“There's a great spiritual awakening in America,” opined Ronald Reagan in 1983, during an address to the National Association of Evangelicals. “A renewal of the traditional values that have been the bedrock of America’s goodness and greatness.” Among the first shots in the 2018 film Mandy, a psychedelic revenge thriller set in 1983, is a slow pan over Nicolas Cage—a hardened lumberjack, in plaid—listening to a radio broadcast of Reagan’s speech on a dusky drive home from work. Cage lets him prattle on for a few more seconds before switching it off—a gesture that’s quick and measured, but that absolutely screams “shut the fuck up.”
That impulse is deeply embedded in Mandy, which pits Cage’s righteous chainsaw-swinger, Red Miller, against a traveling cult called the Children of the New Dawn. Their leader is Jeremiah Sand: a grotesque hybrid of Charles Manson and Bodhi from Point Break, and Miller’s opposite in nearly every respect. His philosophy is a kind of bargain-brand messianism, which he couches in clumsy pronouncements about universal love, though the act is painfully transparent; he’s essentially bad at what he does. He’s also, as it turns out, a musician—in one crucial scene, Sand kidnaps and drugs Miller’s wife, the titular Mandy, and forces her to listen to his terrible single, “Amulet of the Weeping Maze,” which Lakeshore Records actually sold as a promotional tie-in.
Now, a full two years after Mandy’s theatrical run, Sacred Bones have taken it a step further and released what they’re calling a newly “unearthed” album from the Jeremiah Sand character, complete with 1600 words of liner notes and fictional backstory from the late experimental musician Genesis P-Orridge. The label is fully playing the part: they haven’t said who really wrote and performed these songs (though the singer sounds a lot like Linus Roache, the actor who plays Sand in the movie), and they’ve neglected to mention that Sand isn’t a real person. Lift It Down blends cheesy psych-folk and chant-like spoken word into music that’s at once grating and platitudinous, silly and sinister. It’s profoundly annoying, which is to say it’s an extremely effective gag, and an implicit commentary on how we engage with our idiot preachers, our snake oil peddlers.
The idea, writes P-Orridge, is that Sand recorded this album in a state of “divine mania” during the mid-70s, at a recording studio turned religious outpost in Northern California, and that the tapes were hidden away in a lockbox for the next 40 years. According to a description on Sacred Bones’ website, the record’s “negative psychic energies” had even pioneering reissue label Light in the Attic running scared. It’s intentionally unpleasant stuff: the last utopian dreams of the ’60s curdling into self-parody.
The menacing title track sums up Sand’s m.o.: “In the void that surrounds you, you scream like a child/No one can hear you/No one can see you,” he incants, before pointing to a way out: “I’ll love and caress you, and force you to reckon with all that’s impure in your soul.” This is more or less how these songs operate—over garish, sun-soaked instrumentals, Sand plays God in an attempt to get laid. “Golden Desert” is cluttered with pseudo-spiritual bromides and half-baked aphorisms (“Fly with me through the dawning sky,” “Escape the maze”), none of which distract from the obvious charade. And while there are some interesting musical ideas smuggled in throughout (strained, mounting yelps on “Love Is,” the bad-trip Prince pastiche of “Taste the Whip”), the sound of the record is as ridiculous as the concept.
When Mandy hears “Amulet of the Weeping Maze,” in the movie, she bursts out laughing. The filmmakers are practically begging you to hate this music. And listening to Lift It Down for the first time, I wanted nothing more than to stem the flow of awkward sex metaphors and chaotic Sgt. Pepper homage. But there’s an unmistakable appeal in how the album straddles the real, involving you in its own psychology, and exposing a particularly American hypocrisy. The ruse is surface-level; it’s honest, in a way, about its lies.
If Jeremiah Sand is a gloss on self-interest masquerading as truth, then Lift It Down fully commits to the bit. This album isn’t a call to action, or to reexamine our own relationships with spirituality—it’s just a reminder to tune out the noise. Without a chainsaw, the album suggests, it’s maybe the best you can do.
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