The Blue Angel Lounge - A Sea of Trees (8MM Musik/A)

The Blue Angel Lounge continues to move further away from its psychedelic roots on A Sea of Trees. Indeed, the Berlin band’s third LP slinks happily into a cloud of gothic melancholia, with one foot in the Bauhaus era and the other in the kind of heartrending darkwave proffered by Projekt Records in the 90s. That’s a hybrid that threatens to be unbearably cheesy at times, but the Lounge mostly stays out of trouble. In part this is because frontperson Nils Ottensmeyer owns a weeping baritone that sounds test tube-grown to sing gothic rock – cf. the heart-on-sleeve ballad “As Cold as the Moon.” But it’s also simply because the band knows how to write songs with the perfect balance of moody atmosphere and memorable melody – “Winter,” “In Distance” and the sweeping, intriguingly titled “Melloch Halb & Halb” provide warmly chilling thrills. Folks expecting a trippy good time as indicated by the band’s continued presence on Brian Jonestown Massacre leader Anton Newcombe‘s label A might be put off by the smoky gloom found on this disk. But fans of old school gothic postpunk a la the Chameleons might find some delights within A Sea of Trees.

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