Black Angels - The heirs to Austin's psychedelic throne

Roky Erickson and his 13th Floor Elevators needed just one album, the masterpiece "The Psychedelic Sounds Of 13th Floor Elevators", and little else, to indelibly and eternally link the name of their city, Austin, Texas, to psychedelic rock. Of course, both Erickson as a solo artist and the 13th Floor Elevators after his departure recorded other worthwhile material, in some cases legendary, but it was with that album and the follow-up "Easter Everywhere" that they planted the seed for so much of the distorted, wayward yet alluring music to come—the kind that draws you in among the dazzling colors of its lysergic coils and swallows you whole; essentially, a perverse, autistic twin to the sunnier psychedelia of Los Angeles and San Francisco.

From the 13th Floor Elevators up to the present day, Austin and its desert surroundings have been fertile ground for dozens, if not hundreds, of psychedelic bands following in the scorching, hypnotic guitar-driven footsteps of its pioneers. Among the many bands in the scene, it's worth mentioning: Shiva's Headband, Cold Sun, The Golden Dawn, Cotton Mother, The Ugly Beats.

All the bands mentioned, and the vast majority of the others, remained the preserve of hardcore psychedelic music obsessives or a largely local, niche audience. Many, many years would pass before the spotlight shone once again on Austin and its psychedelic scene, and it would happen thanks to 5 die-hard fans of Erickson and his psychedelic acrobatics: Christian Bland (guitar, vocals, bass and percussion), Alex Maas (vocals, bass, sitar, organ and keyboards), Stephanie Bailey (drums and percussion), Jennifer Raines (who would leave the band in 2008, organ and drones) and Nate Ryan (who would soon be replaced by Kyle Hunt on bass and guitar)—namely, The Black Angels.

Formed in 2004, over the span of some fifteen years and five albums, the band has become a global institution of psychedelic rock. The Black Angels, however, haven't merely updated the Austin sound for the modern age, enriching it with the possibilities offered by decades of neo-psychedelic experimentation and their encyclopedic knowledge of American psychedelia as a whole — as the years have gone by and their reputation has grown, they've turned into true hosts and noble custodians of the local psych-rock scene.

Bland and Maas, the band's creative core, are in fact among the most active members of The Reverberation Appreciation Society, the musicians' collective-cum-label that has organized the Austin Psych Fest since 2013. Later renamed Levitation and exported to France, Canada and Chicago, the festival is one of the most important annual gatherings of psychedelic music in the world, famous for bringing together contemporary names and psych classics on its stages; from Animal Collective to Brian Wilson, from Spiritualized to the Zombies, from Tame Impala to Silver Apples, and so on.

The most evocative marriage celebrated at the Austin Psych Fest, though, is precisely the one between the Black Angels and Roky Erickson, when the dark angels acted as backing band for their own champion in what we might suggestively call a changing of the guard. In an interview with this writer (published in 2017 on the now-defunct indie-rock.it) Alex Maas described the experience like this: "It was like riding a horse with no saddle and no stirrups, chased by vampire bats in pitch darkness".

Looking at their extra-musical activity, it's easy to tie the Black Angels indissolubly to their city's psychedelic heritage. The picture becomes more intricate, though, once you listen closely to their music. Across five LPs and various EPs, solo or split, Bland and Maas's crew have revealed influences and reference points that go well beyond the borders of their city and of Texas itself, reaching California, New York, the English Midlands of Jason Pierce, kraut Germany and a thousand other destinations. A long journey that led them to what we might call pure, unqualified psychedelia on their latest album, Death Song, from 2017.

2004 – 2008: dark psychedelic rituals for the new millennium

If there's one band the Black Angels drew inspiration from even more than from their fellow Austinites the 13th Floor Elevators, it's certainly The Velvet Underground, to whose masterpiece "Black Angel's Death Song" (from "The Velvet Underground And Nico", 1967) the Black Angels owe the choice of their ominous moniker. The tributes to Lou Reed and John Cale's band don't end there, though: the Black Angels' first logo was in fact a stylized black-and-white portrait, in 60s pop-art style, of the German chanteuse Nico.

