When Neil Young rush-released his agitprop album Living with War last year, it was said the Canadian veteran had taken a stand because no young American musicians had anything to say about the burning issues of the day. The Black Angels lay that argument to rest. The six-piece band from Austin, Texas, have plenty to say about fear and loathing at home and abroad, and they are saying it right in the middle of George W Bush's old back yard.
The Lone Star State might conjure up visions of Stetsons, pedal-steel guitars and songs about lyin', drinkin' and cheatin', but the Black Angels are nothing like that. Their sound, a dark hybrid they have dubbed "native American drone'n'roll", is defined by tribal drumming, rumbling basslines and doom-laden guitar chords. Lyrically, they deal in fear and paranoia, reflecting the state of a nation preoccupied with its president's "war on terror". They laid it on the line with their debut single, The First Vietnamese War: "60,000 men died/While you all hid/You came into our home and took our kids/And you ask for more now for this new war."
"We're not trying to be a hugely political band," says co-founder Christian Bland, addressing Young's implied criticism of American youth. "But it's partially our duty to talk about the human condition and to speak out about what we see around us. People our age just seem to become jaded."
Songs with titles such as Young Men Dead, Call to Arms and The Sniper at the Gates of Heaven typify the Black Angels' marriage of 1960s protest to a sound that blends ghosts of the Velvets and the Doors with the more modern narcotic psychedelia of the Jesus and Mary Chain and Spacemen 3. The songs spring from the band members' shared weirdness of their upbringings among preachers, missionaries, religious cults and funeral homes. "That's the South for ya," smiles front man Alex Maas, who spent his childhood convinced a nuclear strike could be imminent, and whose sister is a Christian missionary. "We grew up in the Bible Belt, and that's the way it is around here," adds Bland, whose father is a Presbyterian preacher. "Music is a spiritual ritual for us. It's like a ceremony when we play."
The pair, who met at Bland's father's church when they were children, formed the band in 2004, after both had returned from college: an experience that opened their minds and brought them a perspective on life that had been missing in their somewhat sheltered childhoods. "Growing up in a Christian environment, I was only shown one side of things," says Bland. "My entire life was indoctrinated with Christianity. I wasn't given the opportunity to think otherwise - that alone has been a source of lyrical and musical inspiration for me."
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Further came from Maas's unusual family background. "My parents grew up in the cold war and, when I was young, I always had this weird fear that bombs were going to fall," he recalls. "I remember, at 14, my dad telling me to look out for red aeroplanes flying overhead because that could be the sign of an attack. During the 1970s and 1980s, everybody was scared of everything. I recently went back home and filtered through all my dad's survival stuff, and found thyroid pills and gas masks lying around the house... I guess he was taking no chances."
Whoa, hold on a minute there: what exactly are "thyroid pills"? "You take thyroid pills to decrease the swelling in your thyroid glands," Maas explains patiently, before spelling out the dangers of failing to take them. "That's one of the main things that kills you first. Your thyroids get so swollen that your immune system shuts down and you go into shock." His parents even had their own nuclear bunker in case of attack, housed in a wine cellar that they kept 30 miles outside Austin. Inevitably, there were religious overtones to the fear: "I grew up being told that the world is hanging by a string, and if God cuts that string, you're going to hell. That was the fear in the back of my mind when I was younger."
Today, of course, the cold war is a distant memory, but the paranoia has been replaced by Islamophobia, while the ghosts of Vietnam have been reawakened in Afghanistan and Iraq. "Yeah, it never goes away," muses Bland. "They always have to have something to scare us. First it was communism, now it's terrorism."
The Black Angels' debut album, Passover, is driven by the trance-like drumming of Stephanie Bailey, a woman who claims to be related to Davy Crockett, and whose physical power belies her status as the daughter of a Sunday-school teacher. Hovering beneath the beat is the "drone machine" of Jennifer Raines, who grew up in a funeral home in the fantastically named Texan town of Gun Barrel City, and had never played an instrument when she was invited to play keyboards in the band. Anything else odd about her back-ground? "I used to dissect fish," she confesses. "Then I'd make caskets and gravestones for them. Oh, and I've had four open-heart surgeries," she adds with a shrug and a grin. "I was born with three holes in my heart."
Talk to the remaining band members individually and you get more of the same. The father of the newest recruit, Kyle Hunt, is a lapsed Catholic turned born-again Christian missionary, with his own leather-bound Bible. And Nate Ryan? He grew up on a cult compound in Utah, but says that has been "blown out of proportion a little". Then there is the house that four of them share in Austin - it's haunted. "There was an elderly couple who died in that house, and sometimes, at night, I hear a tambourine shaking in the laundry room," Bailey says. "But if I go in there, it's just hanging on the wall." "There's definitely something wrong with that room," Bland agrees. "I lock my bedroom door at night," adds Raines. "I have to walk through the laundry room to get to the bathroom," says Maas. "And I get tingles up and down my spine."
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Passover is out now; the Black Angels support Black Rebel Motorcycle Club on their British tour, which starts in Sheffield on July 10 and continues until July 21