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The Brian Jonestown Massacre is Anton Newcombe's long-running psych vehicle, born in San Francisco in 1990 and steered ever since by Newcombe through a revolving cast of 40-plus players. The sound is fuzzed-out '60s garage-psych soaked in blues and space rock, with the Stones and the Velvets stamped all over it. Take It From the Man!, their 1996 third album, is where they swung hard into British garage-psych and became a genuine cult fixture.
This one runs deep in our world. BJM have shared our stages across Austin Psych Fest 2012 and 2014, then Levitation 2016, 2018, 2023, and 2025. Pressing this record as a Levitation Edition feels less like a reissue and more like keeping a long conversation going.
This is the record where Newcombe stopped drifting and started swinging. After the shoegaze haze of Methodrone, the budget here is minimal and you can hear it, in the best way: cut fast at Lifesource in Emeryville with Larry Thrasher at the board, it sounds like a band locked in a room chasing 1966. Who? struts, (David Bowie I Love You) Since I Was Six sneers, and Straight Up and Down rolls in with that riff HBO eventually borrowed for Boardwalk Empire.
The critics have stayed kind for thirty years. AllMusic gave it 4.5 and called it brilliant; Far Out tagged it a trippy masterpiece. Both landed where we did, on a band finally hitting its stride.
Honest gripe: at this clip a few cuts blur together, and the lo-fi murk can swallow a hook. But that murk is also the point, and it earns wax. The "The Man" Red, White and Blue Smash pressing, an LP limited to 500 for 1996, is exactly the kind of artifact this album deserves on the shelf.
Recommended if you like: The Black Angels, Frankie and the Witch Fingers, Dead Meadow.