The album where the Black Angels' debt to the New York rock pioneers resonates most strongly is precisely their first, Passover (Light In The Attic, 2006). Arriving after two EPs, both released in 2005 ("The Sniper At The Gates Of Dawn" and "The Black Angels"), the album — which contains nearly all the songs from those two extended plays — unfolds across 58 minutes of pitch-black, hypnotic, ritualistic psychedelia. Save for a few sudden accelerations in some tracks, the album moves at the pace of the Velvet Underground's most cacophonous, hieratic songs, with Stephanie Bailey's stripped-down drumming often echoing Maureen Tucker's. Alex Maas, meanwhile, owes a great deal to the most beat and narrative side of Lou Reed's drawl, which he interprets by amplifying its mesmeric possibilities with his metallic, almost otherworldly tone.

In the album's liner notes we find a further quotation that extends the Black Angels' inspirations well beyond musical territory. It's a line from Norwegian painter Edvard Munch that reads "Illness, insanity, and death are the black angels that kept watch over my cradle and accompanied me all my life". It isn't hard to find, in the Austin band's music, the same deformed figures, the same horrific gloom and oppressive obsessiveness found in the work of the brilliant expressionist artist.

The dark celebrations of Passover open with the first of many anti-war anthems, a "Young Men Dead" that remains, in all likelihood, the band's best-known song. Over a guitar arpeggio steeped in full 60s intoxication, it takes just a few seconds to seize the mind and drag it into its vortex, leading straight down into a hell of Sabbath-esque fuzz, on the level of "Master Of Reality". Lit up by a once again sixties-style organ and disfigured by sudden wah-wah attacks, "The First Vietnamese War" is a horror-show carousel running through every war Americans have fought in, starting, naturally, with Vietnam itself. "The Sniper At The Gates Of Heaven" advances at the catatonic pace of Bailey's drumming and drips magnetic debris like sweat; while "The Prodigal Sun" scatters electricity and rings out with metallic clangs, stirred up by the battle cries of shaman Alex Maas.

It falls to the album's other instant classic, "Black Grease", to pick up the beat and deliver, thanks to its electric, unsettling guitar riff, a thrilling garage number to dance to in fits of convulsion; what comes to mind here is the psych-garage of contemporaries Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, whose generous sponsorship the Black Angels benefited from early in their career. In the verses of "Manipulation", meanwhile, what stands out are the discordant, mysterious sonic layers the band is able to pile up, drawing even on Indian ragas, before arriving at one of the most catchy, raw-throated, evocative choruses in their discography.

"Empire" continues to offer vibrations of an Eastern ascetic ceremony, with high priest Maas intent on offering his congregation one of the album's most symbolic and enigmatic lyrics and vocal performances; on "Better Off Alone", finally, a bit of light breaks through, and the guitars and organ once again buzz away at a garage-rock pace.

The album then moves toward its close with "Bloodhounds On My Trail", a wild, winking concession to raw blues memories. Three minutes and thirty seconds of silence after the long psychedelic swoon of guitar and keyboards on "Call To Arms", we find, as a kind of ghost track, a cover of Jimmy Cliff's "Vietnam", its lyrics adapted by Maas and Bland to reference the contemporary conflict in Iraq.

By the end of Passover's 58 minutes, it doesn't feel like you've just listened to a debut album. Despite this being their first outing, the five Texan musicians show complete command of the material they're working with. They absorb hundreds of influences, but combine them into a dark, mesmeric brew that, especially to anyone well-versed in psych territory, sounds at once unprecedented and familiar. "Instant classic", a recurring phrase in this piece, doesn't feel like a forced expression in this case.

Many of the album's tracks, like much of the music the Black Angels would go on to make, are extremely evocative, perfectly suited to soundtrack film or TV scenes. "Young Men Dead" was featured in the soundtracks of the series "Fringe" and "True Detective", while "Black Grease" turns up in the video game "GTA V". These high-profile appearances helped swell the band's following, whose name — while remaining a largely underground, niche phenomenon — began to circulate widely and spark the curiosity of new listeners.

Far more famous and anticipated than in 2006, two years later the Black Angels released Directions To See A Ghost (Light In The Attic, 2008), a psychedelic monolith with a monstrous runtime of about an hour and twenty minutes, promising sensory disorientation and lysergic perdition right from its phosphorescent, spiraling cover art.

Directions To See A Ghost covers the same territory as its predecessor: "You On The Run" is a circular psychedelic mantra built on razor-sharp guitars, "Doves" is brighter but sails in the same lysergic waters, "Deer-Ree-Shee" lights the same Indian incense that burned at the heart of Passover, while "18 Years" is a meandering, wandering neo-psychedelic piece à la Spacemen3. This sophomore effort, though, is no carbon copy of the Angels' debut — if anything, it's a violent, torrid, pitch-black extremization of it. The air breathed in "Science Killer" and the martial "Mission District" is as heavy as that of a merciless desert, scorching by day and deathly leaden and cold by night.

