Review:

on 2011-03-05 CharlesMartel Said:

Anton Newcombe wrote "Not if You Were the Last Dandy on Earth".

Courtney Taylor-Taylor wrote "Not if You Were the Last Junkie on Earth".

Perhaps the two of them should get together and write "Not if We Were the Last Dickheads on Earth".

I mean, seriously, some people can get so precious. Newcombe might be an extremely capable musician but he can be a real prat at times. Perhaps it's the drugs which have fried his brains, for this album represents both the pinnacle and the decline of the Brian Jonestown Massacre. Let's face it, the band is Newcombe, and if the band does not reach the heights of critical acclaim which he feels are deserved, perhaps he ought to look more towards himself and his own issues than flinging shit at others. After all, if your band has had more than sixty individuals pass through its ranks at various times, I would suggest that the one constant member of it is more likely to be the root of all the problems than any one of those other individuals.

As you would expect, Newcombe would probably have been more at home lying on his back in some field in 1967 listening to the Electric Prunes or Atom Heart Mother. Naming the band after the fragile personality that was the Rolling Stones' first members-only victim seems to represent some kind of auto da fe for Newcombe and his artistic vision. The band, and this album in particular, owe much to the sixties psychedelia as anything, and the drugs which fuelled that genre, fuel the Brian Jonestown Massacre as well.

This is apparent right from the start. For some reason, drugs are associated with eastern mysticism, and least in the minds of those who are victims of the former. The strains of, variously, Indian and Arabic music permeate whole swathes of this album. Nowhere is this more evident than on the instrumental "Salaam", but it is also present on the opener "Super-Sonic" and can be easily detected on "Malela" as well. Now this is not necessarily a bad thing if handled skilfully, which by and large it is, though I do feel "Salaam" is a bit of an exercise in pretension.

On the other hand, what I do find difficult are those parts of this album when the drugs have clearly taken over. "Their Satanic Majesties' Second Request" (another Stones' reference) presumably sounded like a good idea when Newcombe was floating round the ceiling, but listened to in the cold light of day, it is just junk. More successful is the rambling "Sue" which conveys the chaos of a disordered mind, but retains enough coherence to make it a fine track.

So where does that leave this album? Well, it is Anton Newcombe in the end and stands and falls as his achievement or disaster. How you view him will affect how you view this album. I would suggest you take a look at the film "DIG" which came out around the same time as "Give It Back". This meandering, incoherent, day-in-the-life-of-a-band sort of film shows how Newcombe and the band developed, their relationship with the Dandy Warhols, and a lot of live footage. Newcombe comes across as someone struggling to hold it together. He rubs everyone he comes into contact with the wrong way, band members, crew, audience and anyone else who drifts across his radar. He may be a talented, gifted musician, but he also comes across as a serious Premier League arsehole. You wonder how he managed to hold it together long enough to come up with an album as worthwhile as "Give It Back".
Rating: 6/10