There's something wildly reassuring about watching seven men wreak controlled chaos on a stage without anyone trying to explain to you why. The Brian Jonestown Massacre don't play concerts -- they hold séances. And in Amager Bio this May evening, many of us had agreed to let ourselves be obsessed with noise, squalor and tambourine love.
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Disclaimer: Apropos Magazine received access or a review copy. As always, we share our own impressions — unfiltered.
Six stars
Anton Newcombe looked like a man who had got up straight from a dream and had brought the whole band along. After 35 years, BJM is still the closest we'll come to a spiritual rock cult, where rehearsal is the ritual and the guitar pedals are the priests.
The stage was tightly packed: three 12-string guitars, a sea of pedalboards, a rhythm section that kept it all from imploding -- and, of course, Joel Gion, who plays the tambourine not as a rhythm instrument, but as a ceremony. He's half mascot, half messin' shaman. And the audience loves it.
The sound was fierce and hypnotic. The walls of Amager Bio felt like they could give way at any moment, yet there was something extremely precise all over the place. Not strictly, but deliberately. Like a dream where you know you're dreaming — and stay in it anyway.
When “Anemone” came along, it was like being served a glass of red wine in a room of absinthe. The dragging, soaring melody made the hall feel weightless, and Anton sang with a strange kind of resignation, as if it were the first and last time he sang it. It wasn't. But it felt that way.
Between the numbers? Not much talk. Not some Anton Newcombe rage that one would otherwise almost expect (and perhaps hope a little for). Just concentrated joy of playing and a surprising collective calm. Even when it all tipped over into jam -- and it did -- it was with a direction. A form of purposeful ferocity.
This isn't music for the people who ask, 'When are they playing the hit? ' or “Shouldn't we just go get a beer?” It's music for those who go to a concert with their whole body. For those who know that noise is not noise, but texture.
Reflection:
BJM still doesn't care about the nice, the popular and the perfect. They play the way they want -- and we listen because we can't help but. In a time when so much music is made for TikTok, it's liberating to be in the company of a band that still believes in the length of the album, the repetition of the song and the power of the tambourine.
Amager Bio was just the right space for their sound and their energy. And while the concert probably won't convert new fans, it gave us, already under the influence, exactly what we came for: A psychedelic intoxication, without filter and without excuse.
