The Black Angels – over

Just got the new 2xLP re-issue from Light in the Attic today!!

Call to Arms is the most Velvet Underground sounding on this album and I love it. Almost belongs on a different album.

An amazing album for the music nowdays.

I have it on good authority that the story goes like this ...

The Black Angles had been playing clubs for some time, they’d nurtured a core following with their blistering live psychedelic shows filled with fuzz, drone, echos, and touches of Middle Eastern influences, all which were laced together with a solid light show, and timelessly merged 60’s attitudes [even laying out a song regarding the Vietnam War, and an ode to Pink Floyd’s “Piper At The Gates Of Dawn,” entitled “The Sniper At The Gates Of Heaven”] with contemporary psychedelic music.

The band was determined to create this album with the same dynamic flow and feel of one of their live performances ... and there was only one way to do that, and that was to dive deeply into their magic box, ingest the perfect substances, and go on to create the perfect album. So ... they’re in the studio, Persian carpets are covering the floor, lava lamps and candles flicker from distant corners developing a boundless space cloaked in exaggerated shapes and dancing reflections, with soft purple lights to bath the room with the feel of an afterglow. So here they are, all set to launch this new venture, the countdown has begun, when all systems have been placed on hold, seems that in their hast, someone had forgotten to bring the magic box ... which meant that someone had to go retrieve it. Time seemed to stand still, the faint smell of Afghani Finger Hash drifted into the control room, the Chambers Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today” flowed in the air, and finally the magical wooden box was placed on the table. The contents read like the makings for a lost weekend ... several ounces of crushed mushrooms, high grade blotter acid, marijuana from the legendary Mendsena County, Valium, Oxycodone, a small vial of cocaine, and twelve pharmaceutical Quaaludes from god nows where ... but there they were, along with their coveted glass bong. Substances were ingested, the banter kicked in, the light shifted, eyes dilated, and the instruments began to swell and fill the studio to the point of total expansion, compressing the outward bound sounds back in on themselves. The room had become so thick with sound that even the smoke hung in the air unmoving as one blistering chord washed into another, reverberations cascaded onto each other, off the floor, and threatened to hold my heart in check. At several points a couple of us had to leave the room just to make sure we were still on this planet.

At 4:30 A.M., 6 hours later, over was being played back over the studio’s system, and it was just perfect. Yes there were a couple of tweaks that needed tweaking, a few effects, and some overdubs that would polish this album up like a star beacon ... everyone just seemed to collapse in on themselves, though they managed to remain standing, packed up their equipment, and headed home in silence ... and the rest, as they say, “Is history.”

Review by Jenell Kesler