Worth noting too is the presence of three tracks running past the eight-minute mark, something that on "Passover" only happened at the very end; there's the stormy space-rock of "Never/Ever", complete with a solemn, Eriksonian electric jug, the closing track "Black Angels Exit/Shine", and above all the tortuous "Snake In The Grass", which unwinds across more than sixteen minutes of slithering guitars, disorienting distortion, metallic clangor and sinister hisses.

It's difficult, and pointless, to decide which album between Passover and Directions To See A Ghost is the more significant; better to think of them as two chapters of an early-career phase in which the Texans arrived already mature and determined to carve out a leading role in the global psych scene — one they would soon come to dominate alongside names like Black Mountain and Brian Jonestown Massacre. The two records offer new generations their own personal take on psych-rock, mindful of the anti-war, lysergic experience of the '60s, yet fully aware of contemporary scenarios and possibilities.

2009 – 2013: hosts of Austin's psychedelic tradition

Among industry insiders and diehard psych-rock fans alike, the success of The Black Angels' first two albums was such that it not only sparked an immediate, small spontaneous cult following around the band, but also renewed attention on the city's scene. Indeed, 2008 saw the first edition of the Austin Psych Fest, which, lasting just one day, saw The Black Angels themselves tower as the main act over a bill of more or less local bands and future signees of the Reverberation Appreciation Society (Spindrift, The Strange Boys, Ringo Deathstarr, Astronaut Suit, etc.). The event was so successful that the following year its length was extended to three days. In 2009 the festival grew considerably both in terms of audience and line-up, which began to take on the shape of a major festival, with its defining trait being the pairing of interesting contemporary acts with sacred monsters of the genre. Alongside the Black Angels (the leit-motif and main act of every edition) and Indian Jewelry, names of the caliber of A Place To Bury Strangers and The Golden Dawn — a true classic of Austin's old psychedelic scene — were added to the bill. From that point on, thanks to the visionary work of hosts Maas and Bland, for three days every year Austin would become a vessel containing psychedelia's past, present and future.

As mentioned, in 2011 (also the year of the magical marriage between Black Angels and Roky Erickson) the event changed location and its name to Levitation. By then a gigantic festival, somewhere between a modern Primavera-style gathering and a '60s-style happening, it only came to a halt in 2020 because of the Coronavirus, following a monstrous edition that brought together Black Angels, Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev.

During their traditional festival appearance in 2010, the Black Angels played their third album, Phosphene Dream (Blue Horizon Ventures, 2010), in full. Not a forgettable record, nor one lacking points of interest, this third outing is nonetheless in all likelihood the band's least successful. Perhaps precisely because of its deliberately more easy-listening nature compared to its two predecessors, instead of grabbing more attention the album ends up looking pale next to its more menacing, imposing older siblings. The first differences from the previous records to stand out are certainly its unusually short 36-minute runtime and the total absence of long psychedelic suites.

The shifts in composition and mood aren't immediately apparent, though, since the album opens along the same lines as the earlier work: first with the fiery opener "Bad Vibration" and its guitar finale crashing down like a river of erupting magma, then with a fizzy, crackling garage number called "Haunting At 1300 McKinley".

It then falls to "Yellow Elevator #2" — after tearing open a space-time fissure worthy (once again) of the 13th Floor Elevators — to introduce the most significant influence on "Phosphene Dream": the Beatles. The Liverpool quartet is referenced again and again: the aforementioned "Yellow Elevator #2" is soaked in the acid of "Tomorrow Never Knows", the scant two minutes of "Telephone" are a dazzling parade of Pepper-esque colors, while "Sunday Afternoon" reworks the dynamics between vocal parts and the Merseybeat harmonies of the Fab Four.

Amid guitars mimicking the furious, whirling blades of a helicopter and lyrics shouted, then hissed, then mumbled — always psychotic and steeped in fear and tension — "River Of Blood" brings the album back to the Texans' most classic anti-war territory. Further down the tracklist, flavored with guitar arpeggios vaguely reminiscent of Buffalo Springfield, the title track tries to pull away from the battlefield, but the memory rages terrifyingly through its knots, just as it does in the lives of the veterans in Cimino's "The Deer Hunter".

