Interview: The Black Angels – “Hope is there for a reason.”

With The Black Angels’ latest album, Wilderness Of Mirrors, hitting the Louder Than War Top 100 Albums Of 2022 at number 11, we caught up with frontman Alex Maas to hear more about it.

This year’s release of Wilderness Of Mirrors saw Texan psych-rockers The Black Angels hit new heights with their best album to date. The album cover perfectly captured the labyrinth that surrounds us, the society that twists us and loses us, divides with an aim to conquer. Whilst always a politically-minded band, the album, especially across the first half, doubled down on their intent with some of their best lyrics to date.

In reviewing it, I noted that they are “bringing the mirror as close as possible, reflecting a broken world back, straight, deep and targeted into our consciousness. There is no hiding from the horrors that surround us and, if we attempt to, the spiral to our own demise will descend with ever-increasing speed.”

For my From The Garage show on Louder Than War Radio, I caught up with Black Angels’ singer Alex Maas to hear more about the album.

LTW: Alex, it’s been a couple of years since we last spoke, when you were putting out your solo album, Luca.

Alex Maas: I absolutely remember that. Yeah, that was a really fun conversation. Really interesting part of my life.

LTW: I remember you talking about the kind of optimism that the birth of your son Luca had brought you but at the same time a fear of bringing a child into the world as it is. Is that something that still permeates your writing?

AM: Yeah. You have to have some kind of healthy optimism to keep you waking up in the morning, getting out of bed, right? I mean, you have to. You can look at the future and, you know, it looks bleak and scary, and every other horrifying adjective that you want to use, but, like we talked about last time, not much changed, other than the fact that we weren’t touring a bunch. Not a lot changed in my life in terms of sitting at home making music or getting together with the band and making music. That foundation, this family, those two families were a great foundation for keeping sane through the whole thing. And you can kind of just disappear into either one of them. That was really healthy for me.

LTW: How did it feed into the writing of Wilderness Of Mirrors?

AM: I still feel the same way. It’s a weird place to be living in right now. It always was, it wasn’t like COVID happened and now everything’s scary. There were a lot of problems before that.  I don’t want to be like an alarmist, or be like, “Oh, my God, I’m afraid of everything”, but a lot of the creativity is how I, how me and the band deal with life, through art and through music. And I think that’s something that’s pretty obvious at this point, from Passover to here, to now. I mean we spoke two and a half, three years ago, and I feel roughly the same about the state of the world. A lot of crazy shit happened between then and now. We probably didn’t speak about it then, but we’ve kind of always been on the brink of a third World War. That was always imminent. That fear has never gone away, really. But yeah, you know, again, music is super cathartic and super healing for us. And that’s why I still play music. That’s why I still do it. I don’t try to claim to know everything about any subject at all. Musicians aren’t particularly known for being like really smart people, I guess.

LTW: When I first heard Wilderness Of Mirrors, it struck me just how politically forthright the first half of the album is. How do you think that has gone down?

AM: When we do say something, there’s always a backlash about something. If you stand on one side of the street or draw a line in the sand, like, I’m disgusted by America, the direction it’s going. A lot of people are just like, “Fuck you, you suck. And you shouldn’t be talking and stick to music.” Whatever. That’s what the whole point of art is. At the end of the day, I don’t really give a shit what they think.

LTW: I think it doesn’t matter what level you reach in that respect though. Pearl Jam still get it and some Rage Against The Machine fans miss the point of what the machine actually is.

AM: You’re right. You’re absolutely right. I feel like people kind of just rally through the chaos, or they kind of curl up in the corner in a blanket. You can do one or the other and, during the creation of the song, you have to have that same thing because you could go down a dark dark hole and not have a light at the end of the tunnel or whatever. I just don’t think that that’s where we’re gonna be personally, where we want to be because there’s always the idea of hope. Hope is there for a reason. It’s not just like some maple leaf thing. It actually does drive a change and it drives people to become better, become better people, become better parents, better educators and leaders. That’s a magic ingredient. So I think that that ingredient, I like to personally put that in songs.

We talked about that before. There are lots of ways to do that. So the Beatles were really good at that, at having an anti-war song. You know, the parents thought it was like a love song, but the kids were like, “No, they’re talking about a revolution.” So I think there’s a way to kind of craft that to where you can sometimes do it intentionally. Sometimes you accidentally do that and sometimes people are just gonna interpret your songs however they want to interpret them, right? At the end of the day, I’ve heard some interpretations of these records and these songs that I never would have dreamed of.

LTW: It comes down to the final interpretation of any art being in the eyes, or in this case ears, of the beholder.

