"Well I've drank a lot of whiskey, ate way too many pills, went around tight corners and had my share of spills."
The Brian Jonestown Massacre are something of an enigma to me. While they have produced some indisputable gems over the past 18 years or so, I find much of their discography somewhat indistinguishable, making it a hard sell for repeated listens in this epoch of digital music overload. Having said this, there was a brief, meteoric three album run in 1996 where their brand of 60s Stones revivalism wedded to an ironic 90s Lo-Fi aesthetic (though BJM are anything but ironic) refracted through a heavy dose of hallucinogenics made for some memorable, compelling work. My favorite among these is Thank God for Mental Illness, which introduced a Country-Blues variation to their sound resulting in some flickering moments of greatness. Three years later, this sound was briefly revisited on the Bringing It All Back Home Again EP, which, at least for me, is the last time BJM sounded relevant. This isn't lush acoustic gloom; rather, it's the kind of thing that sounds like it was recorded with pawn shop guitars at Spahn Ranch (not to mention that one song was actually penned by Charley himself). The gem here is "Reign On" with Miranda Lee Richards doing a more than credible job of channeling Hope Sandoval.
