Brian Jonestown Massacre @Fowler's Live, Adelaide(23/02/10)

Fri 26th Feb, 2010 in Gig Reviews

CHECK OUT ALL THE PHOTOS HERE.

“I think I recognise four of them” says one punter to another as the eight-man maelstrom known as Brian Jonestown Massacre sidle on stage before a sell-out assembly at Fowler’s Live. BJM have had around 40 members since their 1990 inception, a number that if assembled would dwarf the Polyphonic Spree, who just so happened to be playing in Adelaide the following night. But over the last 12 months the group have re-assembled something approaching their classic line-up, as co-songwriter Matt Hollywood, Joel Gion and Ricky Maymi have returned to the group. Evident in the crowd was as much trepidation as anticipation, for BJM’s capacity to do absolutely anything on stage is well-founded, stemming largely from the reputation of chief songwriter and band leader Anton Newcombe.

The phrase “his reputation precedes him” does scant justice to the waft of discord and disaster that Newcombe has developed, both within the indie music scene during the 1990s and in the wider public sphere via his tortured but endlessly watchable portrayal in the popular documentary DiG, which charted the tragicomic arc of his unashamedly analogue outfit next to the more conventional rise of the narrator Courtney Taylor-Taylor’s Dandy Warhols. But Newcombe has gone genuinely straight, ditching the hard drugging, then hard drinking (in the early 2000s he lived on a litre of vodka a day) ways of his past. Who Killed Sergeant Pepper?, the band’s new album, was concocted while sober, and so too now is the live show.

There are still glimpses of Newcombe’s scattershot persona, from rambling stories about McDonald’s restaurants in Iceland, to apologies for not coming to Adelaide sooner (“unless you get on the bill of something like the Big Day Out…”) and the suggestion of a September tour with who else but the Dandy Warhols. He also deigned to close the main set with an anti-climactic “um, I think that’s it”, before trudging off stage to rapturous applause delayed just a few seconds. Yet the overall impression was of instincts far more paternal than at any other stage of the group’s long and tripped out odyssey. He spent much of the night with his face tilted watchfully towards the rest of the band, only assuming a more classical frontman’s posture on a few later songs, while also offering plenty of limelight to his musical and behavioural counterpoint Hollywood. There were two false starts, one causing some in-band discussion related to Newcombe’s dissatisfaction with the sound, though nothing like the kinds of explosions documented so graphically by DiG’s director Ondi Timoner.

Newcombe’s relative satisfaction with the sound was well-founded: here was a night when the density of four vintage electric guitars layered over the top of each other, augmented by bass, drums, keys and the Bez-like prominence of tambourine and maracas merchant Gion, made for a very heavenly mess indeed. The band’s great achievement is to mesh the enveloping wall of guitar noise favoured by shoe-gaze with the garage affectations, song structures and themes of the late 1960s – a marriage one is constantly reminded of by the “cut-up and re-attach” nature of the band and album names.

All this makes for a sound that does not vary a huge amount over the course of a show, particularly one like this that favoured the group’s revivalist 1990s output over the more uneven recent work. The set-list mined the past much moreso than the present, featuring a long line of vintage tunes, including Who?, Anenome, Wisdom, Evergreen, Got My Eye On You, Oh Lord, Straight Up And Down, Crush, When Jokers Attack and a wondrous rendition of Satellite to close the night.

Individual songs and their renditions matter less than the question of whether or not BJM were able to successfully impose their tone and texture on the room. In this the night was an unqualified success, as wave after wave of guitars washed over an enraptured crowd, which in general seemed quite happy to listen rather than devote too much time to baiting Newcombe – a now time-honoured tradition of the BJM live experience. As the gig concluded and the house-music returned, members of the faithful were seen to look at each other in amazement, pinching themselves in an effort to ascertain whether or not they had actually seen that rarest of miracles – a pristine BJM performance. Indeed they had, and it was the sort of experience that makes the at-first-glance-hilarious assessment of a devoted A&R rep from DiG make perfect sense: “They’re the the greatest ‘60s revival band since the ‘60s”.

CHECK OUT ALL THE PHOTOS HERE.