There are a variety of reasons why last month’s release of My Bloody Underground, the thirteenth album by the Brian Jonestown Massacre, wasn’t met with the reams of bated-breath publicity reserved for Portishead, another culty '90s rock band that’s been MIA for awhile. Most of them have to do with the kind of publicity the band has attracted elsewhere in its career: Anton Newcombe, the creative force behind the Massacre, is at least as notorious for his legendary onstage meltdowns, including a gig at the Viper Room in LA that was supposed to have resulted in a six-figure major label deal, as he is for his warped, postmodern take on '60s pop and psychedelia.

The majority of Jonestown’s records specialize in the kind of fetishized, retro-futuristic rock n roll that puts the sound of classic groups like the Byrds and the Stones in quotation marks. Typically this approach is insufferable, especially when the band hails from Haight-Ashbury circa 1992, but the difference with Jonestown was that Newcombe simply acted like the 70s and 80s had never happened—he wore sarapes, championed LSD, wore his sunglasses at night, and played sitars with complete sincerity. He was a man out of time, not by choice but apparently out of pure indifference to the modern world, and soon enough he had record geeks and indie labels owners diving for their wallets.

So, for awhile the BJM had most of their ducks in a row—their early albums for the legendary Bomp! label were modestly successful, they toured endlessly, and Newcombe, besides being extraordinarily prolific, had the looks and the outsize persona of a born star. And yet Newcombe’s antics onstage and off—his violent scuffles with bandmates, on-and-off heroin abuse, and towering disdain for the commercial mechanics of the music industry—served to sabotage every break the band received. The documentary Dig!, which contrasts BJM’s slow implosion against the stratospheric career trajectory of their kid-brother band, the Dandy Warhols, is a textbook document on how to succeed, and fail, in the music business.

Newcombe has slowed down a bit in recent years—the 21st century has seen the release of three BJM full-lengths, which is how many they released in 1996 alone—but shows no signs of settling into wizened-old-folkie mode. My Bloody Underground is unquestionably the loudest, most abrasive album of the band’s career, and as such has unexpectedly become one of my favorite records of the year.

My Bloody Underground (released in April) represents a sea change in technique for Newcombe. Gone are the frilly folk ballads and the burnished pop of Give It Back! and Strung Out In Heaven. Much like its predecessor, And This Is Our Music, Underground favors epic track lengths (averaging six minutes) and takes lengthy detours into droning psychedelia. But whereas Our Music sounded relatively restrained and melancholic—dipping its feet into the wizened-folkie pool—Underground is more of a howl from the pit of hell. Much has been made of the album title’s amalgamation of Britpop and shoegaze references (MBV, JAMC, etc), but taking the name literally—as a blood-soaked hole in the ground one crawls in to escape reality—makes reference-hunting seem a little frivolous.

And we don’t need to be reminded what a shitty reality it’s been for the last five years or so. I won’t go into that, but neither does Newcombe: besides the part of track one that’s called “Dropping Bombs On The White House” (the rest of it’s called “Bring Me The Head of Paul McCartney on Heather Mills’ Wooden Peg,” ho ho), the album is barely political at all. It’s more just a headfuck zeitgeist record, which becomes quite apparent within the first few moments of the opiated dronebomb that opens the album--“McCartney” absolutely slays, pitting a stuttering drum loop against an army of detuned acoustic guitars and spiraling amp noise while Newcombe details some kind of apocalyptic event on the horizon. “It damn near took my life and kicked the shit out of me,” he sings, with an actual shudder in his voice, and while BJM fans aware of his career narrative can’t help but feel a shudder of recognition, the same goes for anyone having a passing acquaintance with the Bush administration. "We Are The Niggers Of The World," an epic, Chopin-on-Valium piano instrumental, is beautifully-written, but Newcombe plays it the way newborn horses walk—that is to say, poorly. The beauty of it is that all those fumbled notes and labored arpeggios only serve to heighten the depressed futility of the melody, creating a pathos that wouldn’t exist if it was actually played well. A man who can’t be bothered to record more than one take of a song for which he is technically ill-suited is a man with a nation's worth of conviction. Sometimes that's all you have to fall back on--the album's centerpiece, "Yeah-Yeah," wraps Zen fatalism around three-chord garage rock, with Newcombe singing "Voices of angels sing in my head / they tell me don't worry, I'm already dead."

Newcombe seems to make records by running a channel straight out of his head and into the tape machine, capturing an entire churning mudslide of thought directly to tape. Anyway It’s far easier to believe that than it is to believe the thing was put together in a studio by human beings playing instruments: listening to the swirling onslaught of tracks like "Who Cares Why" and “Just Like Kicking Jesus” is literally like tapping into the paranoid chatter echoing inside a disturbed mind As inscrutable and overlong as it is--the album could lose about twenty minutes of aimless droning--My Bloody Underground is one of the rare opportunities we have to peek inside the mind of someone who allows himself to be as batshit insane as we all would be if we realized that our cars, jobs, and fancy kitchen appliances merely function as high-priced insulation against the towering insignificance of our lives. And for that we should be grateful.

Brian Jonestown Massacre: Official / MySpace
"Who Fucking Pissed in My Well?" (YouTube)