The Black Angels - 'Directions To See A Ghost' (Light In The Attic) Released 12/05/08

Be prepared. ‘Directions To See A Ghost’ will loom and leer over your speakers like the most persistent of stains. But it’s so welcoming, so infectious and so addictive that you’ll leave it there to grow. Respect the stain, and it will become its own entity. Doing a service to the origins of their name  - The Velvet Underground’s ‘Black Angel Death Song’ – and sounding like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club were always supposed too, sextet The Black Angels groove and grind and pound their way through over an hour’s worth of thick, sticky psychedelic rock.

But psychedelic in a drone machine, Texan, black-clothes-in-hot-weather way. Not in a Syd Barrett, rainbows and rivers kind of way. Their second record since 2006’s ‘Passover’ is a tightly focused and complete body of work. You’d be hard pushed to pick singles from it as it chugs along as one mass and one sound.

Patiently aggressive ‘Never/Ever’ slips into the threatening march of ‘Vikings’ slips into the excitable riffing of ‘You In Colour’; always careful, always well conceived always aware of themselves. Never do they stick around too long, they never surprise you. They grow, and filter through your ears and make sure you’re comfortable with one sound before moving you on to the next.

And then… tom-tom’s pound, guitars wail, Alex Maas’s vocals screech and scratch, (the excellently named) Christian Bland’s come from another place entirely, sounding like the leader of a political rally and you’re back where you started. Maas’s voice is never better than when drawing out the observation: “iiiincredible smile” to last a couple o’ bars. His voice is an instrument, and his pronunciation is soft enough that words merge into each other (‘You In Colour’), the music driving and intoxicating enough that songs do too.

Apart, that is, from the 16-minute monster ‘Snake In The Grass’ that would go on forever but for the limitations of disc printing. Songs that could go on forever are the best: I always though Dylan’s ‘Vision Of Johanna’ should’ve been done the justice of eternity. And while ‘Snake…” isn’t as serviceable in the mind as Dylan’s epic, it teeters on the edge of Second Coming era Stone Roses wank-jamming and comes out as a bizarre backward looping, feedback worshiping atrocity.

It’s a disturbing end to a gargantuan record, whose relentless psychedelic drone will violently destroy the darkest recesses of your kind, and replace them with darker ones.