Vietnam: a war fought against ghosts, amidst the phantom voices in the mist rising above the rice paddies, involving ambushes sudden and lethal followed by air strikes that lit up the jungle like a carnival ground gone mad. No rhyme, reason, or rationale, a conflict fought by children who neither knew nor cared about the hows and whys, an endless scrimmage against wizards and demons waged by means of counter-magic and amulets, a string of human ears worn around the neck.
It was a war carried to an invisible enemy in hot LZs and during night patrols, a war of slow attrition that finally broke America’s young men down, and led them to unleash their impotent rage against innocent women and children, leaving mutilated bodies piled and bloated in a ditch in a village called My Lai. It was the first war with its own drugs and soundtrack, and one day it just vanished, poof, like a magic trick where the man sawed in half really gets sawed in half, but somehow manages to make it home, with his bright burden of unspeakable memories, shadowed by his own cast of unshakable ghosts, bathed in the night sweats brought on by secrets never to be divulged.
I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call the Black Angels’ Passover a Vietnam War concept album, but it sure sounds like one to me. Listening to it, I can almost see the phantom shadows of Charlie hiding in the high grass, hear the mortar rounds, see the Huey gunships swooping in low over the rice paddies, 2.75 inch rockets obliterating everything—water buffalo, ancient farmers in pajama pants with wispy beards and primitive hoes—in sight. It’s a dark LP, phantasmagoric and psychedelic and dirge-like, and it evokes the feel of paranoia and dread—the prevailing emotional realities of Vietnam—as well as anything I’ve ever heard. It’s also beautiful, as beautiful as the deadly jungles the grunts patrolled so long ago, and it’s that beauty that keeps me coming back to Passover, like a guy who signs on for a second tour of duty without having the slightest notion why.
I’ll give you three guesses where Black Angel got their name, and yes, it rhymes with The Elvis Funderhound. Formed in 2004 in Austin Texas, the Black Angels released their debut Passover in 2006, and it was one long psychoactive Khe Sanh. The Black Angels—Nate Ryan on bass and guitar, Stephanie Bailey on drums and percussion, Christian Bland on guitar, bass, and vocals, Alex Maas on vocals and bass, and Jennifer Raines on drone machine—delivered the goods. Theirs is a murky, subterranean sound, and listening to it is a breathless experience—like listening to the voices of the Viet Cong echoing through the tunnel system at Cu Chi.
“Young Man Dead” is a psychedelic blues as heavy as a flak jacket, and establishes a monstrous drone for Maas to sing, “Fire for the hills pick up your feet and let’s go/Head for the hills pick up steel on your way/And when you find a piece of them in your sight/Fire at will don’t you waste no time.” The guitar is a cold-blooded killer, and the song churns up mud like a tank before briefly stopping, and it could be William Calley, the man who ordered the My Lai massacre, who sings, “You will take them out for me.” Then the song cranks back into gear, first with just Maas and the guitar and then with the whole gamut, napalm and white phosphorus and bazookas, the sound of fear turned to rage and aggression. “First Vietnamese War” is the linchpin of the LP, a pounding and propulsive drone in which Maas sings, “You gave a gift to me/In my young age/You sent me overseas/And put the fear in me.” He then adds, “And I ask what for now/The Vietnam War.” Then the guitar rips into some heavy distortion before Maas sings about the correspondences between Vietnam and Iraq. It’s a protest against the pointlessness of America’s wars; “Sixty thousand men died,” sings Maas, “While you all hid,” and the shame of it all is that no one, not one prominent American leader, was ever tried for war crimes stemming from either pointless conflict.
“The Sniper at the Gates of Heaven” delivers a pounding of the sort our B-52s used to administer to Hanoi, and features one great guitar firing off riffs against the backdrop of some iron-plated percussion. Maas sings, “What is it like when Hell surrounds you/How hot does it get I think I’ve already felt it.” Meanwhile he interrupts his usual deadpan vocals to cry, “Wake up wake up wake up!” and utter some guttural shouts. And then the guitar comes on like a hallucination of white tigers in the jungle, before the song fades out. “Prodigal Sun” utilizes percussion and guitar to open the song; then Maas sings some nonsense lyrics before reaching a chorus that explodes like a Claymore—it’s all distorted guitar, destroying everything in its path, and I like it. Second verse, same as the first, that guitar playing a hypnotic riff until Maas screams and the guitar proceeds to burn the jungle down, mean and as lethally beautiful as napalm.
