiris and Hades and Kali all rolled into one. Take the band name, which manages to reference both the mass suicide of 913 cult members in Guyana and Brian Jones, the founding member of The Rolling Stones who was kicked out for partying too much and died mysteriously a short while later. Or look at the album title, which references the apocalyptic album on which the folkie Bob Dylan died and the rock messiah of the same name was born. But wait, there's more: This San Francisco band have been channeling the ghosts of rock'n'roll past since their first album in 1995, deliberately creating Sixties psychedelic music that references some of the best of the Stones as well as the great San Francisco bands of the decade. 'Bringing It All Back Home Again' offers up quality acoustic rock, the kind of hand-clapping, harmonica-soloing, retro rock'n'roll that the Baby Boomers were listening to in their adolescence. And these guys are good at it. All of the tunes on this EP conjure up visions of afros and bell-bottoms. It's an aural time capsule, a bit of original music smuggled across the decades to land in our space-time continuum. Of course, that's also the biggest turnoff to this record, because while BJM make solid tunes, they make solid tunes for a time and a place that exists only in the nostalgic memories of a generation that has long since sold its soul to the devil. The Brian Jonestown Massacre animate the dead flesh of Sixties psychedelic rock, but it's more Frankenstein than Phoenix because the spirit of the Sixties has moved on. And without a spirit, all we're left with is form empty of meaning. Which is why BJM are the poster children for December, the month of re-releases, the time of Aerosmith box sets and Smashing Pumpkins retrospectives, when the record industry tries to bring the dead back to life. True rebirth is taking the old forms and breathing a new life into them - just ask the author of the original 'Bringing It All Back Home', who knew thing or two about rebirth. Let the record labels heed the immortal words of TS Eliot: "In my end is my beginning," NOT "in re-releases there are more profits."

http://www.kindamuzik.net/recensie/the-brian-jonestown-massacre/bringing-it-all-back-home-again/909/
Meer The Brian Jonestown Massacre op KindaMuzik: http://www.kindamuzik.net/artiest/the-brian-jonestown-massacre