Black Angels – Directions to See a Ghost
Reviewed by Sadie O., 6/6/08
Dark and swampy retro psychedelia, redolent of several ostensibly dangerous drugs. Big Velvet Underground influence, and I also hear Doors and 13th Floor Elevators, Patti Smith… It’s great stuff! Simple song structure, overlain with effects and reverb and echo and smothering darkness… CD seems to devolve into more and more dense noise as it goes along, until the epic last track.
FCCs? I couldn’t make out ANY of the vocals. I like 3 and 6 best.
1. 4:53 **4/4 strumming, SOOOO Velvets. Very simple song structure, very compelling. Nico meets the Doors… Gets VERY psychedelic by the end.
2. 4:29 **big drums, fuzzy guitars, echo-laden vocals. this will provoke acid flashbacks in some of us… Or nitrous oxide flashbacks, even… (BTW, this is the “bright” track. Ha ha!)
3. 4:45 ***big bass and creepy noises, slinky beat – cool! Vocals sound as if they’re backmasked – this is gnarly indeed.
4. 5:12 **ominous beat, building sound, feedback… (actually reminds me a lot of the song they apparently named themselves after.) Dissonant and scary – sudden modulation halfway through…. Now it’s gone all Floyd-y on me. Whew!
5. 5:26 *more big bass, some keyboards – almost as if it made an effort to be bright and cheery, but was too downed out on heroin to pull it off…
6. 5:49 ***sitar-drone intro, then uptempo pounding beat… Builds mightily with layers of sound. Ends with jangly sitar. My head is spinning!
7. 8:34 **guitar effects and drones, very slow beat, voice as instrument. Listen to this as you’re nodding off to sleep. Dream pretty, now! Oop, here comes the screaming, never mind. Now a more uptempo and insisten beat and jangly bits. Note to self: do NOT fall asleep listening to this…
8. 4:38 **stomping drums, hi-hat and… sqeebles… Minimalist and disturbing.
9. 5:53 *feedback and jangly guitar, grungy, building and sinking again. Completely unintelligible spoken work and devolution, then jangly guitar again. Noise and distress…
10. 4:31 **march of the zombies, with lots of fuzz and monotonal vocals.
11. 16:13 **(no, there isn’t a hidden track – it’s 16:13 of sound.) backmasking intro and slinky beat. The killer woke at dawn… (after that, gues what? He spent the next quarter of an hour killing people!)