MIEN
MIEN

THE REVIEW

On the eve of the 2018 edition of the Levitation/Psych Fest in Austin, Texas, it is worth talking about this album that marks the debut of MIEN, the new project by Alex Maas of the Black Angels, who are practically the "inventors" of the most important festival of the psychedelic rock revival and are now surely considered one of the most followed rock bands on the international scene. Alex is certainly no stranger to collaboration and, in this specific case, he leads what you might call a supergroup, completed by Rishi Dhir (The High Dials/Elephant Stone), Tom Furse of The Horrors, and John-Mark Lapham of The Earlies.

Announced months ago with great fanfare and a good marketing operation by Rocket Recordings and consequently welcomed with great enthusiasm, I must say that after listening to the self-titled album, even though it doesn't exhilarate, it overcame my initial skepticism, which was more dictated by a less experimental approach than the latest Black Angels’ records and my indifference to The Horrors and The Earlies. While Rishi Dhir is a good musician, as a composer (let's put it this way) he has never really realized himself. Yet it is precisely the contribution of Rishi, Tom Furse, and John-Mark Lapham that gives this record a sense that goes beyond the mere cult of the Black Angels (whom everyone likes in the end). "MIEN" is an album with several interesting cues, and in which Alex mostly takes on an almost managerial role.

The compositions of the album are all built on synthetic structures and samples created by Lapham and Furse and on the contribution of keyboards and Rishi's indispensable synth (whose input is crucial especially in the hypnotic pop-psychedelia of "Earth Moon" and in the obsessive glitch track Daniel Lopatin "Echolalia..."). Nearly entirely missing is the contribution of real drums on an album that, after all, was conceived as a mixture between the Black Angels' sound, Beatles psychedelia, and Conny Plank. A definition that can hold considering we can find drone elements ("You Dreamt"), trance sessions ("Ropes"), or the deep ambient of ("Other") and clearly some more or less successful kraut-rock attempts (like "Odessey"), while at other times the typical Black Angels' darkness prevails, assuming an pompous character ("(I'm Tired Of) Western Shouting"), almost sacred ("Hocus Pocus") up to the most complete banality of "Black Habit". The final verdict - speaking of psychedelia - is "half and half": not bad, but in a few months it will already be forgotten.