The Black Angels
Passover
Light in the Attic Records
Just opening The Black Angels new album
Passover
is a pleasurable experience. Fingertips tingle as they make their way over the textured psychedelic swirls and straights that adorn the packaging. The artistic aesthetic matches the sound perfectly. One expects '60s-inspired psychedelic rock and what pours out is a ménage a trois of Velvet Underground, Mazzy Star and Neil Young.
Guitars swirl and solo around subtly changing drum beats as the organ bellows in opposition to tambourine and thoughts of peyote buttons, bourbon, heroin and unfiltered cigarettes-all of which compliment the auditory experience of sitting in a dark room perched on the edge. The darkness that seeps in is intentional; this is Austin so late at night the sun is about to peek out again; it is where heaven becomes hard to differentiate from hell. Yet, because of all its winding around itself, the music has a momentum faster than its beat, keeping listeners passively engaged and out of the well they might otherwise want to crawl into.
The album's only weak point falls dead center, in "Manipulation," which serves to breach the narrative arch of the sound, but doesn't do such permanent damage that this too-quickly paced, too modern and too Bauhaus-y song stops the album completely. In fact, out of context, this may be one of the albums best tracks, but it sounds just a touch too different to keep from disturbing the articulate groove.
The Black Angels are not "The" band-The Shins, The New Pornographers, and The Killers-indie rock. They rip open psychedelia, pour in the sounds and repetition of goth and sew it up with a thread of alt.country. Throughout the disc the style and sensibility of the music doesn't change much, but there's more to do with it than it initially seems. The Angels use repetition in theme to create complex rhythms that give each song it's own unique direction and its own sound of pitch black darkness.
