Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Of all the concepts in which to put to an audience, the life, the mythos, the story of Aleister Crowley is one perhaps that many would shy away from, after all his legend precedes him, the celebrity, the icon, all the facets associated with the self-proclaimed Great Beast, they still manage to loom large over the practices of black magic and spirituality with an effect of storm clouds that could have been conjured by the critic’s favourite personification of evil.
The Great Beast, a multitude of artists have tried their hand to capture the essence of the man, and yet few arguably have come close to even connecting with the inner mind, instead it could be argued that they have created a lampoon, a grotesque, a caricature to whom the public is left in no uncertain terms is the epitome of social disease; after all what is there to find attractive in a soul that is routinely damned by those who used his notoriety against him, even in death.
There is so much more to the myth, there is the open book truth, and one that the musician Dan Brooklyn utilises in great depth in his new, and seismic album, The Great Beast.
Poet, painter, explorer, spy, Crowley was one of fear maybe, but there can be no doubting the strength of character behind the frame. Today we would maybe see him as someone dealing with the media intrigue and notoriety as one would expect the tik-tok generation or influencers to handle the belief of their own illusion, and that is the crux of the point, The Great Beast, self-appointed, a critic’s dream, a feverish teen’s nightmare, it is the kind of publicity you cannot reasonably buy, but you can certainly capture in art; and Dan Brooklyn excels absolutely as he resurrects the beast in concept and song.
The beauty of the concept album is that ideas can flow with a greater sense of freedom than that of the rigid and tight exploration of the regular recording, and Dan Brooklyn does this with his own particular brand of magic, and across tracks Boleskine House, The Equinox Of The Gods, Chamber Of Nightmares, and Liber XLIV (The Mass Of The Pheonix), as well as the sentiment and power that comes through in the precise interludes that weave the narrative together, the beast is shown to be more than legend and myth, but an artist’s view of life, notoriety explained as excellent P.R.
In the 75 years since Crowley’s death the name still has the capacity to divide, was he embroiled in evil, dealing with forces that no human should touch, or was he a man to whom the meaning of life was to embrace all that came before him, sexually, with passion, a libertine of the highest belief…it perhaps has become meaningless to choose a side, not least without researching the whole story, not without adding Dan Brooklyn’s The Great Beast as a sublime and haunting accompaniment.
Dan Brooklyn releases The Great Beast on December 1st via SAOL.
Ian D. Hall