Hailing from the liberal heart of Texas where a neo-psychedelic renaissance is flowering year-by-year, The Black Angels fourth album Indigo Meadow is a contemplative leap forward for the recently reduced quartet.
Establishing the tone of the album with their title track, a play with genres is obvious and deliberately disorienting.
Southern-gothic keys haunt in the background while a sly injection of Hawaiian blues is administered in between verse and chorus–paradoxically evoking chilling moods from the likes of a Faulkner novel.
This dark interpretation of the psychedelic, an amalgamation of Mod sensibility and ethereal fuzz guitar, adds a necessary complexity for a band that prides itself on inferred intellectualism and an anthropic desire to “confront” social issues.
“Don’t Play with Guns” rubs a raw open nerve within its very relevant context, as does the two juxtaposed tracks “War on Holiday” and “Broken Soldier”.
The latter song holding its own with plenty of reverb twang and the initial hollow rapping of drum sticks.
Stephanie Bailey’s drums determine the course of Indigo Meadow, maintaining a deceptively simple tempo throughout, offsetting the expansive sound of guitar and keys.
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This is best demonstrated in “The Days” where the rollicking pace of drums coyly toys with Alex Maas’ words and The Black Angels rockabilly guitars.
However the band’s mastery shines through in their fantastical homage to psychedelia, “I Hear Colors”.
Where an alternation in loose and tight drums ebbs and flows with the undulation of trembling vocals, set against the mounting juggernaut of mind-tripping whistles, bleeps and fading laughter of quite possibly the Mad Hatter.
Despite such experimentation, it is sallow “Holland” which stands out from the rest.
Where the rolling contemplative bass combined with closing underwater vocal effects satisfactorily executes an intriguing sense of androgyny.
Superseding conventions, Indigo Meadow stands as the most ambitious and accomplished album yet—a definite feather in the cap for The Black Angels.
