Send "The Black Angels " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 By screwing vintage 13th Floor Elevators riffs down to trip-hop tempos, the Black Angels struck psych-rock pay dirt. The Austin, Texas-based quintet's 2006 debut, Passover, and its follow-up, Directions to See a Ghost, were sufficiently fuzzy-headed to win over a few record-store nerds, but also possessed enough head-bobbing grooves to keep college dudes from getting bored. The Black Angels' third album, Phosphene Dream, is groovier still. Recorded in Los Angeles with producer D. Sardy (Black Mountain, Holy Fuck), it finds the band peeling back the psychedelic murk and tempering its bad vibes with a hint of flower-power homage. It's about time, too. After two records of hazy drones and mid-tempo grind, the Black Angels desperately needed to hit the defog button and get some perspective.It helps that the group has flushed out its Rolodex of Acceptable Psychedelic Influences. On "True Believers", frontman Alex Mass bends his voice into a spooky and near-perfect approximation of Jefferson Airplane singer Grace Slick. "Haunting at 1300 McKinley" borrows some bluesy shuffle from the Animals. "Yellow Elevator #2" slips from a spiky Pink Floyd-inspired organ hook to an eerie Odessey and Oracle-worthy outro. These are welcome additions to the band's sonic palate, but the past doesn't hold all the answers for the Black Angels. Their eerie vibe doesn't mesh very well with the hippie decade's perkier moments. "Sunday Afternoon" brings those 13th Floor Elevators riffs back up to speed, but lacks that band's cult-ish quirks. "Telephone", the album's up-tempo tambourine-fueled first single, comes off as an underdeveloped British Invasion pastiche. Or maybe it's just out of place, sandwiched between haunted-head-shop fare like "The Sniper"....full text |
| Drownedinsound |
| I know a lot of really great cover bands. Some truly fantastic ones, actually. Blissful teenage years of musical idiocy spent in suburbia resulted in an inordinate number of underaged and overintoxicated viewings of some of the finest and most terrible cover bands known to man. One in particular sticks out like a thorn amongst bad puns on Guns N' Roses: a cover band claiming to at once reinterpret and remain faithful to a bunch of Sixties garage psychedelics known as Nuggets. My naïve young ears having never heard such wondrous music before, the day after I immediately sought out a copy of a record that unbeknownst to me, can probably be credited with launching a thousand musical careers. I imagine that each of the members of The Black Angels had a similar experience. Over their two previous albums, they married the fuzz-laden party angst of the Nuggets collections with a sense of impending doom familiar to fans of The Velvet Underground, The Stooges. The result was some ‘classic’ pyschedelic music, crawling out of the narcotic swamp dripping feedback and shamanic, lurching vocal performances. It wasn’t clever, but it very definitely sounded big. Their third album, Phosphene Dream, has been greeted with some fanfare: mainly due to it being the first release on reincarnated legendary blues label Blue Horizon. This doesn’t appear to have phased the Texans, who wore their appreciation of the blues firmly on their sleeves prior to signing to Mike Vernon’s label, and Phosphene Dream is primarily business as usual: murky, gloomy and hazy, the musical equivalent of a valium hit....full text |
| Themusicfix |
| I remember the first time I heard this band. It was two years ago in a dimly lit stiflingly hot Internet cafe the size of a decent walk-in closet on the Avenue Felix Faure in Nice. While the rest of humanity was sunning itself in the 80 degree plus heat, my fellow cybernauts and I were sitting in front of computer screens tapping away, oblivious to the summer sunshine outside. Our soundtrack was this trippy music sung in a ghostly whine, as if traveling through another dimension to reach us. Later as I was paying I asked the guy who it was. "Les Anges Noir" he said. The Black Angels. I had never heard of them. Where were they from? French? American? British? "Don't know" he shrugged. "But they're cool." Indeed they are. Their music is like those old black light posters your boyfriend had hanging on his wall; there is something eerie and otherworldly about it. Alex Maas's distinctive whine, the understated music that swirls around you like cigarette smoke. Opening track 'Bad Vibrations' slithers in, ominous, almost stand-offish, then at the end it lets loose as if the pent up energy it was trying to control has spilled out over the sides. 'Yellow Elevator' continues along in the same tone. This is 21st century psychedelic rock that many want to do - but few do well. The melody is insistent, hypnotic and will have you covering up all the windows in your room with dark blankets to help block out the sun. 'Sunday Afternoon' is upbeat (well, upbeat for these dudes) and charges along at an infectious clip. The creepy 'River of Blood' brings the mood back down again. The song is one of the album's highlights, glorious and powerful with the cacophony of guitars and Maas's wonderful voice powering it along. This gives way to the stupendous 'Entrance Song', beautiful in the extreme. The rhythm is deliberate, menacing, the vocals trance-like. It is one of those songs you ache to hear live as you know it will blow you away. Title track 'Phosphene Dream' continues the album's winning streak. Dark and brooding, this what the Four Horsemen would rock out to. 'True Believers' is perhaps the album's crowning glory. The song is gorgeous, with its strong Indian influence and Maas' hypnotic vocals giving it an exotic colour and shape: "Woo hoo they said as they crossed the river / Woo hoo they said as they prayed to Jesus...well who knows which birds will be left to sing...well no one knows"...full text |
The Black Angels lyrics
|
| ||||||||||
