“Oh man, it’s dropping out from heaven and it’s bringing the word, the wicked fucking sound that you never have heard,” reckons The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s ringleader, swaggering through the front door of album number 13 with a long list of antagonising song titles and a fat bag of tattva under his arm. Bold words, but who is anyone to argue with the musing of Anton “You fucking broke my sitar, motherfucker!” Newcombe?“So grab your silver bullets and sharpen your stakes, and lock your fucking doors, for Jesus sakes.” Righto boss.
In the four years since that documentary rocketed him to infamy, Newcombe hasn’t made many moves to belie director Ondi Timoner’s portrayal of a self-sabotaging Colonel Kurtz-styled maverick, trading in BJM’s ubiquity in the studio to become a low-key touring vehicle. With My Bloody Underground he breaks the silence with an album of occasionally staggering quality, but these fruits of recording sessions held between Liverpool and Reykjavik in recent months are as much homage and history lesson as they are the sight and sound of where Newcombe’s head is at in 2008.
It’s “1.21 gigawatts!” as the DeLorean makes its first stop by the psychedelic canon of The Velvet Underground, called to mind by the metronomic buzz and chime of ‘Bring Me the Head of Paul McCartney on Heather Mill’s Wooden Peg (Dropping Bombs on the White House)’ – flying in the face of almost anything new you’re likely to hear all year with its hallucinogenic-friendly fug of tambourine and laconic vocals. And this is the form throughout much of the album’s tripped-out opening salvo, completed by a Thurston-friendly ‘Infinite Wisdom Tooth’ and ‘Who Fucking Pissed in My Well’, which, despite the distinctly non-flower power friendly title, recalls a hookah pipe-toting George Harrison.
So far, so tribute to the nebulous New York avant-garde and the middle eastern-centric period of a Liverpudlian fellow who took his spirituality pretty seriously, but this jaunt to the late ‘60s is derailed when ‘We Are the Niggers of the World’ is rolled out – a brief piano-led ‘Phantom of the Opera’ moment; riddled with the imperfections of fumbling fingers, allegedly recorded in one take and written by a drunken Anton at the tender age of nine. Whatever, it’s a lullaby that doubles as an intermission of sorts before Newcombe somehow muse-jacks Kevin Shields and collaborates with former Ride front man Mark Gardner. Far from perpetuating some lukewarm “neo-shoegaze revivalist bullshit”, though, ‘Who Cares Why?’ is where the resolve of any protests toward My Bloody Underground’s derivative nature are tested by a song that juxtaposes soul with indifference in a way that Loveless mastered. ‘Just Like Kicking Jesus’ proves it to be no fluke.
