Tune In, Drop Out, And Turn It Way Up
Barely five seconds into the lead track on "My Bloody Underground," the new album by the Brian Jonestown Massacre, everything sounds business as usual. The skeletal percussive drive grows from an absentmindedly struck bass drum. The melody is sketched by a vaguely psychedelic guitar strum. An electric guitar, distorted to sound like a humming Indian stringed instrument, dashes in and out. Band leader Anton Newcombe's laconic vocals fade in, as if removing a sheet from the furniture of an old house. And the song itself is titled with Mr. Newcombe's idiosyncratic gift for appropriation overkill, if not perfect spelling: "Bring Me the Head of Paul McCartney on Heather Mill's Wooden Peg (Dropping Bombs on the White House)."
Throughout "Underground," the band's first full-length studio album in five years, the Brian Jonestown Massacre adheres to its blend of late 1960s rock and Eastern culture as tightly as it ever has. Only this time around, the band's peculiar knack for making a swirling morass of mystical drone sounds downright pertinent.
Since forming in the early 1990s in San Francisco, Mr. Newcombe, the Brian Jonestown Massacre's lone constant member, has made albums as if he lived during the contentious late summer of 1968. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy have been assassinated and North Vietnam's Tet Offensive is making the year one of the bloodiest of the Vietnam War. Police and protesters clash at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The world feels as if it's accelerating toward oblivion — only in Mr. Newcombe's 1968, the Rolling Stones don't revert back to their bluesy rock playbook with "Beggar's Banquet" and instead continue on the experimental path mapped out on 1967's "Their Satanic Majesty Requests," primed by some of the albums of their peers: Pink Floyd's "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn," the 13th Floor Elevators' "Easter Everywhere," the Velvet Underground's "White Light/White Heat," and the Zombies' "Odessey and Oracle."
Amazingly — and often self-destructively — the Brian Jonestown Massacre has maintained this vibe for nine albums. And while they have consistently offered a paisley and pithy throwback to the band's beloved era, rarely has the musical anxiety felt as oddly prescient as it does on "Underground." The fuzzy guitars rolling through the plush "Who Cares Why" carve out an unstable melodic footing as they rev up and fade into the background. Over this fleeting melody, Mr. Newcombe adds darting bits of acoustic guitars and his own vocals, which are barely discernible through the track's fuzz, and his almost spoken, restrained delivery further camouflages the lyrics. Only snippets of verses cut like a light through the production's fog: "Help me," "feels so good to be," "everyone I know is dead." The end result feels a bit like being submerged in somebody else's confusion and trying to fight back to the surface.
That's not a knock — genuine sensory disorientation is an elusive mood to achieve purely in song, and Mr. Newcombe finds ways to do it as effortlessly as birds taking flight (see also: "Monkey Powder" and "Black Hole Symphony"). And that isn't his only strong suit here. "Golden Frost" sounds like a lost 13th Floor Elevators song. The guitars rush to the song's fore only to flee just as quickly, with the pumping backbeat moving everything along at a near sprint. Mr. Newcombe's vocals are caked in so much reverb that it makes him sound as if he's singing at the top of his lungs as an invisible vortex sucks him out of the studio and into another dimension. And "Ljósmyndir" floats along a dreamy organ line as the Icelandic lyrics pass like clouds through the speakers.
Mr. Newcombe is far too elliptical and opaque a songwriter to comment directly on current events (and some of his witty song titles contain words unfit for daily-paper publication), so the meanings of most of the songs on this album remain a bit unclear. But the album's music so nails its anger and anxiety that it doesn't matter if every single word cannot be deciphered. For the first time in the band's existence, the world feels as unsympathetic, unstable, and volatile as the world in Mr. Newcombe's mind. And even he's not ready to throw in the towel on humanity. "Yeah Yeah" is a jangly, acoustic track that finds Mr. Newcombe at his most sincerely defiant, howling against the pessimistic voices in his head.
Sure, perhaps the Brian Jonestown Massacre's brand of stylistic excess was bound to find its time eventually — even the broken clock is correct twice a day. But "My Bloody Underground" is strong and realized enough to remind us that there's more to Mr. Newcombe than an industry survivor whose time may have finally come.
