It was a cold Friday morning when Tone Deaf’s Ella Jackson was to interview The Black Angels’ Christian Bland. Still in bed and still hungover from the night before, it wasn’t the optimum time to be performing an interview, but hey, for The Black Angels, who could complain? Arguably one of the best modern psychedelic rock bands in the world, they’re anything but one of your average fad-chasing “psychedelic meets shoegaze meets noise pop” teenage bands, that let’s face it, there seems to be a lot of these days. Alex Maas’ haunting and supernatural vocals teamed with soaring guitars and more drone than a hive full of killer bees make for a beautiful and mystical sound that borrows from both the past and present, as well as some time between now and the future that’s hard to quite put your finger on…

After 40 minutes of waiting on hold, the excitement to interview Christian began to wear thin, the hangover continued tightening its greasy clutches, and Tone Deaf gave up and begrudgingly hung up. All was not lost though; just a couple of minutes later an extremely animated and apologetic Christian Bland appeared on the line, and—excuse the bad pun— he wasn’t very bland at all.

“You were waiting for 40 minutes!?” he laughed, “Oh my god! I stayed on for like 15 minutes just saying “Hello… hello… hello? But I couldn’t hear you, so I gave up!”

We proceeded to go well over our time limit, talking everything from the connection between the popularity of psychedelic music and the world’s deteriorating state, to the band’s annual music festival Austin Psych Fest, to spirituality, to ghost encounters, and so on in that fashion, racking up a very expensive phone bill and more pages of interview transcription than this interviewer has personally ever seen before (unfortunately about 70% of it was chit chat and completely unusable in this story… sorry guys).

As you all probably know, The Black Angels are about to embark on their first Australian tour ever. This has been a VERY long time in the works, Christian tells us, as Australia was actually the first country they released their first album Passover in, and consequently they had always thought this would be one of the first countries that they would tour internationally. Despite all being somewhat disappointed that they couldn’t have made it here earlier, they’re all very excited at the prospect of the coming here at the beginning of July, although unfortunately they won’t be staying longer than six or so days.

Coming along with them will be Joel Gion of The Brian Jonestown Massacre, which still seems slightly surreal to Christian, he reveals. Brian Jonestown Massacre is obviously a big influence of the band, and having a member supporting them (friend though he may be), is still sinking in. It’s not surprising though, as the support they’ve been getting from them, along with other big names in the industry such as Roky Erickson, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and The Dandy Warhols (just to name a few) has been absolutely overwhelming since the bands inception in 2004. They even toured as Roky’s backing band in 2008.

It has now been announced that The Laurels and Beaches will be supporting them along with Joel. But at the time of the interview, Christian was saying he was dead keen to get The Dolly Rocker Movement and The Astral Kaleidoscope backing them. Christian watches the Australian music scene closely, and The Dolly Rockers and Astral Kaleidoscope are big favourites and friends of his, along with Tame Impala and The Morning After Girls.


Spawning from The Morning After Girls is Sydney’s The Black Ryder, who Christian is more than familiar with as well, having just had them play at The Black Angels’ annual music festival Austin Psych Fest. Having gotten on the topic of Austin Psych Fest, there was no better time to ask about whom we may expect to see on next year’s bill. Christian didn’t disappoint, explaining that next year would be their fifth anniversary, and thus they would be getting together a very special line up indeed.

“There are several bands that we’ve been wanting to get since the first year. So we’re hoping to get them next year. We’ve been trying to get Black Rebel Motorcycle Club to play and Brian Jonestown Massacre, um… Clinic…”

Christian went on to elucidate that Clinic were a large modern influence for The Black Angels that their fans may be less familiar with.

“They’re really cool, they’re like… they remind of 13th Floor Elevators kind of thing. The guy’s voice really sounds a lot like Alex’s… like our singer… so yeah, the first time I heard Clinic I was like, “Man! Alex sounds just like you!” Or maybe he sounds like Alex… I don’t know.”

Other modern bands that Christian would tip his fans to check out are Crystal Stilts, Psychic Ills, The Strange Boys, Moon Duo (The Wooden Shjips side project) and The Growlers. All hailing from America, he has been keeping an eye on each one of these bands and thinks they’ve all got something a bit special going for them, and that if you’re a fan of The Black Angels that you’re likely to enjoy these bands too. Crystal Stilts and Moon Duo have even had somewhat of an effect of the shaping of The Black Angels’ sound, which he reveals will show through a bit on the forth album, which they’re busy writing already.