“Black Grease” opens with a super-fuzz guitar and comes at you like a bouncing betty, Maas singing, “Kill kill kill kill/You kill what you can.” Meanwhile the song slowly increases in intensity, that guitar all raw power and capable of burning a hamlet, ten hamlets, a thousand hamlets, to justify the insane logic of the unnamed American officer who famously said of Bến Tre, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” “Manipulation” is lighter fare, relatively speaking. The guitar plays a mesmerizing and vaguely Eastern riff while Maas sings and some strange sounds, swoops of guitar and demented wind chimes, come and go. Finally the guitarist moves into full psychedelic mode, and it’s like we’re moving upriver on a patrol boat. And things get stranger and stranger and it’s like Chef says in Apocalypse Now, “Never get out of the boat.” But it’s too late because “she’s got you,” whoever she is, so you might as well sit back and enjoy the view, out there on the endless psychedelic river that is nothing but a fluid drone, hemmed in on both sides by the impenetrable jungle, which is death.
“Empire” is a night patrol through dark forests; it opens with some phantom voices and a cranking noise before succumbing to some very heavy drum pummel, and the general vibe is Nico at her chilliest. Then the guitarist plays some weird hoodoo, and Maas sings, “You sit in dark forests/You’ve been there quite a while/And when they come to take you/You just sit and smile.” Meanwhile the drums come on like an artillery barrage, lighting up the tree line, and that guitar crawls like a king snake through the high grass, before the song quickly speeds up and fades out.
“Well I feel so alone,” sings Maas on “Better Off Alone,” and this one has the feel of a Doors song, or like something off the first Stooges’ LP. Maas kinda sounds like the Lizard King, and he sounds like he knows exactly what Morrison meant when he sang about things being strange when you’re a stranger. I love the subtle shifting textures of the groove, and the way the drums hammer everything down, and the fractured-sounding guitar that ends the song. “Bloodhounds on My Trail” is an up-tempo slide guitar-fueled variant on the blues, and it moves briskly along until Maas cries, “1, 2, 3” and the band erupts, and we ain’t in Mississippi anymore. No, Maas drops the name Vernon Howell (the real name of David Koresh), and suddenly at the Branch Dividian compound near Waco, waiting for the final conflict that would end in the deaths of 4 ATF agents and 86 Branch Davidians. I don’t know why Maas drops Koresh’s name; perhaps he’s saying that Waco was just another lethal an excessive exercise of American power. Hint: It ends with the sound of police sirens.
Album closer “Call to Arms” opens with some acoustic guitar backed by a soaring electric, and picks up speed, and I can’t tell you what it’s about but I can tell you Maas repeats, “You came in on your own and you’ll leave all alone.” The melody sounds familiar but I can’t nail down where I’ve heard it before, but the effect is euphoric as the song morphs again and again, climbing towards a heaven that nobody who has meditated upon My Lai could possibly believe in. “The trigger to the finger,” sings Maas, “The finger to the trigger/One eye took the aim, just behind the man’s brain/But who is to blame?” It finally reaches a soaring climax that sounds to me like the souls of those dead innocent Vietnamese rising to Heaven, before crashing back to earth, back to the burning hooches and the dead children and those wind chimes in the hamlets, slowly, and I mean very slowly, washing away the blood that can’t be washed away, a discordant sound that lingers on and on. And so ends the LP except it doesn’t, because some 5 minutes of silence later the band has buried a hidden track, in the form of an acoustic version of Jimmy Cliff’s great protest song “Vietnam,” only with lyrics updated to damn the useless deaths of young Americans in the war in Iraq. It’s a great song, its perky tempo completely undercut by Maas’s repetition of “Somebody stop that war/Somebody, PLEASE, stop that war.”
If Passover is not the perfect concept album about Vietnam, it’s because the lyrics are too diffuse and lacking in detail. Some of them are probably not about Vietnam at all. But the album’s mood—of dread and rage at the utter uselessness of that long, long debacle—holds true. The Black Angels lead us straight into the heart of darkness, where you didn’t become afraid until the noise stopped, and where the film reels showed naked children being burned alive by napalm running, running, and they dare us to confront a governmental mindset that has not, as Iraq and Afghanistan prove, changed an iota. We use our drone missiles to commit atrocities now. They’re cleaner. There is no William Calley because we’ve all become William Calley, and complicit in yet another war without end.
Passover marks the liberation of the Israelites from 400 years of slavery. God directed the Israelis to mark their doors to save their newborns from execution. In Vietnam and Iraq there were no such marks, and the babies weren’t spared. And in the meantime, our leaders still believe that it is necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
