The Black Angels are back with another album full of siren songs. Murky, tripped-out rock that will lure us back into captivity with its haunting, yet meditative discordant jams not unlike their first release Passover.
Still nodding heavy homage to their psychedelic, garage rock, and drone punk influences such as The Velvet Underground, The Doors, 13th Floor Elevators, Joy Division, The Jesus & Mary Chain, and Syd Barrett, they still remain modern sounding for today’s young ears.
The story behind this sophomore release is that while recording the album, the Black Angels lived in an old haunted mansion in Austin, TX and are claiming to have seen a girl frequently walking the mansion at night robed in a red dress, resulting in the inspiration for the album’s title, Directions to See a Ghost. It would also seem that it influenced the darker mood it evokes.
Though a tad on the ominous side, it is still an album full of multi-layered chords, smoky echoing vocals, vibrating noises, guitar fuzz that thrums like electricity under the skin and steady tempo’s pulsing back and forth like a slithering snake that sets one adrift in uncharted seas where the undertows are ones of pure Epicurean delight.
The songs are epic even when under five minutes, cascading within walls of golden sound as if moving languidly through honey, or reminiscent of adagio kisses in the dark with pulsing goose-flesh shivering against warm flesh, one side with a five-o-clock shadow; definitely music one can union to, eyes darkened with smoldering passion.
After listening from start to finish, I twitch with the silence hailing the end, leaving me with a feeling much like waking up unsure of where I am until my eyes land on a midnight sylvan scene rendered in acrylic paint on black velvet, the jarring fluorescent highlights of the moon’s glow cast on bark and rippling river water, bringing me back to the present. Or am I still lost in dreaming?
Album release date May 13th.
