Black Angels - Directions to See a Ghost
The Black Angels’ latest, Directions to See a Ghost, a poignant title encapsulating their increasingly distinct desert-noir dusty psych grooves, picks up right where 2006’s Passover left off. The Black Angels are neither original nor inventive. But in this case, it’s a-okay, and I’m gonna do something that rarely happens in a world of snarky blogs: make an argument for why derivative can be sometimes a preferred position and why the Black Angels are, in fact, the bee’s knees.
In Captain Beefhart’s Ten Commandments for Guitarists, he decrees that a guitar “is a divining rod, use it to find spirits in the other world and bring them over.” The Black Angels take this sentiment to heart, as both their efforts bolster a rather sinister grit bouncing about dark soundscapes, perfect for a séance. Light a candle, dude.
Tom-heavy percussion intros, tremolo-saturated guitar meltdowns, nasty bass rumbles, and Alex Maas’ throat offerings (vocals that, to me, flutter somewhere between Jim James and Gregorian chant) are all still intact from the Passover days. However, Directions to See a Ghost does mature in two distinct ways. First, there’s a very fluid motion to the album, connecting each windswept canticle to the next. By structuring and composing most of the album in a similar vein with slightly altering moods, the Black Angels have created a whole, cohesive work as opposed to simply a collection of songs they dropped off at the studio on the way to the store. Of course, a good psych rock record should have a consistent ambiance as per the clientèle since, you know, Beck albums are not the weapon of choice for the 420 LOL contingent. Secondly, the Black Angels have adopted a deeper sense of melody. Dare I say some catchiness abounds in the major-key call to arms “Doves,” the evil-Beatles sitar raga of “Dee-Ree-Shee,” and the funkadelic first movement of “Snake in the Grass.” This new melodic slant pushes the Black Angels above some of their LSD theater contemporaries like Dead Meadow and Bardo Pond.
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