The Brian Jonestown Massacre "We Are the Radio" (Tee Pee)
By Emily Trinks
Monday. Sep 19, 2:15 AM
Saint George slays the dragon.

Let’s start with the obvious: The Brian Jonestown Massacre are a remarkable band.

Remarkable, of course, is a loaded word, but it works even when you’re just looking at the basic resume bullets.

• Remarkable for existing 15 years out, let alone having a created such a vast collection of beautiful songs in the process.

• Remarkable for being more famous / infamous for the cult of personality than these beautiful songs.

• Remarkable in that all of their recently converted fans are now loving a band from eight years ago.

• Remarkable in their consistency of sound, even without consistency of players (try it: you could play something from Methadrone next to something from Bravery Repetition and Noise and not notice that these songs are 10 years apart… of course, the re-releases and remixes of deep cuts don’t help the matter, but I digress).

That being said, We Are the Radio is definitely a departure for TBJM in terms of sound and structure, and of course there’s a whole story behind it. Anton Newcombe joined forces with Sarabeth Tuceck, a young singer-songwriter, and they set forth to “create an alpha-wave-generating-audio environment so potent as to not only inspire and awaken deep thought in the listener, but in turn have that freshness of spirit spread like some thought plague from mind to mind.”

Newcombe positions We Are the Radio as an artistic crusade. The most important project in his lifetime. The sword of St. George that can slay the dragon of pop-culture brainwash.
If nothing else, he’s remarkable in his faith in his work.

Hype, hyperbole, tales of saints and monsters aside, We Are the Radio is a departure for TBJM. “Never Become Emotionally Attached to a Man, Woman, Beast or Child” opens the record with that familiar is-that-a-guitar-or-a-sitar? jangle, and while I don’t know an alpha-wave from a beta, I know Newcombe’s voice from somebody else’s. Even though we’re treated to Tuceck’s dripping-honey voice, it’s a little jarring not to hear Newcombe singing.

Tuceck’s voice is absolutely gorgeous. Although vulnerability and love are constant threads throughout many of TBJM’s songs, the listener gets a totally different, much more immediate sense of it from Tuceck, especially in the second track, “Seer.” This is the sound of self-actualization. It’s beautiful and it’s powerful.

We finally hear Anton on lead vocals in “Time is Honey (So Cut the Shit),” and this is vintage TBJM: shoegazey, torn-heart love song. Tuceck provides backing vocals and it sounds like the exhausted moans of the damned; like Orpheus and Eurydice and moment when he turns around and she gets swallowed up into Hell again. “Teleflows v. Amplification” is three minutes of “electronic experimentation,” and should best be left as that.

“God is My Girlfriend” closes the record out with a Satanic Majesties’ Second Request-esque neo-folk psychedelic Eastern-flavored love song. It’s pretty. There definitely (at least I think) are sitars involved.

Maybe it’s all because I’m highly suggestible (very likely), but the more I listened to We Are the Radio, the more I wanted to. Are these alpha-waves or St. George’s sword or are they just pretty songs? Who knows?

“At the end of the day, this is music. It should be listened to and not talked about.” Right on, Anton, right on. Listen to it.
www.brianjonestownmassacre.com
www.teepeerecords.com

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Emily Trinks

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