AM: Yeah, they become somebody else’s dream. And so once we write a song, it’s out there. If I could, I think it’d be great to just be a studio musician, and play. And you wouldn’t have to relive these moments in your head. You’re playing the songs, and then you’re playing songs off the third record or first record and about hardship or a breakup. It can be really mentally kind of fucked up going through these motions again and retelling these stories that you maybe brushed under the rug. I think there’s something kind of cathartic about that, but probably also something that’s not super healthy. There’s a correlation between substance abuse and musicians and denial and everything, you know? There’s something too about exposure therapy, like exposing yourself to your fears or looking at a mirror. How more terrifying can you get than looking at yourself in the mirror?

I mean, it’s the most frightening thing in the world, holding a mirror to yourself. And then what’s even more frightening than that, than having a mirror to mirrors and you’re seeing multiple sides of your face, and then, all of a sudden, you’re in a wilderness of mirrors. That’s kind of the most terrifying thing, when you truly don’t know. I think that’s part of the point of the record, you don’t know what’s what, which way to look, who to listen to. Ultimately, we encourage people to find out their own truths. Find out for yourself, find out how the government works. Maybe that’s a bad example because maybe nobody knows how the government works. If you don’t know something about the topic, research for yourself and understand that. I’m not claiming to know everything about everything else but encouraging people to find out information for themselves. That’s what makes you an informed, intelligent person at the end of your life.

LTW: Tying in with the wilderness of mirrors though, with what you say about not knowing which way to look, which reflection to pay attention to, I think that the way that we communicate so much through social media has created a system via which we simply seek confirmation for our opinions and rage against any that contradict us without investigating. It’s like we immediately feel backed into a corner by our views and are not allowed to change our minds.

AM: Totally! What’s up with that? Yeah, that’s another thing that was kind of trickling in conversations that I’ve been having recently with people. Once you have this thing, it’s like, we call them horse blinders in Texas, you just can’t see anything not right in front of you and nothing can change your mind. So why is it that this is just a flaw of ours, a thing that makes us feel good, makes us feel safe? Once we find our tribe, then we can kind of find comfort and safety in that, and you and I both know that tribalism mentality is polarising. It really is. It’s like, as much as you want to find your people, as much as you want to find your tribe, if your ears aren’t open and your mind isn’t open, then it can be a very dangerous thing. And you see that in America, you see that in these other places, literally polarised. If you look at the political situation of the US, it’s literally split down the middle.

It’s pretty wild and what’s always strange to me is when I talk to somebody who’s very typically Republican and religious, but then they also believe in evolution. And I’m just kind of like, “Well, that’s wonderful, but how can you stick to your guns so hard on all these topics? If you believe evolution is real, how can you define everything else that you believe off of these other religious beliefs that you have?”

I think the idea of an open mind starts at home and starts in our classes. That’s where it starts and people can still be influenced later on in life without being prosecuted or persecuted for that. As long as you’re not doing any harm to anybody, you should be able to change your mind if you like, and you shouldn’t get any flack about it. How do you change that? I don’t even know. Schools in America, we’re still banning textbooks and people are talking about Columbus Day as if it’s this thing that should be celebrated.

LTW: The fact that you’ve named some of the songs in Spanish jumped out too. You’ve got La Pared (The Wall), which seems really clear where it’s aimed, and you announced the album with El Jardín (The Garden). How much political intent was there behind giving them Spanish titles?

AM: Absolutely tons of intent in that. We’ve kind of felt like at some point we can’t just keep speaking in English the entire time. And granted, the entire record is, for the most part, sung in English, but just reaching out a hand to other people. At a certain point, you feel guilty that you didn’t do that years ago, that you don’t have a whole album in Spanish, and then the whole album and French and Swahili or something. So, I think that eventually you just make changes, you make small changes to your life, and you shouldn’t be persecuted or feel guilty. But there’s that guilt there. You know, we’re human. So we go back to that. But yeah, there was intent and wanting to not be so westernised and we are careful in terms of that.

I don’t have a lot of pride right now, or American pride or whatever, if that still is a thing. I know, it is, because I see people around with their MAGA hats and stuff. I think what we’re trying to do with our music is always trying to evolve because evolution is real in our opinions. And you don’t always have to be all-electric and tough and fuzzy all the time to get your point across. Sometimes there’s that quiet loud, or quiet can be louder than war.

That’s the whole thing that kept this quiet, loud approach to music, especially when people associate psychedelia, psychedelic music with big, fuzzy sounds. It doesn’t have to be that and that comes down to personal differences within the band. There’s always a quiet one or two quiet songs on our records and I think I do see something about putting the album Luca out, there is some correlation between that and Wilderness Of Mirrors. There was some kind of like, “Oh, this feels good, the strings feel good.” I’m only speaking for me, you know, but I love it when bands like reinvent themselves. Like, look at Radiohead. When they were putting out Kid A and Amnesiac, I remember reading that Thom Yorke said he didn’t want anybody to recognise that it was Radiohead at all. They wanted to surprise people. And if you listen to Kid A, it’s just brilliant to me, you know, and Amnesiac. They’re both just so twisted and bizarre. But I love doing that. And the next record, who knows what it’s gonna sound like?

