Record Review: “My Bloody Underground,” Brian Jonestown Massacre

The Brian Jonestown Massacre
“My Bloody Underground”
A Records, 2008

Anton Newcombe has good reason for the chip on his shoulder. A prolific start in the early 1990s got his band, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, labeled the Next Big Thing, before it was derailed by a perfect storm of drugs, volatile personalities, and plain old bad luck. This downward spiral, occurring at the same time as BJM friends and protégés The Dandy Warhols experienced a mainstream breakthrough, is chronicled in Ondi Timoner’s fascinating 2004 documentary “DiG!” While Newcombe contested his portrayal in the film as an unstable junkie, the movie also re-popularized BJM for a new audience. It’s been a long time coming, but the first BJM album since “DiG!” finds Newcombe letting loose and exorcising his myriad demons.

Introducing the album with exhausted bile is “Bring Me The Head Of Paul McCartney On Heather Mill’s Wooden Peg (Dropping Bombs On The White House),” surprisingly not the most confrontational song title on this release. Newcombe states his targets up front: the celebrity-obsessed media, politicians and bands that are more successful than BJM. The song compresses all these in a rail against an imaginary foe, one whose supernatural powers appear to be focused on screwing Newcombe’s life. “Buy your silver bullets / and sharpen your stakes / and lock your fucking doors / for Jesus’ sake,” is all Newcombe can gasp in his defense. It all ends with a twist, as this antagonist, who “sleeps with your girl” and is “hurting mankind” turns out to be Newcombe himself—“in fact it’s playing [guitar] right now!” Talk about a head case, and that’s just the first track.

The best BJM moments lock on to a trance-like rhythm, one that can repeat itself for more than five minutes, uninterrupted, and still not grow old. Such is the case with “Who Cares Why?,” the standout song on “Underground.” Amidst a swirling backdrop of noisy guitars and shoegazing organ drones, Newcombe’s lethargic, echoing voices collapse into an instrument of their own, rendering the lyrics useless but the vocals essential. It’s a trick that’s been used before, particularly by My Bloody Valentine, whose influence on “Underground” extends beyond the title into the songs themselves. In contrast to the clear punch and electronic drums found on BJM’s last album, 2003’s “And This Is Our Music,” the sound of “Underground” is as murky and drowned in reverb as the band has been since its 1994 debut, “Methadrone.”

“Underground” features a score of new ideas from BJM. “Ljósmyndir” (Icelandic for “photographer”), casts a woman reading what sounds like an Icelandic poem, over a warm, airy synthesizer pad. It’s an intriguing, Boards of Canada-style ambient breather on the album, placed in between two unsettling noisy pieces, “Just Like Kicking Jesus” and “Automatic Faggot For The People,” both of which feature a decidedly disturbed Newcombe shrieking unintelligibly. Not that it’s a bad thing; even the most out-there pieces on “Underground” are still founded in BJM’s whirlwhind psychedelia.

Despite its loose experimentation, the album refuses to fall apart, and even includes a few rockers. “Monkey Powder” is a jarringly satisfying rave up, building on a rockabilly bass line and a steady, bass drum-and-tambourine beat. “Yeah-Yeah,” the first single, sounds the most like BJM’s “classic” early-mid 90s run, and serves once again to remind listeners of just how much of an influence Newcombe was (and probably still is) on The Dandy Warhol’s Courtney Taylor. The obvious influence of Brian Jones, the Rolling Stone’s psychedelic prophet, is still in fine force on such instrumental jams as “Who Fucking Pissed In My Well?” Perhaps channeling his idol, Newcombe continues to sing in a faux-British accent; though, for a man who has claimed to be a deity and to have secretly ushered Charles Manson out of jail for a recording session, this is hardly his greatest eccentricity.

“My Bloody Underground” is too difficult an album to land The Brian Jonestown Massacre the popularity that they deserve. For longtime fans, it’s a triumphant restatement of BJM’s vitality, and psychedelic and shoegaze fans will feel right at home. Newcombe doesn’t seem to find any solace or solutions in these songs, but instead has created a thrilling chronicle of inner turmoil.