Black Angels

Texan quintet Black Angels, fronted by Alex Maas, played majestic psychedelic-rock that took inspiration from the masters of the 1960s but took the genre to a higher dimension. Passover (Light In The Attic, 2006) often sounded like a marriage of the 13th Floor Elevators and the Velvet Underground, with drummer Stephanie Bailey playing the roles of both Mo Tucker and Nico, Alex Maas playing acid shouter Roky Erickson and Christian Bland playing fuzz guitarist Stacy Sutherland (The First Vietnamese War, Bloodhounds On My Trail). The most original songs, though, emphasized a majestic tone that was missing from the masters: Young Men Dead is a hypnotic threnody that mixes Doors and Gun Club; another trance-inducing beat supports the Middle-Eastern litany The Prodigal Sun; and another Doors-infected refrain permeates Better Off Alone; The Sniper At The Gates Of Heaven is a dramatic crescendo propelled by mountain-shaking drones and slow tribal drums; the folkish hymn Black Grease is built on booming bass and frantically-strummed guitar. The lengthy closer, the ten-minute Call To Arms, employs the rhythm of a square dance (thus admitting its debts to country music) and rowdy boogie guitar chords to pen a prayer-like psychodrama. Unlike most acid-rock practitioners of their generation, the Black Angels pay attention to the composition of real well-formed tunes and refrain from indulging in noise for the sake of noise.

Directions To See A Ghost (Light In The Attic, 2008) had a less epic feeling although it tried more adventurous architectures (i.e. a more personal and less derivative style). The influence of the first Velvet Underground album is palpable in the hypnotic threnody You On The Run, but an atmospheric organ puts to sleep the nerve-wracking oration of 18 Years, and a sitar launches the percussive dance of Deer-Ree-Shee. The bluesy Mission District slowly builds up more tension than all the previous release combined (and perhaps noise too), only to be outdone by the eight-minute propulsive bacchanal Never/Ever, whose guitar riffs border on hard-rock in the second half while the pounding drums border on Sister Ray's ecstasy. Less intense but more subtle is the intricate tapestry of drones, reverbs, distortions and repetitions achieved in Doves. A further expansion of that concept is Vikings, whose solemn salmody is backed by sparse and abstract sounds. Meanwhile the catchy and exuberant You In Color evokes the "Madchester" orgies of the 1990s. Surprisingly the weakest song is the the lengthy closer, Snake in the Grass, a rather uninspired ceremony that only has an odd-tempo tribal beat to complement the The End-like meditation. The trademark of the band is still the hypnotic pace, that mutates from song to song but maintains an overall identity and provides an organic feeling to the collection.

The Black Angels later released Phosphene Dream (2010), with River of Blood, followed by the companion EP Phosgene Nightmare (2011), then Indigo Meadow (2013), followed by the EP Clear Lake Forest (2014), with An Occurence at 4507 South Third Street, Death Song (2017), Wilderness of Mirrors (2022).

Alex Maas debuted solo with Luca (2020).