“Knees Deep” was written last minute, but yields one of the best guitar lines on Expert. “When You Know You Know” skews a bit groovier, pure pop and a natural addition to the band’s live set. The rest is a capsule of The Beths’ most electrifying and exciting output, a sonic spectrum: “Your Side” is a forlorn and sincere love song, emotive while “Silence is Golden,” with its propulsive drum line and stop-start staccato of a guitar line winding up and down, is one of the band’s sharpest and most driving. “Love is learned over time ‘til you’re an expert in a dying field.” The album’s title track “Expert In A Dying Field” introduces the thesis for the record: “How does it feel to be an expert in a dying field? How do you know it’s over when you can’t let go?” Stokes asks. There, Expert finally became the record they were hearing in their heads.Įxpert is an extension of the same skuzzy palette the band has built across their catalog, pop hooks embedded in incisive indie rock. That latter half felt more collaborative, with everyone on-hand to trade notes in real time, until it all culminated in a chaotic three-day studio mad-dash in Los Angeles. The following February, The Beths left the country for the first time in more than two years to tour across the US, and simultaneously finish mixing the album on the road. They traded notes remotely for months, songwriting from afar and fleshing out the arrangements alone, the first time they’d written together in such a way. Most of Expert was recorded at guitarist Jonathan Pearce’s studio on Karangahape Road in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa (Auckland, New Zealand) - and sometimes in the building's cavernous stairwell at 1am - toward the end of 2021, until they were interrupted by a four-month national lockdown.
They wanted it to be fun - to hear, to play - in spite of the prickling anxiety throughout the lyrics, the fear of change and struggle to cope. With Expert, The Beths wanted to make an album meant to be experienced live, for both the listeners and themselves. The third LP from the New Zealand quartet houses 12 jewels of tight, guitar-heavy songs that worm their way into your head, an incandescent collision of power-pop and skuzz.
If we can all think about them, maybe we can help save ourselves.” “You can’t work out your struggles unless you bring them to the forefront and think about them. Mellotron, strings, and other keyboards also play a more prominent role on Wilderness of Mirrors than ever before.Įven 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. 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. Wilderness of Mirrors expertly refines the Black Angels’ psychedelic rock attack alongside a host of intriguing sounds and textures. In the five 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. 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 new album, Wilderness of Mirrors, feels so aptly named. The best music reflects a wide-screen view of the world back at us, helping distill the universal into something far more personal.
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