Split between comfort zone and new experiments, Phosphene Dream doesn't grip and captivate the way its two predecessors did, but it does offer interesting peaks and shouldn't be dismissed as a skippable minor episode.

As our review pointed out at the time, the following Indigo Meadow (Light In The Attic, 2013) represents a sort of synthesis of the two albums that preceded it. The song lengths and the structures, more tied to conventional song form, come from Phosphene Dream, while the hardness, darkness and abrasiveness come from the sound of Directions To See A Ghost. There's a slight tilt toward its garage side, also accentuated by Maas's new way of singing, which increasingly sheds the robes of the psychedelic priest in favor of more loose-limbed verses and choruses.

This happens on the lashing "Indigo Meadow" and "Evil Thing", which open the album in gusts of electric energy, but even more so on "Don't Play With Guns", a psych jab plunged into a bath of white-hot fuzz, then lightened by a formidable, mesmerizing chorus. The three songs kick off a record with a granite-solid, immediate sound that, thanks to the tighter songwriting — none of the tracks exceed four and a half minutes — successfully continues the audience-broadening work begun by the previous record.

Down to four members (Maas, Bland, Bailey and Hunt), the Black Angels of Indigo Meadow are seasoned, surgical players. A steamroller that rolls through a tight 45-minute tracklist without showing any sign of flagging, effective both on the lean, hard-hitting tracks ("Broken Soldier", the heavily distorted "Twisted Light") and on the more drawn-out ones ("Holland", "Black Isn't Black") as well as the more '60s, carefree numbers ("The Day", "Love Me Forever").

2014 – 2017: closing a circle

A year later, it's time for the Black Angels to release an Ep, the first one to truly stand on its own, rather than simply serving as a companion piece to one of their Lps or collecting a live performance: Clear Lake Forest (Light In The Attic, 2014). The direction of the seven tracks it contains is clearly in line with Indigo Meadow, though the atmospheres here feel more relaxed and more heavily filtered through the kaleidoscopic lens of the 60s ("The Executioner", "Tired Eyes").

Particularly interesting here are the rollercoaster organs of the madcap "The Flop", but even more so the six minutes of "Linda's Gone", which, through its narrative structure, disorienting repetition of phrases and underlying noise, sounds truly like an apocryphal Velvet Underground track.

By 2017, the Black Angels from Austin no longer needed any introduction. Four albums, their work with the Reverberation Appreciation Society and, above all, Levitation had by then made them not just stars, but genuine institutions of the psych world.

So the concentric circles, themselves made up of other blue and red circles, that tangle up the intricate, swirling cover of Death Song seem to suggest that the Angels intend to close a chapter, to join the two ends of a circle. The title does the same, combining with the band's moniker to form the boldest reference the band has ever made to the Velvet Underground ("Black Angels Death Song").

From the opening "Currency" onward, Death Song is a parade of dizzying, circular hard-rock riffs, stormy vortices in which to drown one's mind. The ever-shifting rhythm section tangles up the songs' geometries, turning them into unsolvable labyrinths with a prog bent.

The tempo and pacing of the songs are also quite variable, ranging from stoner marches (the aforementioned "Currency", "Comanche Moon") to utterly liquid ballads in slow motion. This latter category includes the album's most touching songs, "Half Believing" (probably Maas's finest vocal performance ever) and the funereal "Estimate".

Captain Alex Maas's voice, always perched a step above the musical maelstrom, is that of a shaman presenting himself, bearer of the direst omens, to his devotees in a hypnotic trance. Death Song is not just a reference. The Black Angels' messages have never been so forceful and self-aware, so symbolic and leaden, so steeped in death and devoid of hope. The blame, or credit, depending on your point of view, lies with the new President of the United States, Donald Trump. Blending esotericism, politics and theatre, Maas at times condemns American capitalism – "Currency", "Grab As Much (As You Can)" – at times plays the part of a Native American ("Comanche Moon"), and so on.

Unlike previous Black Angels albums, which always seemed to push in one direction rather than another, Death Song is a sponge that soaks up more than ten years of explorations and experiments, only to squeeze out of its pores a brand-new, ever-shifting hypnotic liquid. The maturity with which the Austin band stages its latest (to date) psychedelic spectacle is such that these structured, hard-hitting and varied songs manage to sound damn accessible too, radio-friendly even in some respects. What makes it even more remarkable is that pulling this off required no softening or compromise.

