The Black Angels – ‘Death Song’ (2017)
Envision lightning striking across a velvet sky, holding there momentarily, strobing, eliciting hypnotic trails within trails that rush at you, through you, bouncing off passing cosmic clouds, and are sent rushing right back through you again and again, lifting you off the ground, holding you transfixed, illuminated … and forever transformed.
This is the Black Angels’ fifth album Death Song, delivered with an organic growing morphing intensity that ebbs from your speakers, creeping across the floor, both defining and redefining your listening space. Death Song is an album unlike any delivered before from The Black Angels, it’s an album that reaches out to embrace you, to caress you, welcoming you in with a warm presence of sonic meanderings. Played in the lower ranges, Death Song is an adventure into deeper more breathless psychedelic waters that plays on seamlessly, at times throbbing, filled with fuzz, reverb, echoes, and laced with crystal lyrics delivered in a most unexpected and intoxicating manner, proving once again, that even after a four year absence, there is no one walking the planet who does it any better.
With star filled summer nights just around the corner, Death Song will let you dance with wild abandon. The album is constructed well, moving with assured steps, opening all of the right doors at the right time, and leaving you with the key so that you may return whenever the spirit moves you.
*** The Fun Facts: The Black Angels took their name from The Velvet Underground song “The Black Angel’s Death Song” … and here, combining the band’s name ‘The Black Angels’ along with the album title ‘Death Song,’ you get the full Velvet Underground reference, “The Black Angels Death Song.”
– Jenell Kesler
The Black Angels – ‘Death Song’ (Partisan Records, 2017)
It’s almost Halloween, so here’s an Interview treat with Christian Bland of The Black Angels
