Thursday’s Child is Sunday’s Clown (Black Angels/Preacher’s Kids, Southpaw)

Santayana be damned, some folks know their history and just enjoy repeating it.

Drop everything – no, wait.  Drop something and witness Austin, Texas’ The Black Angels, a band that clings to 1968 like it’s a down comforter on a cold winter’s morn.  There’s bad stuff happening outside, man; better stay under the covers.

They bastardize ol’ headless Timmy on their website – “Turn on, tune in, drone out” – while singing about pretty colors and the Vietnam War.  “We got off that boat/Charlie’s everywhere/a lotta killin’ and dyin’/and no one seems to care.”  Almost makes one want to start a drum and fife outfit and sing out about them big bad redcoats.

The band worships at the shrine of the Velvet Underground – its name comes from VU’s first record, and Nico’s face stares up from its merch – while popping the same Psychocandy as neo-psychedelics Brian Jonestown Massacre (and all its fall-out bands).  The sound is decidedly indirect:  Lead singer Alex Maas’ vocals are soaked in reverb while guitarists Nate Ryan and Alex Maas fiddle with slides and distortion pedals.  The percussion is tom-heavy, filled out by tambourine.  It echoes and twangs and shimmies.  It’s fuzzy enough that, under the proper circumstance, you could probably see it.  The way Maas – who remains mostly motionless throughout the performance – squints out from the stage, perhaps he can.

The keyboardist’s iBook was positively anachronistic.

Images run over the players throughout their show; projectionist Richard Whymark is listed as a band member.  He draws on the usual acid-head stuff – there’s some animation, some Koyaanisqatsi, refracted and reflected images.  The Teletubbie Sun Child giggles in an appearance.  Goodly chunks of Gerald Scarfe’s stuff from Pink Floyd The Wall are used, which is troublesome for a couple reasons:  First, you start thinking Floyd while listening to VU; and second, you start thinking about how second-hand all this stuff really is.

Sure, the Black Angels’ sound is a good one, a full one, one easy on the eyes, but it’s one we’ve seen too often before.  And the sound is there, but not the songs:  Listen to that fat fuzzy bassline in “Black Grease” (available on their myspace page) and just try to keep your mind from slipping to some recent work by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club (or even blues duo Black Keys).

The Southpaw show only lasted about fifty minutes (no encore); that even such a short set should hint at monotony presents a problem.  Towards the end, as the Angels droned on and cartoon hammers marched incongruously over them, I started thinking about the Velvet Underground and how they had their heroes too.  You can hear how influenced by Dylan and Phil Spector Lou Reed was, but his band sounds nothing like either.  The appropriate way to honor the VU is to innovate, not appropriate.

*

I was actually there to see the opener, Mississippi’s Preacher’s Kids.  There’s nothing overly distinctive about their music, either, but there doesn’t have to be:  The Kids could serve as house band for the bar that sits at the corner where blues-based Southern Rock and Garage meet.  It’s a good, lean combo that guarantees toe-tapping tunefulness and a minimum of indulgence.  They’re Stonesy, not stoned, and a hell of a lot of fun in a packed room.

Unfortunately, last night, Southpaw was hardly that; there were about twenty-five people in the venue, including the band.  There wasn’t a single audience member in the front performance space.

The Kids did their best to fill the room otherwise, with three guitars going at once.  Frontman Tyler Keith missed just enough notes to let us know he really meant it.  Near the end of the set he leapt off the stage, dragging the mic chord as far as it would go, banging at the little crucifix on his tambourine, trying to bring the music to the people.

They deserve better than an empty room, and you deserve to hear them.

tags: black angels  preachers kids  concert reviews  

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