Addendum

As promised, I return! My girlfriend and I missed the start of the Black Angels' set, which started at the unreasonably early time of 9pm, so what follows is not a complete account. The show was also ear-shatteringly loud, so loud that we could hear the band playing as we walked down Granville street. We entered to the strains of a patented Black Angels' death song, which worked itself into a steamy lather as we visited the merch table and then found a suitable vantage point. The Commodore is a wonderful old room if you get there early enough to secure one, and a creaky death trap if you are forced to settle for a partial view from behind the ancient wooden pillars that hold the place up. Someday it's going to burn down and kill everyone inside, a la Great White. Ah, but I digress. The show.

The Angels quickly launched into a vicious rendition of Passover favourite "Hellhounds on my Trail," complete with slide guitar and culminating in an explosive noise freakout. The band was bathed in psychedelic light throughout the show, fluorescent greens and oranges often giving way to spirals of blue and deep red. Previously, the Black Angels have been known to project Vietnam-era stock footage on the stage during performances, but none was to be seen on this night. The warped 'summer of '68'-style jangle-pop of "Yellow Elevator #2" and the tribal pounding and arching feedback of "The Sniper At The Gates of Heaven" provided other early highlights to the set. The sound was punishingly loud, but the instruments were all clear and the band was powerful. Throughout the ensemble's playing was tight and varied, with members switching up instruments and songs frequently being stretched out to treat the audience to a particularly tasty groove or mind-expanding improvisational section. Depending on your opinion of jamming, this kind of thing can be anathema, but none of these digressions ever lasted too long, they were simply embellishments which re-interpreted old and new material in a free-form live context. The songs were all still very much recognizable as such, but it was not a rote recital of the recorded versions. Christian's voice was clear and powerful throughout, and his energetic hollers and whoops in mid-song lent a spontaneity and energy to the performances. Stage banter was almost non-existent, not really a bad thing for a band of the Angel's talents.

The set list was well-chosen and varied, hitting the necessary high points of all three of their albums without focusing too much on any of them. The band's second and weakest album, Directions To See a Ghost was represented by only a handful of its very best songs. Among these were "Mission District" which boasts a tasty buildup and a riff as crushing as anything in the catalog, and "Science Killer," a classic death march which rides a snaky groove through the murk and is spiced up with some maracas. At a psychedelic rock show, where the line between transcendent and monotonous can easily become blurred depending on your own preferences or even quantity of drugs taken, it is important to craft a set which maximizes the dynamics of the performance. This is especially crucial for a band like the Angels, whose mandate dictates that they play droning Velvet Underground-inspired trance rock which strips the listener's senses and scrubs the mind of all earthly perception through sheer volume and repetition. Although there was a bit of a lull mid-set, the band did pull off the difficult feat of balancing these conflicting ideals.

The band continued to go from strength to strength over the course of an almost 90 minute set, as excellent cuts from 2010's Phosphene Dream album such as "Entrance Song," "The Sniper" and the title track were given powerful and exciting live renditions. The album is easily the band's most dynamic and song-oriented to date, and the material was equally vibrant and hard-hitting from on stage. These poppier numbers were alternated with vintage Angels mind-melters like the propulsive anti-war anthem "The Second Vietnam War" and the corrosive fuzz-bass stomper "Black Grease."

The set was brought to a powerful conclusion by a hammering one-two punch. First, the garage pop of "Telephone" was stretched far longer than the album's 1 minute and 59 second runtime and turned the band's poppiest and most memorable song to date into a methanphetamine-laced White Light, White Heat jam far more in line with the band's murky aesthetic. That is a compliment. Finally, the band closed its set with their best ever song, the incredible "Young Man Dead." The first half of the song was a little bit more up-tempo than the recorded version, which did not particularly suit the song at all. Fortunately, it was a bait-and switch, because the song's tripped out false collapse halfway through soon exploded into an absolutely massive half-time riff which brought down the house. All in all a very good performance from a great rock band, and one that will hopefully win them some new fans from among the sea of hipsters and beardos which populate Vancouver's concert halls.

Black Mountain took the stage to a triumphant reception some time later, but since I didn't stay for the whole show I won't review it here. Suffice it to say, the Mountain is a titanic force live, but on this particular night they were merely ground-shaking instead of earth-shattering. A glut of mediocre material from the disappointing new album is to blame. Amber Webber's warbly vibratto-obsessed vocals, which have previously detracted from what have been some of the greatest rock shows I've ever been to, were slightly less irritating than they have been in the past.

Also, for what it's worth, I picked up my own copy of Passover on vinyl from the merch table. Now I own all three on wax, and I can tell you that the Black Angels and Light in The Attic records do a fantastic job with the packaging of their products, putting everything on extremely high-quality 180 gram vinyl and providing lyrics and artwork in all their albums. I feel this extra effort is worth mentioning, and I wish more record companies shared this commitment to superior quality.