Album Review: The Black Angels, Death Song

If Roky Erikcson had stumbled wild-eyed into the Chihuahua desert and scattered hydra teeth on the baked Texan soil, the resultant Spartoi warriors might look something like The Black Angels. Instead of axes and shields, they’d be armed with Gretsch guitars and Vox keyboards. Drenched, not in blood, but reverb. Still, they take no prisoners.

Strange, benighted times we are living in – Donald Trump is the leader of the free world and Ed Sheeran dominates the upper reaches of the charts. We’re doomed. The Black Angels have a cure for them both. They view the world through shit-tinted granny glasses and don’t like what they see. The greed, corruption and sickness of a society consumed with consumption. Food, drugs, sex, power and mindless pop-culture, ravenously pursued with the avarice of locusts. Where is it all heading? There’s only one destination, with not even the proverbial handcart to protect our collective nethers from the upward licking conflagration. What do you expect from an album called Death Song?

Occupying much of the sonic territory vacated by the likes of The Velvet Underground and Spacemen 3, the Angels add their own black-magic to the psych-rock soup. Hypnotic doomy mantras lope menacingly, featuring gut-churning bass pierced by searing fuzztone shards. Not calculated to win the hearts and minds of today’s flighty public but appropriate to the themes. Claustrophobic and malevolent but somehow simultaneously uplifting. There is a light, however fragile and guttering, in the darkness.

8/10.