The Brian Jonestown Massacre - My Bloody Underground

by Eddie Robson

A long, sprawling review of a long, sprawling album

"Perhaps Brian Jonestown Massacre frontman Anton Newcombe is just coming into the time where he belongs. By which we don’t mean that he’s discovered time travel and gone back to 1969."

He may have turned 40 last year, but perhaps Brian Jonestown Massacre frontman Anton Newcombe is just coming into the time where he belongs. By which we don’t mean that he’s discovered time travel and gone back to 1969. Rather it’s that, as the music industry desperately tries to adjust to a world where piracy is absurdly easy and its time-honoured strategies are being undermined, Newcombe seems right at home. Until recently every BJM album was freely available to download from the band’s official site and he posted rough mixes of ‘My Bloody Underground’ online late last year – which may have backfired, as you can find comments online from people who didn’t realise they were rough mixes complaining about how rubbish ‘that free internet album’ was.

Anyway, here’s the finished product and it is well worth actually paying some money to hear. It’s the first full-length BJM album since 2003’s ‘And This Is Our Music’ – an unusually long gap considering this is the band which released three albums in 1996 alone, and a surprisingly long gap considering the profile boost the band got from ‘Dig!’, the hugely entertaining though disingenuous look at their rivalry with The Dandy Warhols (which has since been overplayed as a consequence of the music media’s tedious obsession with inter-band feuds). Why the hiatus? We have no idea, but given that ‘My Bloody Underground’ is the first BJM record on Newcombe’s own A Records label, it seems like an attempt at a fresh start.

What it isn’t, however, is a radical departure. Newcombe has always been one of music’s most inspired appropriators, able to swipe large chunks from his influences whilst putting his own stamp on them so clearly that any accusations of unoriginality seem totally churlish. Over the years he has cast his net ever wider, incorporating Latin and Indian influences, but on ‘My Bloody Underground’ he keeps those angles (most notably on ‘Who Fucking Pissed in My Well?’) and brings in elements from the Icelandic musicians with whom this was recorded (the minimal ‘Ljosmyndir’) whilst also going right back to his roots – the shoegazing sound which few outside the UK were rocking back in the grunge years.

The connection is cemented by ex-Ride man Mark Gardener, who here adds his name to the long, long, long list of sometime BJM members. Ride are long overdue a reappraisal and Newcombe helps the cause here with the dreamy eight-minute distort-a-thon of ‘Who Cares Why’, which is one of the tracks featuring Gardner and sounds more like Ride than anything has since 1995, including the fourth Ride album. Later on the record skews more towards My Bloody Valentine with ‘Just Like Kicking Jesus’. Both tracks are excellent, as is much of this album.

Like many BJM records, ‘My Bloody Underground’ is long and sprawling, not quite coherent, but full of good stuff. ‘Who Cares Why’ is the fifth track and it’s about then that the album properly kicks in (it follows a mournful, meandering five-minute solo piano instrumental called ‘We Are the Niggers of the World’), though opener ‘Bring Me the Head of Paul McCartney on Heather Mills’ Wooden Peg (Dropping Bombs on the White House)’ is also superb in its ramshackle way. (And yes, there are rather a lot of provocative titles, including the rather dubious ‘Automatic Faggot For the People’, which we’d quite like to see Newcombe explain the thinking behind if he wouldn’t mind – like much of the album, it doesn’t have any vocals to expand upon the title.)

In amongst all this there’s ‘Golden – Frost’, which is straight-up-and-straight-down BJM psych-rock, stunningly executed – perhaps the most successful attempt they’ve made at capturing their juggernaut live power; the doom-laden groove of ‘Darkwave Driver / Big Drill Car’ and the murky indie-dance of ‘Monkey Powder’. At 78 minutes it’s the opposite of the concise two-sides-of-vinyl statements made by Newcombe’s 1960s heroes, yet you feel that, unlike most modern lengthy albums, it wouldn’t necessarily be improved by being trimmed down. It is what it is, and what it is is great.

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