Trite as it is to dredge up drug-trip comparisons while attempting to describe how music sounds, there's a particular effect of failed, go-nowhere attempts at psychedelic rock: It aims for making you feel like you're high, or at least able to empathize with the notion of feeling high, but instead it's like you're actually stuck in a room with someone else who's high while you're sober. They're having the time of their lives, experiencing all sorts of mind-altering creativity, and here you are watching them flail around inanely-- or, worse yet, they just sit there staring into space. Even with a few good-to-great moments, this happens frequently during Directions to See a Ghost, the second full-length from Austin's Black Angels: The trip is implied, but it's all a secondhand narrative that loses almost everything in translation. The band members play under the impression that they're going somewhere, but it's a completely different place than where they actually are, and in either case there doesn't even really seem to be much of a destination in the first place.
Put this album amidst a thousand other songs on your mp3 player of choice, and eventually one of the tracks will come up, and it'll sound unique and startling and impressively fuzzed-out and evil for a couple minutes. Odds are it'll then go on for another three or six or 14 until it becomes clear how little their grinding, snarling riffs and heavy-footed rhythms hold up under constant repetition. Sometimes this drone is enough to snatch your breath; there's enough of a melody (and a compellingly creepy one at that) in "18 Years" to sustain the song's five and a half minutes, and the slow, hypnotic swagger of "Mission District" pulls you in long enough to let one of the few really powerful crescendos on the album to hit you dead-on. And even if it takes a while to get to its core, "Never/Ever" peaks with this burst of high-speed chaos that condenses everything cool about "Sister Ray" into an efficiently malicious explosion
But those songs come after an opening volley of not much, as the vertiginous midtempo shoegaze of opener "You on the Run" melts into the lurching, swooning "Doves" and then into the thumping sludge of "Science Killer", each song canceling out whatever sensations you might have felt from the previous. And all the interminable record-ending "Snake in the Grass" really does once it gets going ("going" used loosely) is get a bit slower two-thirds of the way through its 16 minutes. Is it really worth listening to a song that goes on for more than a quarter of an hour if it actually loses energy the more it goes on?
The bastard of it is that the lyrics fit the tone well-- all gloomy invocations of warfare, betrayal, paranoia, and self-obsession. And these people can play: There's some sparks when guitarist Christian Bland snaps out of his robo-strumming and actually sets about cranking out frightening peals of noise, Stephanie Bailey's drumming is forcefully solid even when the rhythms threaten to lull you into inattention, and every time I try to think of who lead singer Alex Maas is derivative of, I keep flashing back on their solid-enough 2006 debut Passover instead, which is as good a sign as any of how distinct his flat but doomed-sounding wail is. And if you isolate any random 45 seconds of Directions to See a Ghost's 70 minutes, you'll definitely be compelled to listen for another few minutes-- after which time you'll probably start waiting for a solo or a shift in tone that might not even come. One thing I've tried to keep in mind is the fact that the Black Angels tend to play live with film accompaniment, so maybe it works better in that context. Perhaps they could help those of us without any drugs by pressing this stuff on a DVD next time around.