It’s hardly shocking that they’re already in the midst of working on a forth album, as despite the third album only just being released on the 24th of June here in Australia, it was released all the way back in September of last year in the US, and was recorded long before then, in May of 2009.

“It’s crazy to think about,” Bland mused, “It was about two years ago that it was recorded!”

He went on to run over the recording process a bit, stating:

“It was recorded with this guy Dave Sardy. It was the first time we’ve used a producer, and he sort of acted as the sixth band member and he helped us to kind of structure the songs and come up with different parts of the songs… and it turned out to be a cool thing. I was kind of nervous to deal with a producer in the beginning, but I thought all of his ideas were really good, so it turned out nice.”

The Black Angels’ influences aren’t all the bands you might expect though. Christian reveals that he personally is somewhat influenced by old reggae music in the seventies, in particular The Congos and their collaborator Lee “Scratch” Perry, from Jamaica, who is an influential figure in both the reggae and dub genres.

“We don’t necessarily have a reggae type beat, but there’s a song [on our second album] called Science Killer that’s kind of got a dub kind of feel… that slow kind of groove that reggae had back in the seventies is kind of an influence on me, at least.”

Taking influences from all over the world, the members of the band also enjoy listening to some Indian classical music, Ravi Shankar in particular, which is admittedly slightly more common in psychedelic bands. Sitar, Harmonium and Tabla are all instruments that Christian in particular occasionally listens to.

“Yeah that stuff’s great. We have a great friend of ours whose name is Rishi Dhir, that on the second album we have a song called Deer-Ree-Shee, that he plays the sitar on. Whenever we’re in Montreal, Canada, ‘cause that’s where he lives, he comes and plays with us. We flew him out to Psych Fest last year and he did some sitar sets – it was really nice.”

With all of the previous talk of psychedelic bands, the topic shifted quickly to the meaning behind the sudden outbreak of psychedelic fever, which has been slowly moving more and more into the mainstream over the past few years. Bland theorized:

“Well in the sixties when it came out there was kind of a backlash of what was going on in the world… and it seems like right now things are pretty chaotic in the world too … So I think psychedelic rock … it just seems like it’s a bit of a backlash against what is, I guess, normal or acceptable in the world.”

Bland didn’t grow up with such a firm stance ‘against the norm’ though, he tells us. He grew up with a preacher for a father, and attended church every Sunday as a child. He thinks that that shows through in some of The Black Angels’ songs a bit, stating that ghosts, fear of dying and paranoia are all common topics in their songs. Perhaps it’s because of this that The Black Angels as a band seem to attract a lot of otherworldly activity, having had many strange encounters, which Christian went on to tell us a bit later on.

“We went to the [Gettysburg] battlefield on the 45th anniversary to the day of the battle. In this particular battle 50,000 people died in 3 days… so it was a really huge battle. We went walking around in the morning from 2am to 5am on the anniversary and we had quite an adventure out there… we saw some hauntings. Lanterns dangling in the trees, musket fire… it was crazy.

There’s this area called the bloody wheat fields, and that area was like… it was really humid out that night… it was like… oh… I was going to tell you how hot it was, but you have Celsius down there… so Fahrenheit probably wouldn’t translate to you. But anyway, it was a lot colder in the wheat field when we were walking around in the exterior out around it. So, pretty eerie!”

And no, despite what you’re thinking, the band was not on any kind of psychedelic drugs on this night in particular.

Christian went on to tell us another encounter the band had had, continuing:

“Somehow we find ourselves in haunted situations a lot, like, one time we were staying at this hotel somewhere in France, and it was this real kind of old hotel and Stephanie, who’s our drummer, had put her shirts on the bed and then she went to the bathroom, and when she came back, it was like, the… the TV was kind of up in the corner of her room, up like, on a stand, you know, like it was attached to the wall up off the ground. But her shirt was dangling off of the TV… and she didn’t have any roommates!”

Check out what the ghosts are so interested in at one of their Australian shows in July. If we’re to believe what we read, their live performances will not only eclipse their recordings entirely but will leave you in a state of elation that could remain in your system up to weeks after the gig. A little birdy even told us that they might be back soon if all goes well with this show. So smoke some weed, take some acid, do whatever you feel you need to do and get along to a show in the town nearest you… just don’t tell the cops that Tone Deaf told you to if you get caught.

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