Their dark materials
Black Angels revel in a brooding, dangerous sound
"Oh, great, we just pulled into Detroit and already I'm hearing sirens."
Alex Maas, singer for the Texas-bred mood-swingers the Black Angels, is in the midst of insisting that - despite his band's name and predilection for dark drones - "we're all really happy people" when the panicky, alarmed whine of a police car or an ambulance arrives within earshot.
Actually, it's a sound and a feeling you might expect to encounter on a Black Angels album, rising from the steep barricades of guitar fuzz and the pervading sense of narcotic oblivion. But it appears to slightly spook Maas, who, in contrast to his brooding stage persona and strange lyrics, actually seems a perfectly well-adjusted and down-to-earth guy during daylight hours. Ask him and he'll tell you he's just another kid who formed a rock band with a childhood friend, in this case guitarist Christian Bland, and then named the fledgling outfit after a Velvet Underground song.
Maas, whose band headlines the Middle East Downstairs tonight, says his first exposure to the decadent dystopia of the Velvets was through Lou Reed's R-rated solo epic, "Walk on the Wild Side" - a dirty little ditty he sang at a middle school assembly, much to the chagrin of his teachers. "I was so attracted to the bass line and the sound of Lou Reed's voice," Maas recalls over the phone from the tour stop in Detroit. "It just sounded so cool." (Let's just say his teachers didn't share his astute appreciation.)
From there, the aspiring songwriter immersed himself in the Velvets and the work of the avant-garde composer Tony Conrad. He began writing tunes with his old childhood friend Bland, who played guitar. "Christian and I grew up together and used to go to the same church - his dad was our preacher," Maas, 26, remembers. "We knew we shared some kind of creative energy between us and started writing songs. They started coming out like water."
The compositions were full of fog, swarming with echo, and encrusted in guitar feedback. In other words, the songs sounded, in temperament, an awful lot like those that appear on "Directions to See a Ghost," the Black Angels' second album, which came out last month on Light in the Attic Records. The band has just returned from a slate of European headlining dates in support of the new record. "They really liked us in Europe," Maas says. "They get it and understand what we're trying to do."
What the band's 2006 debut, "Passover," made apparent was that the Black Angels too knew exactly what they wanted to do. And they were unself-conscious about borrowing from their influences. "We knew what we liked - the Warlocks, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and [the Brian Jonestown Massacre]," says Maas, whose outfit at times also reaches back farther to the sepulchral menace of the Doors. "We knew we didn't want our music to sound poppy. We wanted to not put too much thought into it. If the music felt evil or felt good or gave us chills when we were playing it, we knew we could convince other people."
One group of people the Black Angels convinced was the Queens of the Stone Age, who, after hearing a copy of "Passover," invited the quintet to open for its US tour last year. The Angels made the most of their support slot, enthralling audiences who arrived early. The band's mesmerizing performance here at the Orpheum Theatre proved a riveting highlight of the evening.
"We didn't expect to win every one of their fans over or anything," Maas says. "But there are a lot of people who are coming to our shows now who say they first caught us at Queens of the Stone Age."
When the group set out to make "Directions to See a Ghost," Maas claims its aim was to create something "you could rob a bank to" - an album bristling with danger, daring, and momentum. The studio disc succeeds marvelously at capturing the incantatory, almost ritualistic quality the band conjures on stage: the molten churn of Bland's and Nate Ryan's guitars, and the tribal beat and throb of Stephanie Bailey's drums and Kyle Hunt's bass.
"It's very ceremonial for us," says Maas. "That's the point, and that's where we want to be. I don't want to use the word spiritual, but that's really the only way to put it. It's Sunday school every day. It's always about feeling the music - feeling, feeling, feeling." 