Sadly short-lived yet distinctive and arresting enough to inspire bands more than thirty years after their sole LP (shouts out to Broadcast), the United States of America took full advantage of the late ’60s psychedelia boom to introduce so many unusual elements to pop music that it almost feels like they created an entire potential alternate history of rock. Joseph Byrd, an acquaintance and peer of composers like La Monte Young, Morton Feldman, and John Cage, would spend the entirety of the 1960s steeped in avant-garde music and come out of it leading a band equally dedicated to performance art, radical politics, and musical experimentation. The United States of America achieved that with a remarkably deft touch on their ’68 self-titled, with lead singer Dorothy Moskowitz completing the haunting atmosphere — sometimes heartachingly sincere, often counterculturally mordant, almost always some of the strangest shit you’ve ever heard — that Byrd’s experiments with electronic instrumentation set in motion. The rockers, such as they are, feel heavy enough to scare the squareness out of you (“Hard Coming Love”; “The Garden Of Earthly Delights”; “Coming Down”), and even the pretty delicacy of meditative pieces like “Cloud Song” and “Love Song For The Dead Che” are deep in uncanny surrealism. But if you’ve made it through the nightmarish imagery of psychological highwire opening act “The American Metaphysical Circus,” you should be more than ready for anything else this album confronts you with.