Brian Jonestown Massacre - 'Don't Look At Me' featuring Aimee Nash
Two-years away to refuel gifts Brian Jonestown Massacre a chance at taking back control.
Opening with a riotously simple, hip-hop like kick-drum beat, the track reveals that it is not afraid to showcase its low-thumping mechanics that repeatedly bark and snarl beneath the scything guitar rhythms throughout. Harkening back to their glory days, the band brew together a wiry collage of gossamer-like riffs in preparation for Aimee Nash’s vaporous vocals. Upon her arrival, the grinding, steely claustrophobia of the track is fully-immersed in its own self-made ether. Like a siren serenading from the remnants of a shipwreck, Nash is given fragmented, liminal spaces to sound out her mantra. Hazy, yet hollow, her voice needles itself with gorgeous motivation, hypnotising listeners as she fades out, only to return for another two moments where she haunts and pervades. Newcombe had mentioned that the intention was to imagineer a duet between his voice and Nash’s, but upon production he found Nash’s singular voice to be more illuminating amongst the cavernous, canine-toothed canopy of guitars and snarling drums.
Lyrically, the words are marooned in their own ghastly delivery, with the refrain “Do No Harm,” directing us to ponder what it is that Nash identifies as a crucible of such threatening potential. Enmeshed in a looping repetition, we are given very little resolution to such a turn-screw phrase. Despite the song’s less than urgent rhythm, the band feverishly master the pace of their musicianship, blueprinting a lullaby-like trance that is mocked together with melancholic, taloned sounds. Newcombe’s narrowing down fizzes with a return to a shoegaze-scabbed sound, the distorted hum of guitars that saw and grind are both iconoclastic and crafty in their orchestration. It is not a track mosaicked together by the same ethereal relics of the band’s earlier years, instead it is anchored by a famine of density that renders it skeletal and sinewy. However distant the track might be from its heritage, Newcombe and his tremendously, well-tethered collective of fellow craftsmen exhibit a remarkably, rare ability to dig and recover the haemorrhaging crashes and collisions that defined them.
Spending two-years away, the band return with an ugly, yet very enticing intelligence. The title ‘Don’t Look At Me,’ is modelled on temptation, the age-old ignition of rearing an audience to poke and pry at the outcasted, in telling us to ignore, Newcombe knows that he is drawing us closer. Whilst it fails to flood my nerves with the same nail-biting butchery of the band’s earliest and most ethereal, it still bleeds the same genetic material of that which made me love the band in my salad days. Dangerously alive, dangerously artistic and dangerously hard not to listen to - ‘Don’t Look At Me,’ is a single bent on being hypnotically hostile in appearance.
Words by Josh Mabbutt
