Album Review: The Black Angels – Wilderness of Mirrors

Revenge of the ‘60s

The Black Angels are speaking truth to power with their sixth studio album, Wilderness of Mirrors. The album showcases the band’s signature buzzy and tripped out style with a renewed energy and sense of urgency that is fit for times past and present.

Taking their name from “The Black Angel’s Death Song” by the seminal 1960s rock band The Velvet Underground, The Black Angels are preeminent in the Austin, Texas, psych rock scene. Wilderness of Mirrors proves why.

The album provides a sparkling variety of tastes and textures. Songs range from heavy and hard-edged to acoustic and misty. The album is unsurprisingly heavy on reverb which is punctuated by fun keyboard and tambourine accents and Mellotron tones.

The lead track on the album begins with a soft and slow ‘60s-esque Mellotron tune which is progressively overtaken by a fast drumbeat and then punched out by a loud fuzzed-out power chord. Those first 30 seconds set the tone for the entire album.

Wilderness of Mirrors takes psych rock full circle in a way that’s both illuminating and depressing. While psych rock’s origin era, the 1960s, is increasingly romanticized by younger generations, the painful irony is that the social, cultural and political battles being fought today are the same battles that were being fought in the ‘60s.

Wilderness of Mirrors plucks at the tension between fighting for the world to change and fantasizing about the end of it. On “Make it Known”, lead vocalist Alex Maas defiantly drones “We can be better than this / Most of us know / Our nation is numb / We’re slowly boiling over.” Over the course of the album, resistance twists into surrender. “I will follow you, my dear / Until the oceans drown us both,” he sings on “El Jardín.”

Poetic in and of themselves, the lyrics are practically magic in musical form. Maas delivers a timeless and seemingly effortless vocal performance on all 15 tracks. He is joined by original members Stephanie Bailey on drums and Christian Bland on guitar alongside new additions Ramiro Verdooren and Jake Garcia.

Wilderness of Mirrors is an album that derives its energy less from the band itself and more from the physical environment in which it’s played. Wilderness of Mirrors is a complex and meditative album from which you could derive a different meaning with every listen, but the best way to listen is with no intention at all.