Brian Jonestown Massacre

Something Else

First of two albums this year from Anton Newcombe’s rock’n’roll survivors.

More than 20 years into what has been a tempestuous career, and

Brian Jonestown Massacre are arguably in the best shape they’ve ever been in. Once a caricature for rock’n’roll excess, the now‑sober and settled Anton Newcombe and his band have not only survived their past, they’ve also surpassed it, because underneath it all they’ve always offered so much more.

Something Else is the first of two albums to be released by the band in 2018, and it finds them on classic BJM form

– a warm, densely analogue journey through inner space punctuated by churchy keyboards and tambourines that rattle like bones. The usual touchstones are there – Suicide, The Jesus And Mary Chain, the Velvet Underground (particularly on the sour, obsessive, trancelike My

Love and the somnambulant Silent Stream) – but it’s very much Newcombe’s voice you’re hearing: mournful, weatherbeaten, and in the richly melodic Psychic Lips, cautiously optimistic. This is psych garage rock at its most artistic. Where this journey takes us, we’ll find out later in the year.