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The Black Angels: Tiny Desk Concert

By Stephen Thompson
Published June 8, 2011 at 2:33 PM EDT

The Black Angels' music is hardly the stuff of stripped-down acoustic confessionals: It's the sound of a distant rumble, possibly beamed from a garage in the early '70s. So when we got word that the Austin-based psych-rock band would go acoustic for this Tiny Desk Concert in the NPR Music offices, a mystery was born: namely, "Huh?"

Amazingly, what we got came largely without amplification or electricity, with one notable exception: Singer Alex Maas got his own vocal mic so he could be properly filtered for full, dreamy, otherworldly effect. The resulting four songs, three of which appear on 2010's Phosphene Dream, showcase a bold and surprising mix of sensibilities — at once icy and rustic, cavernous and confined.

Set List

  • "Bad Vibrations"

  • "Haunting At 1300 McKinley"

  • "Entrance Song"

  • "Too Much Hate"

    • Credits

    Filmed and edited by Michael Katzif; audio by Kevin Wait; photo by Adele Hampton

    Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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    Music News from NPR
    Stephen Thompson
    Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)
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