Side projects and solo work

Also thanks to the production work done with the Levitation festival's own label, Reverberation Appreciation Society, the Black Angels boast a myriad of collaborations, split Eps and guest appearances on other people's records. Untangling such a dense and multifaceted web exhaustively and completely would therefore be an arduous, if not impossible, task.

What follows, then, is a brief rundown of the Black Angels' side releases that are absolutely worth a listen.

The most active Black Angel outside the band is undoubtedly guitarist Christian Bland, who since 2010 has been putting out Eps and Lps with his second band, Christian Bland & The Revelators. Bland's work with his Revelators (Chris Catalena on organ, Colin Ryan and Bob Mustachio on drums and percussion, and Luke Dawson on bass) follows in the footsteps of the mother band, right down to the artwork of his Lp covers, but offers a sound that's much drier, rougher and more desert-like. Bland's guitar, still intent on its well-known hypnotic riffs, appears stripped bare without the muscular backing of the Black Angels, favouring instead a sound firmly rooted in 60s atmospheres.

Of the three albums released under the name Christian Bland & The Revelators, the second one, Pig Boat Blues (Reverberation Appreciation Society, 2012), is absolutely worth tracking down: thanks to hazy songs like the hypnotic "Black Crayon" – on which Catalena shows off his organ skills in full – the western-rock of "13 Cent Killer" and the more luminous "Blue Glue", we find a record that's certainly indebted to the guitarist's main project, but undeniably charming, especially for anyone who loves the messy psychedelia of 60s Texas.

Fewer in number, but far more interesting, are the solo outings, or those made alongside Alex Maas.

2018 saw the sole release from a fascinating neo-psychedelic project called MIEN, born out of the meeting between Alex Maas and Tom Furse of England's Horrors. At first glance, pairing two bands as geographically and stylistically distant as the Black Angels and the Horrors might seem like a sheer gamble. Indeed, the only common denominator between the two projects, albeit approached in utterly opposite ways, is psychedelia – understood by the former in a more classic sense, effectively carrying on the decades-long tradition of their native Austin, and by the latter in a more evolutionary one, letting it brush up against other musical territories, from kraut to synth-pop, by way of industrial and shoegaze.

That alone was enough, though, to convince Tom Furse, keyboardist of the Horrors, and Alex Maas, the iconic voice of the Black Angels, to join forces – together with Rishi Dhir of Elephant Stone and John Mark Lapham of the Earlies – and set up this kind of anti-supergroup mysteriously named MIEN. Behind the project, in fact, there are no great pretensions or expectations, let alone any commercial ambitions whatsoever, but only the sincere passion of its members for all things psych. It took the four of them about a decade, however, before they finally decided to turn into something concrete the backstage chats they'd been having at the countless festivals whose line-ups they'd shared.

Given such premises, this self-titled debut could only turn out to be an album of total yet wonderfully varied psychedelia. The opener, “Earth Moon”, has the spiced flavour of a raga and ensnares the listener with dense tangles of sitar and flute; we're in the 1960s at their most entranced by ascetic Eastern philosophies, though diversions and vertiginous U-turns lie just around the corner. “You Dreamt” is a mantra of rattling percussion not far removed from the frenzied world-music celebrations of Goat, while “Hocus Pocus” swallows up any form of rhythm and shoots the album into space, with Furse setting his synthetic control panels to Tangerine Dream coordinates.

The course is held in the second half of the closing “Earth Moon – Reprise”, where the MIEN spaceship is propelled by a muffled drum part played in total absence of gravity. The most disorienting track, however, is “Odessey”, which alternates violent verses backed by irritable keyboards with utterly bizarre pop choruses, sung by maidens somewhere between odalisques and pin-ups.

Knowing Maas well and his concerns about the ruin to which capitalism is leading our planet, it's no surprise to find a piece of fierce satire like “(I’m Tired Of) Western Shouting”, whose title is repeated obsessively over a backdrop of apocalyptic guitars.

In terms of reach, MIEN will most likely amount to little more than a cult object for diehards of the psychedelic-festival circuit. And that's a shame, because it's a formidable compendium of the genre, played superbly, and able to compensate for its – inevitably – limited originality thanks to the passion each member brings to the subject at hand. A passion that oozes from every keyboard touch, every word intoned with priestly solemnity, every lysergic guitar chord, and the sacred reverence with which every sitar string is grazed.