LTW: You’re able to just wipe it clean and start with a completely blank canvas.

AM: Exactly, yeah. And change your mind and not be persecuted. So I think there’s that full circle that remains unbroken and that is okay. It’s funny you know, a lot of people think that this record was like our pandemic record, but the reality is this record was written before the pandemic happened.

LTW: And more even. Didn’t you write Icon more than 15 years ago?

AM: Oh, God, yeah, 16 years, 17. In the beginning, it was just like this acoustic thing that I used to play, which sounds entirely different to what it sounds like now. I think you’d probably find it somewhere on the internet, me playing that song, but I should release the earlier version of that song so people can kind of see where that song came from. It was going to be on Luca and Christian [Bland] was like “Would you do me a huge favour and would you save that song for Wilderness?” I was like, “I don’t know, I’ve been sitting on it for like 15 years. You didn’t want it for the last 15 years.”

But it ended up working in the situation where I just took the lyrics basically and put them on this kind of older-sounding Black Angels kind of song. It has this kind of Southern, you know, I don’t even know how to describe it. Icon sounds like it could have been something off of Passover, it sounds like Bloodhound and it sounds like it could have been that part two, sonically. So, when we first started seeing it, it was kind of interesting because I had this idea that I wanted this song to have this Depeche Mode meets Texas vibe to it. That’s the cool thing about music and a melody that’s been sitting around your head is of all of a sudden it comes out when you least expect it. The band is playing and I’m walking in and, and you’re just kind of like, this moment works on top of your moment, too. So, everybody, everybody was in that situation. Christian got to have Icon on the album, and we finally released it, but it’d be cool to hear those versions side by side.

LTW: You all have a few other projects on the go too. You’ve got your solo work, Christian has The Revelators and UFO Club, Jake [Garcia] has The Ripe, and Ramiro [Verdooren] The Rotten Mangos. When you’re writing together, are there ever moments when you think that certain ideas are better suited to those other projects?

AM: I think it’s interesting because I feel like we tried to not say “That’s your thing.”  That’s where you can get kind of sticky with it. We always lean on what’s best for the song and in putting the song first, it separates our ego from it. So you don’t get a lot of like “That could be a Christian Bland & The Revelators song”. But there’s tons of stuff that gets left on the cutting floor. I mean, tons. You see these bands that put out like one record every like year. We would love to do that. As a band, we have tons of music and we left 15 to 20 songs off of this record that could have been on it. That sounds crazy, I know, but it’s the reality of how we approach music and how we want people to digest our music.

King Gizzard or someone will put out a record every single year but we have a different business approach. We have an album cycle, we put a team together people and we have an intent and focus and I’m not saying they don’t. I’m not saying that at all, but we have the album and then we tour on that record and our team pushes this concept and these lyrics and this voice and the sound. So that’s our approach. It’s like tortoise meets the hare kind of thing. We’re the tortoise, but that’s not to say that we’re not productive and it’s wonderful that we do have these side projects.

We all have our own side projects and we all support them, and we all support each other’s side projects. It’s really healthy. We can be like, “Okay, that can be that. And this can be this.” and no one’s feelings get hurt because if they don’t make it on one project, it can get released in another way. It’s super healthy for us.

LTW: On the song The River you namecheck and pay homage to some of your influences too.

AM: Well, I think it was really important for us to pay homage to them. If you didn’t already know that we were huge 13th Floor Elevator fans and Velvet Underground fans, obviously this was our opportunity to get these names out there. That song was originally called Seance and yeah, it is a seance, kind of like calling to these people. Really weird shit happened when we played that song. I’m not even really a believer in this kind of stuff but we would play that song and the lights would flicker in our practice space. We thought that Seance was a little too hokey and so we ended up naming The River.

You hear people like Bob Dylan and Neil Young talk about this river of knowledge and river of creativity that you can always just tap into if you want to and so that ended up becoming the name of the song, which I thought was really fitting and it makes for a good story. So I could tell you that that song used to be really spooky, and it does have a spooky kind of vibe to it. It doesn’t sound like anything else that we’ve done and I just I’m so proud of the band for moving in these different directions and really embracing different sounds, like putting down the fuzz and picking up the classical guitar and getting rid of more of the reverb or, you know, adding more.

LTW: How do you see Wilderness Of Mirrors sitting with the rest of the band’s body of work?

