A grand chasm divided Sleepy Sun and The Black Angels. A desert, sprawling as far as the eye could see and in that cacophony of voices at El Rey, John F. Kennedy quietly declared that space was the place to be. Were my ears deceiving me? The audience did not respond. There was more silence – then a voice. Martin Luther King Jr. hushed the people, his voice part of the whirlwind building behind the curtain and then The Black Angels descended upon us.

"Then Bloodhounds on My Trail" ripped through the crowd, the bluesy torrent a veritable oasis in that room. Alex Mass crooned, and howled. There were moments where something was forming above his head, like some cursed soothsayer who brings his finger to the sky and touches the collective conscious of the world, there was a table with all forms of voice modulation, of echo and pitch, an incubating velociraptor egg. A girl in front of me had a thick afro, there was a stage light that flickered violently and guitarist Nate Ryan moved in stop-animation, while the light filtered through the girl’s hair, the whole universe on that very precise point, until they got into the good ether. It was a stretch of a few minutes before "Young Men Dead" erupted from the guitar and bass, but we were all witness to that testimony and there’s no denying that our teeth rattled for days on end.

The Black Angels performed at El Rey on 05-15-11