Night Beats - Myth Of A Man

Some forked tongues would say these days, riff-oriented, blues/soul psych-influenced bands are a dime-a-dozen. Ok, possibly, but frankly, I’ll have those any day instead of some other flavors of music. Actually, a dozen of these bands for a dime is quite a bargain!

Based on their first three albums, Texas via Seattle trio Night Beats were usually lumped into that group. Energetic, good chops and Roky Erickson/13th Floor Elevators influences did nobody any harm. For Myth Of A Man, their fourth, throw in a few more twists and bust open the niche characterizations.

Not that singer/guitarist Danny Lee Blackwell, the leading force behind Night Beats has given up on Roky and his seminal band, but with the help of Dan Auerbach who recorded the album and a posse of Nashville session cats, they extend the Texas roots line, and wider, and go into a psych/roots/soul/’whatever else you can throw in’ territory. That the band named the album after the Sam Cooke classic is also reflected in a mixtape Blackwell presented online - Link Wray, the fellow Texas legend Lee Hazlewood, Marvin Gaye, Funkadelic...

It is all here on Myth Of A Man. From the country soul-inflected “Her Cold Cold Heart”, to Roky and The Elevators fuzz of “One Thing” to Lee Hazlewood ‘anything goes with a twist of a country’ of the closer “Too Young To Pray”. Auerbach’s touch is all over the place, but not at any point overshadowing Blackwell and the band, and the Nashville guys came to the studio of their standard bag of tricks making complicated things sound so simple.

What we get from Night Beats is a showcase how some well-known musical elements can still sound fresh and new, particularly if you sprinkle them with some dark lyrics from Blackwell that give the music an additional element of depth. Let's see if somebody tries to lump Night Beats into a genre-specific bag after this one.