The Brian Jonestown Massacre
My Bloody Underground

A) The Brian Jonestown Massacre (from now on BJM) is a "portmanteau" composed of the name Brian Jones, the guitarist of the Stones, and the place in Guyana where the mass suicide of the followers of the Peoples Temple sect occurred in 1978;

B) "My Bloody Underground" is the tenth album, excluding compilations, of the Californian band and is another "portmanteau," evidently referring to My Bloody Valentine and the Velvet Underground, and implicitly to a piece by The Jesus And Mary Chain called "My Little Underground";

C) Actually, it doesn't seem to me that BJM resembles the three aforementioned groups much, having in common with them only a decent adoration for feedback;

D) Members of both The Warlocks and the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club have passed through BJM, and perhaps these two, along with the buddies The Dandy Warhols, are the groups to which BJM's sound can be compared, only that the latter, in my opinion, are better;

E) It must be said that BJM is fundamentally the project of the singer Anton Newcombe, the only member always present since 1991, the year the band was formed;

F) BJM have a vast and somewhat crazy production: in 1996, they released three records; now it had been five years since they published anything;

G) "My Bloody Underground" was put online on the band's website, in a slightly different version, since September 2007, but it is only now being released in stores;

H) The first song on the album is called "Bring me the head of Paul McCartney on Heather Mills' wooden leg (Dropping bombs on the White House)," a delightful title to say the least, and it is a raga worthy of the best Kaleidoscope, the American ones: you can put it on loop for an entire afternoon and have tantric sex with your girlfriend/boyfriend, you will have more satisfactory results than those of the bassist of the Police, or you can smoke away the afternoon (I say girlfriend/boyfriend, because this doesn't seem like a record for married people, unless you're close to legal separation);

I) After two more psycho-lysergic tracks, the work continues with a piano piece of Lisztian origins called "We are the n****** of the world" (?!!), then again walls of guitars, reverse voices coming from Saturn, feedback, and loops;

J) "My Bloody Underground" is probably the definitive album of BJM, the summary of more than fifteen years of work on psychedelia, the seventy-six minute hallucinatory journey of an adult and uninhibited Alice within a wonderland made of candied fruits, cotton candy, pills, and low-cost paranoia;

K) But also L), M), N), etc.: I have the vague feeling that Anton Newcombe is quite a type of mad hatter.

P.S.: If you buy many records, don't put it on your shopping list, it's too dense. If instead you like getting lost in a few things, throw it in, it might fill, I believe, a couple of months of listening.