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The Black Angels - Passover
Light In The Attic
**** (4 Stars)
Texan Drone Rockers Take Aim At The Neocons
With their fuzztoned drone and monotone name, The Black Angels could have stepped straight out of an audition for VU cover band of the year. And the sleevenotes, thanking Anton Newcombe of The Brian Jonestown Massacre, don't do much for those with an aversion to Black Rebel Motorcycle Club-style posturing. But, somehow, this Texan quintet slip such shackles. Hell, they even manage to sound like The Doors without making you want to reach for the shotgun.
It's partly a question of atmosphere. Where others play at gloom, The Black Angels add layers of churning, murky groove (keyboardist Jennifer Raines is listed as playing "drone machine") to create a cinematic sense of mounting fear, over which singer Alex Maas intones words of God and war and dread. As with Roky Erickson and Lift To Experience before them, a Texan upbringing seems to bring out a combination of god-fearing and grandeur that lends itself to quasi-religious psychedelia. It's no shock to learn that guitarist Christian Bland's father was a presbyterian preacher, while the inlay makes oblique reference to '60s psychos Charles Manson and Charles Whitman. This could be all very Goth-u-like, but Black Angels borrow from elsewhere, too: the flat, pounding rhythm of early heavy metal, the brassy echo of Peggy Suicide-era Julian Cope; the brooding sludge of Spacemen 3; Grace Slick's mock-solemn incantations.
The result is startling. Passover opens with a bang, twice over. Death march "Young Men Dead" and gloom groove "The First Vietnam War" both deal with wars past and present: "60,000 men died/While you all hid... And you ask for more now/For this new war". But The Black Angels' concerns are usually less precise, a creeping paranoia summarised by the warning, "Don't stop moving, they're right behind you" in "The Sniper At The Gates Of Heaven". "Manipulation" offers a switch in mood from morbid to obsessive, and the bluesy "Bloodhounds On My Trail" is an exceptional throwaway. But closer "Call To Arms" returns to the fray, a Texan murder ballad that sounds like Jim and William Reid covering Joe Ely and which epitomises The Black Angels' bleakly blasted soul.
Peter Shepherd
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