
The Black Angels
The Chapel
∙
San Francisco
Saturday, September 6 at 9 pm PDT
Rock
Concert Venue
Saturday, September 6 at 9 pm PDT
Rock
Concert Venue
Entry Options
Details
Artists
Description
To request ADA seating: Please send us an email at boxoffice@thechapelsf.com or call our box office at (415) 551-5157 and we can assist you. Our ADA area can reach capacity early, so we highly recommend contacting us as soon as possible. Day of show requests may not be able to be accommodated.
Dine with us at Curio and receive Expedited Entry into The Chapel! When you kick off your evening with dinner and drinks at Curio, we will check your tickets at your table and you will avoid the line outside. Be sure you tell us you're coming to the show when you make your reservation and upon arrival to the restaurant. Reserve HERE.
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The best music reflects a wide-screen view of the world back at us, helping distill the universal into something far more personal. Since forming in Austin in 2004, The Black Angels have become standard-bearers for modern psych-rock that does exactly that, which is one of many reasons why the group’s most recent album, Wilderness of Mirrors, feels so aptly named. In the years since the band’s prior album, Death Song, and the two-plus years spent working on Wilderness of Mirrors, pandemics, political tumult and the ongoing devastation of the environment have provided ample fodder for the Black Angels’ signature sonic approach.
Wilderness of Mirrors expertly refines the Black Angels’ psychedelic rock attack alongside a host of intriguing sounds and textures. There are classic blasts of fuzzed-out guitars meant to simultaneously perk up the ears and jumpstart the mind, alongside melancholy, acoustic guitar-driven newfound experiments. Mellotron, strings, and other keyboards also play a more prominent role on Wilderness of Mirrors than ever before.
Even amidst these new experimentations, The Black Angels remain masterfully true to psych-rock forebears such as Syd Barrett, Roky Erickson, Arthur Lee and the members of the Velvet Underground, all of whom are namechecked on album highlight “The River.” “The Velvet Underground song ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ – that’s what every Black Angels album has been about,” says vocalist/bassist Alex Maas. “You can’t work out your struggles unless you bring them to the forefront and think about them. If we can all think about them, maybe we can help save ourselves.”
Since their 2004 self-titled debut, Pink Mountaintops have supplied an outlet for the more arcane fascinations of Black Mountain frontman Stephen McBean. On Peacock Pools—Pink Mountaintops’ first new music in eight years—the British Columbia-born singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist shares 12 songs sparked from his magpie-like curiosity for a wild expanse of cultural artifacts: the sci-fi body horror of David Cronenberg, Disney Read-Along Records from the 1970s, early Pink Floyd and mid-career Gary Numan, John Carpenter movies, Ornette Coleman live videos, a 1991 essay on the cult of bodybuilding by postmodern feminist Camille Paglia. Featuring counterculture icons like Steven McDonald of Redd Kross and Dale Crover of Melvins, Peacock Pools alchemizes those obsessions into a body of work with its own enchanting power, the sonic equivalent of falling down a thousand rabbit holes at once and landing somewhere gloriously strange.
If Black Mountain represents the darker side of singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Stephen McBean's musical thinking, Pink Mountaintops is a vehicle for his brighter and more engaging ideas. While both bands share McBean's fondness for trippy, psych infused sounds, Pink Mountaintops avoid the doom inspired tone of Black Mountain to make room for a wider range of musical influences, matched to lyrics that playfully deal with his various obsessions, from favorite musicians to the edges of teen culture. McBean and his collaborators merged lo-fi production and arrangements with dashes of lysergic Americana on their 2004 self-titled debut and 2006's Axis of Evol. 2014's Get Back filtered McBean's melodic ideas through muscular rock guitars, and 2022's Peacock Pools made room for folk, pop, vintage electronics, and classic rock overtones.