There's this saying that goes something like you alway hurt the ones you love. As far as I can tell, this is true. I tend to avoid criticism on this site unless something is really terrible (Best Coast) or if it's really disappointing (Mike Doughty). The former is a lot more rare than the latter, since it seems like some artists have this unfortunate knack for spiraling downward into mediocrity and that just makes me feel kind of sad and I have to say something about it.

The Black Angels seem to be falling into some sort of nostalgia fueled death spiral. Maybe it was the fact that Directions To See A Ghost was a massive droning mess from which it was hard to identify individual songs, and they decided it was safer to just start over as if that album hadn't happened and move in some new direction. That new direction is pretty clean sounding songs that sound, to me, one step removed from The Black Crowes playbook.

If you winced when I said The Black Crowes, you should. I don't have a lot of patience for masturbatory classic rock nostalgia baiting, and I like classic blues rock even less, so when I listened to this new Black Angels album, Phosphene Dream, and it ended up being one Doors-y blues rocky almost entirely inconsequential track after another, I was sad. I was really sad. All I could tweet was, "The new Black Angels album is pretty thin. They're starting to sound a bit Black Crowes-y with all the shameless, useless nostalgia."

Earlier this year there was a pretty sublime song on the new UNKLE album featuring The Black Angels and it was a damn good, fun track. Not only did it feature an awesome melody with pretty awesome lyrics, but the whole thing sounded so fun and fresh. It was The Black Angels' dark psychedelic sound meshed with a solid dance-able beat. It sounded almost perfect, like you could have given me an entire album worth of that stuff and I would have felt great.

But the Angels took nothing from that collaboration. There's not a memorable lyric anywhere to be found. There's nothing you can dance to, unless you count jerkily swaying around like a half drunk hippie "dancing". To make a long story short, most things on this album are not memorable---no hooks, no good beats, if there's a clever lyric somewhere I don't know where it is.

I can't recommend this one. Go listen to their debut album instead.

It's been a while since I've been truly single. A year and a half, actually, it's been. I've been with others, I've dated a little bit, but my head was always preoccupied with wondering if the one I just let go was the one who got away and I didn't take anything very seriously. You know what, I'm lying. I don't know anything at all about how I've felt over the course of the last year and half. No clue at all. To try to pretend and explain myself is to pay a great disservice to anyone who will ever read this and think they've found someone who understands them.

The truth is I've spent the last year and a half wondering if whatever little meter in my chest that measures and releases the feelings of love in me has been broken. I'd sit and tap on my chest hoping to get it restarted, but no matter what I did, I just couldn't get those love juices flowing. I still worry now, now that I'm alone, that my searching will be futile, but I manage to hold onto a small nugget of hope.

One day I'll find the perfect one for me. They will be pretty and funny at least to me. Something about her will make me fall head over heels in love, and I'll sigh blissfully and say, "Good lord, I've missed this!" and it'll lack all the things that used to annoy me about love: the fear and sometimes crippling anxiety. Instead I'll keep my clear head, my self-confidence, and I'll just be happy and in love---and I'll feel like I know what love is, because I've found it, and when people tell me about their lousy relationships, I'll laugh inwardly and think, "These poor fools, if they only knew what I had, they would feel even worse."

Course, if I meet her and she's with some other dude like in this song then everything will just suck for me, because I've never killed anyone before and I don't know how it's done... but at least I'll be in love.

This song reminds me a bit of the time back in the day when The Dandy Warhols were a good band, back when they played shoegaze with 60's-70's rock influences. At least up until the vocal starts, at which point it's all Black Angels.

I liked this album a lot, which is why it is such a shame that their second album suffers from a sever case of sophomore slump, where there are no longer songs but just walls of shoegaze guitar droning on and on. There are no hooks, no catchy lyrics, nothing you can dance to for the most part, just the same endlessly wailing guitars.

This song, off their first album, is a good example of why The Black Angels are a band who need to release a "return to form" third album, full of 70's rock and summer of love psych-outs. Give us something we can dance to, hell, give us something we can sing along with. Give us back our Black Angels.

Site Note: staires_!_, now with "more" hyperbole!

Author's Note: It's Sunday! Everyone reads this on Sundays. Most people, for the first time! Sigh.