AM: I’m really proud of where we are as a band right now. I think this is the highlight of my career or whatever. You know, I get that question a lot, what’s the highlight of your career? It’s like today, and yesterday it was yesterday and tomorrow it will be likely tomorrow. Yeah, I do.

LTW: You’ve announced a European tour for the New Year. I imagine it must feel great to be out playing again. Are there any places that you’re really looking forward to getting to?

AM: Gosh, you know, I actually came to Spain for Thanksgiving here in America, which is kind of a weird holiday. My sister was in Spain because she was in school there and I went and visited her. So I mean, not just because you’re there, but I really like Spain a lot. I don’t think it’s a country where we’ve really played tons of shows. You have Primavera and you have these things that happen there but I feel like it’s like an underplayed place for us. We always love playing in France and Germany, but we’ve never really been past, we’ve never gone deep into Eastern Europe. We see the Night Beats going to like all these really cool places, and The Black Lips‘ guys in really cool places and we’re kind of jealous of that.

So we’re excited to go on to go a little bit further into Europe, but, you know, really just excited to play the songs for people who have been wanting to hear them and to come back and share these experiences and go through these weird, bizarre moments where we play these songs, the hard moments.

I always err on the side of, I want to play all new songs. I will always, always want to play something new. And when I go see Radiohead, I use this analogy, I will eat whatever they make me for dinner. I’m not going to complain that they’re not playing Creep, you know, I’m not going to complain, I’m not gonna be like, “Oh, man, creep isn’t for dessert, man.” I’m there to eat whatever they cook me for dinner. I’m happy to, so I hope people have that same kind of mentality when they come to the Black Angels’ show. I really do.

We have very polarised fans where some people hate Indigo Meadow, but for some people, that’s their favourite record. And some people love Passover, and they can’t get past it. And some people are like, “Yeah, but Directions To See A Ghost.” So, very selfishly, I hope people are just willing to accept whatever we want to play for them.

There’s something exciting about sharing stories and sharing how people got through this whole fucking weird last two or three years now and seeing that excitement in people’s eyes. That’s what’s a good payoff for me personally, seeing that someone else can be cathartic and have these cathartic moments that we have. They’re therapeutic and the music is truly healing.

This is an edited interview from show #33 of From The Garage On Louder Than War Radio. Listen to the From The Garage two-hour Black Angels special below, featuring the full interview with Alex Maas, songs from Wilderness Of Mirrors, other projects of the band members a whole lot more…

Wilderness Of Mirrors by The Black Angels is available here.

The Black Angels will be on tour in Europe in the New Year.
Fri, JAN 27: LAV – Lisbon, Portugal
Sat, JAN 28: Hard Club – Porto, Portugal
Mon, JAN 30: Teatro Eslava – Madrid, Spain
Tue, JAN 31: Apolo – Barcelona, Spain
Wed, FEB 1:Le Bikini – Toulouse, France
Thu, FEB 2: Rock School Barbey – Bordeaux, France
Sat, FEB 4: La Belle Electrique – Grenoble, France
Sun, FEB 5: Les Docks – Lausanne, Switzerland
Mon, FEB 6: Dynamo – Zurich, Switzerland
Tue, FEB 7: Arena – Vienna, Austria
Thu, FEB 9: ROXY Prague – Prague, Czech Republic
Fri, FEB 10: NIEBO – Warsaw, Poland
Sun, FEB 12: Huxleys Neue Welt – Berlin, Germany
Mon, FEB 13: Kantine – Cologne, Germany
Tue, FEB 14: Fabrik – Hamburg, Germany
Wed, FEB 15: Vega – Copenhagen, Denmark
Fri, FEB 17: Trix – Antwerp, Belgium
Sat, FEB 18: Doornroosje – Nijmegen, Netherlands
Sun, FEB 19: Paradiso – Amsterdam, Netherlands
Tue, FEB 21: l’Aéronef – Lille, France
Wed, FEB 22: Le Trianon – Paris, France
Thu, FEB 23: Antipode – Rennes, France
Sat, FEB 25: SWX – Bristol, UK
Sun, FEB 26: Invisible Wind Factory, Liverpool, UK
Mon, FEB 27: The Button Factory – Dublin, Ireland
Wed, MAR 1: QMU – Glasgow, UK
Thu, MAR 2: New Century – Manchester, UK
Fri, MAR 3: O2 Shepherds Bush Empire – London, UK

Tickets for all shows are available from the band’s website.

The Black Angels are on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

~

Words by Nathan Whittle. Find his Louder Than War archive here.

Nathan also presents From The Garage on Louder Than War Radio every Tuesday at 8pm. Tune in for an hour of fuzz-crunching garage rock ‘n’ roll and catch up on all shows on the From The Garage Mixcloud playlist.

Source: louderthanwar.com