The Black Angels: Not Those Ones...
Not the Nazi Pilots, rather a less confronting group of musicians producing a new wave of psychedelic, experimental rock from Austin, Texas in the USA also called The Black Angels. Catching Christian Bland mid tour-poster-designing, The Dwarf chatted to the happily interrupted musician.
Touring with guys you live with could prove a difficult task and Christian admits the band are no strangers to family squabbles though its always easily resolved.
The Black Angels most recent tour involved them supporting the Warlocks on a 6 week USA tour. They began their trip with East Coast shows with a rare few gigs in southern states Christian confesses “The hardest place for us to tour is in the ‘deep south’, they have the worst crowds, we’ve never even played in the state of Mississippi, we played for the first time in Louisiana, and Florida. It’s all kind of a dark age now”.
Playing together, living together, ghost hunting together...it's best to let Christian tell this story.
We played a show in a place called Kenyon College in the middle of Ohio, it’s a liberal arts school. It’s the most haunted college campus in the United States. I went to a college at Florida state uni, of 40,000 this college was of about 1500 or 2000 so more like high school but on a college campus. They put us up in this house and Kyle went upstairs to go to bed in this bunk room before all of us. We stayed down stairs with the hosts, we were drinking smoking and telling stories and they were telling us a ghost story about this thing up in that room where Kyle went. When you are sleeping up there people say there is like this pressure on their chest. Anyway, they told a couple more stories, then I went up that room to go to bed and Kyle was sitting on the edge of the bed, real pale and scarred looking. I said ‘What’s going on man?’ he said ‘Man someone just jumped on my chest or pressed on my chest, I don’t know what just happened. Apparently the ghost struck again! It had to have been true, because he was freaked out. And he didn’t hear the story downstairs”.
Ok, enough spooking for one collection of five experimental musicians. A suggestion of somewhere slightly less paranormal, though in some towns quite ghostly...Australia?
“I would like to able to come down there, we wanted to when we put out Passover, but actually it was released in Australia before it was released anywhere else. We didn’t even get to play there, so I really hope that NOW we can get to come down there. So hopefully people like the new album”.
With their second album, appropriately titled Directions to See a Ghost, The Black Angels took a new approach “We experimented with each member playing different instruments. I played drums on a couple of the songs and Stephanie is the drummer, she played bass and we all kinda switched up instruments for the album. Though the majority of the songs are us playing our main instruments, the 2nd album was more collaborative. In the first one it was Alex (Maas) and I bringing in the songs, the second one was more of us getting together, jamming at a song together and then working it out and creating different parts for it from that”.
Influenced by the obvious choice of bands for this genre of music The Black Angel attribute their humble beginnings to Brian Jonestown Massacre, The Warlocks and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. “We (Alex and Christian) went and saw them in early 2000 we were so inspired by everything that we saw that we pretty much stopped what we were doing and decided to get a band going”.
Other than that Christian enjoys fuelling his musical creations with reading and delving into History. “A lot of that has a bearing on our songs”
He confesses; “I like to read lots of different things. I like novels that are Utopian novels, like 1984 and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley” Christian continues to recall common tour practices that see him indulge his love of history “We always stop in civil war battle fields, we went to Gettysburg, which was pivotal for the civil war, that is where The South pretty much lost the war. We got to go there on July first which was one-hundred and forty five years to the exact day that the battle occurred. We got to walk around at night… saw a couple of ghosts, fun times”
Even though they are not, (nor represent the values of) the group of illusive Nazi pilots who share their name, Christian corrects any rumours and disclosed they actually chose their name from a Velvet Underground song.
