The Black Angels, Directions To See A Ghost

So you've gone and named your band after a Velvet Underground song so atonal and anti-rock (“The Black Angel's Death Song”) that it continues to peel paint from the walls 40 years after its release. Your sound represents a sonic soup squeezed from the pulp of the banshee-wail psychedelia of Roky Erickson's Thirteenth Floor Elevators, the Doors'most drone-tastic interludes and the mock-gospel of Spiritualized. And your live show resembles nothing less than a Pink Floyd UFO Club gig circa 1967, period-perfect in its acid-streaked details right down to the ectoplasmic slide show beamed over a stage otherwise dark enough to induce drowsiness among band members and stage crew alike. (Oh, and your band's “Eddie the Head”-like icon is a high-contrast black/white image of Nico, pre-damage). What could possibly be next?

If it's possible to assemble all the iconic rock ‘n roll talismans in a single place, Austin's Black Angels have gathered the clouds around them, and on the band's sophomore LP, unleash them on an unsuspecting world like the Ghostbusters dumping the contents of their spectral garbage can into a raging sea. Whether embodied in the spirit of the album's perfect sonic bookends — the creeping-dread opener “You on the Run” and its 16-minute-plus mirror, “Snake in the Grass” — or the many essays-on-a-theme that dot the barren landscape in between (“Never Ever” — vocalist Alex Maas'freak-flag festival of doom, complete with weird noises that echo the Elevators'legendary “electric jug” — is particularly effective), Directions to See a Ghost keeps it real (creepy) by harnessing the group's black-light Warlock Rock in all the right, evil ways.