Brian Jonestown Massacre – My Bloody Underground

Brian Jonestown Massacre My Bloody Underground vinyl is the one to seek out if you want to hear Anton Newcombe at his most untethered, presenting the band’s tenth album on A Recordings with catalog number AUK 11.

Anton Newcombe and the Brian Jonestown Massacre

Since founding the project in San Francisco in 1990, Newcombe has kept Brian Jonestown Massacre in a state of near-constant motion, cycling through lineups and recording methods while maintaining a singular vision rooted in psychedelia, shoegaze, and folk. The records tend toward the sprawling and hypnotic, rewarding the kind of repeated listening that lets smaller details surface over time. This is not a band that makes tidy, radio-shaped music, and that is precisely the point. By the time My Bloody Underground arrived, Newcombe had been running the project for nearly two decades and showed no interest in settling into a formula.

What Makes Brian Jonestown Massacre My Bloody Underground Vinyl Worth Your Attention

My Bloody Underground is the tenth Brian Jonestown Massacre album, originally released in 2008, and it represents a deliberate push further into avant-garde territory than the band had previously explored. Portions of the record were recorded in Iceland, and that geography seems to have left a mark on the atmosphere. Newcombe adopted a strict no-talking policy in the studio, letting the sessions breathe and drift in ways that shaped the record’s distinctive space-rock and neo-psychedelic textures. His reported heavy intake of psychedelic drugs during the recording period is not incidental context here. It is woven into the album’s DNA.

A notable collaboration with Mark Gardener, co-founder of Ride, produced the track Monkey Powder, which Gardener co-wrote. The connection to Ride is not a throwaway detail. Gardener’s background in shoegaze brings a specific kind of layered, washed-out guitar sensibility that fits naturally alongside Newcombe’s own instincts, and hearing the two sensibilities meet on record is one of the album’s more interesting moments.

Pressing and Format Details

This is the standard LP pressing on A Recordings, catalog number AUK 11. A Recordings is the label Newcombe runs himself, which means releases come out on his terms and in the quantities he decides, without the pressures of a major pushing for wider distribution. That independence has made A Recordings titles somewhat harder to track down than releases on bigger imprints, particularly as years pass and original stock thins out. For collectors focused on the BJM catalog, an original pressing on Newcombe’s own label carries a different weight than a later reissue would. My Bloody Underground is not the band’s most widely discussed record, but among collectors who know it, the experimental ambition and the Gardener collaboration make it a genuinely distinctive entry in a long and uneven discography.