black angels Archive
28 Jul 2021
Remembering Roky Erickson, Part Three

Continued from Part Two… But Luckin “couldn’t find any commercial American label that wanted to put this guy out,” says Chris Knab, co-founder of San Francisco-based independent label 415 Records. Selecting songs from the UK release and adding five other tracks from the sessions, 415 released the music as The Evil One in 1980. Taken
27 Jul 2021
Remembering Roky Erickson, Part Two

Continued from Part One… Bill Miller would play amplified autoharp in Roky’s late ‘70s band, The Aliens, but by that time he had been a fan for years. He says that Roky was always unpredictable. “One thing about working with Roky: any day might be the last day,” he says. “Back in the days of
26 Jul 2021
Remembering Roky Erickson, Part One

The Bay Area’s rich psychedelic music tradition has its roots in familiar places: Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company and The Grateful Dead laid the groundwork and built upon that foundation. More than a half century later, artists like The Fresh and Onlys, Thee Oh Sees and Ty Segall carry on that tradition.
30 Jun 2017
The Black Angels: Slow Death (Part 2)

Continued from Part One… The Black Angels have never been what one would call a commercially-minded group. That said, a few years back Alex told me that “Telephone” off Phosphene Dream was a conscious attempt to reach a wider audience. Would you agree, and if so, to what degree was that successful? Yeah, I guess
29 Jun 2017
The Black Angels: Slow Death (part 1)

The Black Angels are reliable purveyors of a modern rethink of 60s psychedelia. The Austin group’s updated approach is a kind of tribal psych, heavy on droning, hypnotic and irresistible tunes. The group just released Death Song, its fifth (or sixth) album – we’ll explain that in a moment – and is heading out on
01 May 2014
Album Review: Various – A Psych Tribute to The Doors
Tribute albums can go any number of ways: they can showcase new takes on old music, they can provide a way for young or relatively unknown bands to use classic tunes to jump-start their own careers, or they can be pretty much a waste of everyone’s time. Cleopatra Records specializes in tribute albums, and while
01 Mar 2014
Bonus Weekend Feature: The Black Angels’ Alex Maas Talks About Roky Erickson
Austin-based band Black Angels have a finely tuned sense of history. While their music – often described by the band members themselves as “tribal psychedelic” – doesn’t aim to slavishly re-create the sounds of some long-lost musical era, the group readily acknowledges a clear debt to their psychedelic forebears. And chief among those influences for
29 Apr 2013
Concert Review: Black Angels, Allah-Las and Elephant Stone — Asheville NC April 5 2013
I started attending arena-scale rock concerts back in the late 1970s. My first show was in October 1978, seeing Electric Light Orchestra with their hamburger bun/spaceship setup at Atlanta’s Omni. (In the words of Rob Reiner‘s Marty DiBergi character in This is Spinal Tap, “Don’t look for it; it’s not there anymore.) One of the