No one could ever accuse the Black Angels of shying away from their influences.
Over the course of their nine-year career, these stoner rock scions have incorporated everything from Jimmy Page’s electrified blues riffs to Ray Manzarek’s introspective vamp into their own unsettling take on the bad-trip brood of late-sixties psychedelia. Their last two albums presented slight variations on the theme, as 2008’s Directions To See A Ghost was lacquered with the hallucinatory drone of the Velvet Underground while 2010’s Phosphene Dream featured more tightened-up compositions that hedged towards the acid-fried garage styling of fellow Austin freakniks like the Moving Sidewalks and the 13th Floor Elevators.
With this year’s Indigo Meadow, the Angels have headed down the same drug-induced corridor, offering up a collection of thirteen songs that each lean heavily on their usual calling cards – vintage fuzz guitar sounds, rolling distorted basslines, hard hypnotic drum breaks, and spooky keyboard undertones, all layered beneath frontman Alex Maas’s foreboding androgynous wail.
It’s a formula they have had success with in the past, and it’s one they continue to mix with menacing precision. The opening title track begins with crushing floor-tom stomps and funhouse organ waves before slipping in a series of surf-laden licks, while “Evil Things” builds around a hulking “Electric Funeral” groove that gives way to a blurred, caterwauling finish.
The latest wrinkle being folded into their repertoire comes in the form of pop-leaning hooks, albeit ones that are delivered behind the customary shroud of doom and paranoia. Maas rides his best Lou Reed-via-Frank Black impersonation into an unlikely sing-along on “Don’t Play With Guns”, and then accents a spare, bouncing rhythm section with an almost oldies-radio ready melody on “You’re Mine”. Even the psychodramatic revelation of “I’d rather die/than be with you tonight” on “Holland” carries a sort of torch-song balladry that’s been absent from their previous works.
Yet nothing on Indigo Meadow is going to bring the Black Angels any new converts. Regardless of whatever conventional structure they choose to gather their ideas under, they will always be tried-and-true psych diehards more liable to lead you through the looking glass than up the charts. At times they can appear boxed in by their reliance on genre-specific textures and bygone-era narratives, but it is this unwavering dedication to their mind-expanding principles that push them apart from the assemblage of bearded bands that are still scouring the wrong side of the moon.
It may all seem like a trip you’ve taken before, and – let’s face it – it probably is, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be rewarding for those who are willing to run the risk to revisit.
