It is Thanksgiving in Austin, Texas, and Alex Maas is recovering from what has been one of the most surreal episodes of his young life.

“We just got off tour with Roky Erickson,” says The Black Angels’ guitarist and singer, “he was amazing. It’s like playing with John Lennon or something.”

It seems slightly unfair to begin an appreciation of this most powerful of psychedelic bands by aligning them with another artist. But Maas and his band would be the first to acknowledge that if it wasn’t for Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, fellow natives of Austin of course, his band could never have been spawned.

So the day they were offered the chance to play with the counterculture hero, it somewhat put tours with The Warlocks, The Black Keys and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club in the shade.

“His manager called us out of the blue and asked if we wanted to do this,” Maas explains, “and we were like ‘of course, just tell us when to be there’. Then he came into our practice space and we started playing ‘You’re Gonna Miss Me’ and he started doing all these yelps that he does, and we all looked at each other and got the chills. He was all (assumes impossibly high-pitched squeal) ‘yeah yeah’. It was unbelievable, your knees start shaking. It was weird to see how therapeutic the music was for Roky.”

The Black Angels, currently a six-piece, formed in 2004 and have released two albums to date: Passover (2006) and Directions To See A Ghost, released earlier this year. The latter is a chugging behemoth of aggressive drone psychedelia dripping with reverb and thudding grooves, from the school of Spacemen 3 rather than the Strawberry Alarm Clock, the Velvet Underground rather than the Lovin’ Spoonful. On the spectrum of the currently fascinating American psych scene, they can be posited somewhere between the raucous urgency of Wooden Shjips and the laid back melancholy of Brightblack Morning Light. Directions is dense and foreboding, and you wouldn’t want to listen to it at any great length – the heavy rhythms and massive volume is almost reminiscent of certain strands of metal. But you would want to listen. Visceral shit, man.

“It’s such a spiritual thing for us that it’s gotta sound like we’re in a cave,” says Maas. “With this album it was more the sound that we were looking for, more groove-based and less rock and roll-based. We got a lot more bass and low end, but we’re constantly honing our sound and getting closer to the zone of a primal sound.

“We are music based on feeling and not a lot of thought. The only thing we think about is how it makes us feel.” That feeling is something between awe and fear, trust me.

The Black Angels take their name from two sources. Obviously, one is the Velvet Underground’s ‘The Black Angel’s Death Song’ from Velvet Underground and Nico, but the other is a little more interesting. In the sleeve to Passover they have a quote of Edvard Munch’s (as well as a credit to Zane Lowe for some reason… we’ll let them off I suppose). It is: “Illness, insanity and death are the black angels that kept watch over my cradle and accompanied me all my life.”

Illness, insanity and death make up The Black Angels’ strange euphoria. “Americans are so afraid of death,” says Maas, “growing up in the Bible Belt you’re taught the world is always hanging from a string, and then you get out into the real world and figure things out for yourself you realise none of that’s true.

“I think those things are good to have in the world to appreciate everything else.”

Speaking of illness and insanity, underneath all the distortion and effects, The Black Angels’ lyrics are more socially-minded than most bands of this kind, who might tend to concentrate on surrealism or ignore lyrics altogether.

The war(s), domestic politics and the uneasy fact the departing president hails from their home state all make for an interesting read on their lyrics sheets, even if they are hard to make out underneath the messy layers of guitar, organ and percussion.

But their central message is conveyed sonically. When I interviewed Erik ‘Ripley’ Johnson of the Wooden Shjips he took every opportunity to express his enthusiasm for avant garde minimalism. Despite his band not being quite as insistent that chord changes are optional as the San Franciscans, Maas is similarly enthralled.

“Whenever I heard Outside the Dream Syndicate with Tony Conrad or John Cale, it felt like a heartbeat,” he says.

“That primitive kind of sound is all based around the heartbeat. Minimalism is huge with us. If a song sounds too busy we start chopping away at the chords. You hear a lot of music and think ‘that’s cool’ but lets take away the nicest chords out of that so there’s just two and then go back and forth between those. I grew up listening to a lot of trance music and minimalistic things like LaMonte Young. And then you have a song like ‘Venus In Furs’. John Cale brought darkness to rock and roll.”

Maas has known fellow Angel Christian Bland since they were 12-years-old, when the two would go on mission trips as part of the church at which Bland’s father was pastor. They would orchestrate songs together among the children roped in with them… “It’s how we got through the day. I never thought I’d be doing this right now – I went to business school.”

That particular career choice stemmed from his parents’ successful running of a plant nursery. However, it was in that very place that the seeds of Maas’s musical curiosity were planted (forgive that fantastic pun), due to the fact his parents were so eclectic in their choice of music to accompany shoppers round the nursery.

“They would have tribal, ethnic music from North Africa or some weird sounds from New Guinea, Cantonese witchcraft music. Weird stuff would be playing in that nursery.”
Then came his love of psychedelia.

“I always liked the covers,” he says, “I think that’s what drew me to the music in the beginning. When I go to record stores I know something’s gonna be cool because of the way it looks on the outside.

“Then I heard Nico’s voice. It was like ‘is that a guy or a girl?’ But it doesn’t matter, it just spoke to me.”
Maas once, to his teacher’s disgust, performed ‘Take A Walk on the Wild Side’ at a talent contest, and indeed the Velvet Underground represent The Black Angels’ foremost influence.

“Patient, calm and simple,” says Maas of Velvet Underground and Nico, although those ingredients don’t necessarily apply to The Black Angels, “it’s like a minimal, dungeon sort of sound,” which certainly does.