The Black Angels/Allah-Las/Elephant Stone

With The Black Angels’ era of insouciant Velvet Underground worship sadly over, newly released Indigo Meadow finds the psych rockers excavating 60’s garage rock bombast, with crunchy guitars, freewheeling Farfisa squalls, and weirdly polemical lyrics (“Don’t Play With Guns,” kids!). While the lysergically-inclined drone schtick can wear a little thin after an album’s worth of woozy riffs, jangling tambourines, mincing Lewis Carroll lyrics, and faux-British Invasion intonations, their mammoth live shows actually evoke the reverb-soaked trip they’re trying to approximate with their unintentionally campy album. And more poppy, sinewy tracks like “You’re Mine,” despite their cringe-worthy lyrics (“The way you taste at night forever paints my mind/My favorite wine/I’ll drink you all the time”), prove that the band hasn’t quite disappeared down the rabbit hole just yet. (Hannah Franklin)