From day one, the Brian Jonestown Massacre demanded a certain amount of commitment: Between their 1993 debut and ill-fated 1998 signing with TVT Records, Anton Newcombe's rock'n'roll circus released no fewer than seven albums, three of them long enough to qualify as doubles. But it was still easy to make sense of their instantly sprawling discography, as each record presented a distinct identity and intent: Methodrone was their bad-trip take on shoegazing drone-rock; Their Satanic Majesties' Second Request exuded a Beatles-in-India splendor; Take It From the Man! channeled the sneering petulance of mid-1960s freakbeat; Thank God for Mental Illness captured Newcombe in busker-Dylan mode, and so on. Newcombe's influences were easy to parse on those early records, but at a time when the pop mainstream was starting to embrace electronica, and the initial promise of grunge had been diluted into corporatized alt-rock, Newcombe's fervent dedication to reviving these once-revolutionary musical forms constituted its own act of radicalism.
Much has been made of the Brian Jonestown Massacre's inter-band acrimony and revolving-door personnel, but truth is that initial creative surge was fueled by more or less the same core lineup. Since that cast had all but splintered by 1999, Newcombe has struggled to find the same kind of camaraderie, overhauling lineups, changing recording locales, and introducing new guest vocalists on an album-by-album basis. All that upheaval has resulted in more whimsical, exploratory records, ones that have opened up new sonic territory for the band (see: the disco/house beat pastiches of 2010's Who Killed Sgt. Pepper?), but have ultimately lacked the insurrectionary verve and focus of the BJM's 90s-era formation. As its title suggests, Aufheben-- a German term with several, oppositional meanings-- marks another change of scene and personnel for Newcombe, this time to East Berlin with a multicultural cast of session musicians. But the album also features the grounding influence of ex-Spacemen 3 bassist Will Carruthers (a touring member since 2008) and BJM Mk. 1 member Matt Hollywood, the closest thing the autocratic Newcombe has ever had to a foil. Their presence could very well account for the fact that Aufheben is the band's most consistent, welcoming, and sonically lustrous album in years, stylistically of a piece with the acoustically driven, organ-swathed psychedelia of Their Satantic Majesties' Second Request, but updated with a more pronounced rhythmic thrust and Middle Eastern instrumental accents.
Where Hollywood once enjoyed a George Harrison-esque allotment of two or three vocal turns per album, his contributions here are purely as a guitar player. But it's not like Newcombe's hogging the mic for himself; as per the BJM's recent track record, he spends the album's first half receding indecipherably into the mix or deferring to an unknown guest singing in a foreign language (in this case, Eliza Karmasalo, who supplies the airy Finnish lead vocal to the glacial, motorik pop of "Viholliseni Maalla"). But what's missing here isn't so much Newcombe's voice and personality (which take a more central role in the album's second half) as a sense of dynamics or anthemic release. Newcombe is a master at turning the minimal into maximal, layering myriad swirling textures into a dizzying head-rush of a tune (see: "Seven Kinds of Wonderful"), but crafty production only takes him so far. As richly rendered as songs like "I Wanna Hold Your Other Hand" and "Clouds Are Lies" may be, they pretty much reveal all their secrets right from the get-go and don't waver or intensify for their duration, without so much as introducing a chorus or a key change. And in the absence of any dramatic arc, the songs' running times become wholly arbitrary-- a point that Newcombe himself acknowledges when he fades out "Gaz Hilarant" abrupty after two uneventful, unintelligible verses.
Curiously, Newcombe saves his most fully realized melody for flautist Friederike Bienert on the atypical but surprisingly affecting instrumental "Face Down on the Moon", which posits an easy-listening union between Indian and English pastoral-psych traditions. And while the title of closer "Blue Order New Monday" reads like another case of Newcombe pillaging the rock canon for his own devious ends, the song actually counts as one of his most open-hearted gestures to date. As if to make up for his stinginess with the hooks elsewhere on Aufheben, Newcombe offers, by way of parting gift, a song that's all chorus, no verse, setting an optimistic sing-along refrain atop swells of strings, daydreamy piano taps, electronic frequencies, and a big, booming shuffle beat à la the Beatles' "It's All Too Much". Sure, he probably didn't need to stretch it out past the seven-minute mark, but, in light of a career as tumultuous as his, you can't begrudge Newcombe for wanting to prolong this moment of bliss.