To see Maas tackle a proper solo album, on the other hand, we had to wait all the way until 2020 – December, to be precise.

When a band member sets out to make their solo debut, the biggest risk is always failing to break free from the sound and ideas of the parent band, ending up as an accessory version of it – often, indeed, a superfluous one.

With Luca, the Black Angels' bassist, keyboardist, singer and chief songwriter wins that challenge twice over, managing to be both recognisable (the metallic-ecstasy intonation and the looping keyboard arpeggios of opener “Slip Into” leave no doubt as to who Alex Maas is and where he comes from) and something else entirely – a result achieved by completely dropping the Black Angels' massive riffs and fuzz. Psychedelia still rules the roost, but it's not an explosion of colour and electric energy; rather, it's a nostalgic bubble of folk and pop suspended between dust and the 1960s – or just a touch earlier (“All Day”).

Luca takes its name from the son Maas had in 2018, to whom the achingly sweet “Special” is dedicated – a bare, love-filled little ballad dressed in nothing but acoustic guitar and wrapped in a soft cushion of horns. The arrival of his son was certainly the push Maas needed to throw himself into this solo venture; much of the material that makes up the album, however, dates back as far as a decade. Sketches left to gather dust before finally taking shape in the studio with the help of numerous collaborators, among whom his bandmates Christian Bland and Jake Garcia stand out, along with Jack White's keyboardist Quincy McRary and Eels drummer Derek Brown.

Songs steeped in dark melancholy like “The Light That Will End Us” or “Shines Like The Sun (Madeline’s Melody)” sound as if they came from old jukeboxes in border-town dives or from battered little radios left forgotten on a village wall somewhere towards Mexico; while “Been Struggling” adds to that gloom and dust the immediacy of a catchy, hummable chorus. Only “American Conquest”, with its distinctly Western guitar, looks more closely towards the anti-capitalist mantras of Death Song.

“The City” closes out, with its sweet, despondent humming, a run of ten tracks that, in this era of exhausting runtimes encouraged by the digital format, has the added virtue of a lean length – about 36 minutes in which Maas leaves no room for missteps or superfluous details.

Of course, the wait for a new Black Angels record will remain uppermost in the minds of every fan of the Texan psychedelic crew, but Luca is a finely crafted diversion that offers the chance to get to know the captain of the ship a little better.

With 2017's Death Song, the Black Angels released an album that is, in every sense, the summa of their work up to that point – the culmination of a path that synthesises all their experiments and detours. A psych-garage formula that's easy to call total.

Despite a five-year gap in which all manner of things happened in the United States and the world at large, the band led by Alex Maas and Christian Bland – usually quicker to mutate and more responsive to circumstance – chose to pick their journey back up exactly where they'd left it. Wilderness Of Mirrors (2022) thus borrows its sound and solutions from its predecessor, broadening its scope, however, partly thanks to a monstrous – and at times rather heavy – runtime of almost an hour.

On their sixth album, the Austin quintet thus find themselves tackling new themes, sometimes even with an unprecedented note of positivity (the defiant “Without A Trace” and an “El Jardin” that urges us to leave a better world for our children), arranged in an ideal three-part structure: a first section that charges ahead into psychedelic garage, a more folk-leaning middle stretch, and a final part that drifts into airier psychedelia.

After a masterpiece of an opener like "Without A Trace", where the whole band shows off its considerable qualities, "Hystory Of The Future", "Empires Falling" and "La Pared (Govt. Wall Blues)" then launch into a blistering assault of fuzz and incisive guitar incursions.

The psychedelic folk of "The River" folds Anatolian overtones into the band's formula, while the picturesque "100 Flowers Of Paracusia" even takes a landscape-painting approach to its lyrics, and "Here And Now" slows the pace down further in favour of an energetic acoustic-guitar strumming pattern that, combined with Maas's sweet vocals, becomes highly evocative. The thunderous title track, on the other hand, slithers along quickly, like a rattlesnake darting between desert dunes.

The album heads towards its close with "Icon", which echoes the martial psychedelia of the much-missed Passover with a touch of Eastern spice in its trilling vocal lines, before wrapping up the journey with the spacey "Suffocation", whose guitars reach up towards a dark, mystery-laden night sky.

There's not much more to say: nothing new on the Austin front. Still, it's an immense pleasure to find this band again after quite some time and see them reconfirm their status as leaders of the scene, turning out one solid record after another.

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