The White Bitch, the brainchild, alter-ego, and band of writer Michael Patrick Welch is one of the most bewildering and obscure creations to come out of the Crescent City. While Welch’s debut, The White Bitch’s Prey Drive, culled together a decade’s worth of musings and misgivings, his follow-up, The White Bitch’s Brass Balls, makes a statement—one as unapologetic and astute as it is unhinged and alienating.

Unlike Prey Drive, the songs on Brass Balls are fully realized, and the album is conceptually congealed. Still, what unfolds isn’t any less eccentric or easy to listen to. Set in a post-Katrina wasteland, Welch strings together stories stemming from substance abuse and a sinking relationship. The music is extravagantly lo-fi, peppered with paranoid psychedelia, reckless retro-rock, and obtuse, analog fuzz courtesy of co-conspirator Ray Bong. Along the way, Welch’s careening falsetto crashes through a menacing and majestic amalgamation of cosmic garage riffage while streaming horn melodies and punchy shifts enliven the album’s deflating sense of euphoria.

Guided by Welch’s winding guitar, “Hurricane Party’s” grinding groove gives way to the surge of “Car Cute” as the singer bemoans life in a fool’s paradise and begins to grapple with his own misapprehensions. An eerie, unsettling air creeps into the cloying bitterness of “Weekly,” which spills over into the deranged, despondency of “N.O. Unknown.” Elsewhere, flashes of clairvoyance flicker amidst the whimsical torture of “Never Go Anywhere,” only to linger in the acidity of “Feeding Time” before succumbing to the reckless outbursts of “No More Parties.” By the time Welch arrives at the dismal catharsis of “Hold My Attn.,” the icy breakthrough has already slipped through the confusion of “Song to a Bong (Plus Song from a Bong)” as it washes up on a shore of repetition. It takes a real musical misanthrope to concoct such perverse pop mockery, and in the White Bitch’s case, a pair of brass balls.