Apparently, the people playing under the strange moniker ‘Night Terrors of 1927’ are reluctant to reveal their identity as they have cartoon masks drawn over their heads on their Soundcloud page , and don’t give any sort of info on their Facebook page or website page either. They had a Monday night residency at the Echo this whole month of November so they had to be some special guys, having no identity but nevertheless a residency…. I went to their last show at the Echo on Monday night, and the club was packed for a week night, plus the KROQ car was parked in front of the door, which always sounds like a validation for a future hit-making band. When they took the stage around 11 pm, I thought that one of guys looked awfully like Rilo Kiley’s Blake Sennett, then for some reasons, I thought it wasn’t him… Silly me, it was Blake, proving one more time that there is a musical life after Jenny Lewis! I got my answer once home, after being the Elected frontman for a little while, he associated with Jarrod Gorbel of the Brooklyn band The Honorary Title for this mysterious project, in 2012.
They already have released a debut EP ‘Guilty Pleas’ on November 5th via Neon Gold Records and it was obvious, watching them play live, that they wanted to produce this huge, loud, uplifting sound destined to hit the airwaves sooner or later… At their first song, I totally understood why KROQ Locals Only was around, almost all their songs sounded like these fat rock anthems, too big to just live in the indie scene but built to conquer the arena-rock world. Five on stage, with a synth that got them the qualification of synth pop band, I would say they were aiming towards a big sound à la U2, the Killers or Passion Pit.
How did they get such a moniker first of all? According to what I read, it comes from a 1920s journal, that Gorbel’s great grandfather left to him, and ‘chronicling the nightmares of ghosts visiting him that plagued for eight months’. But I didn’t feel anything close to nightmares during their set, the music was rather ascending and upbeat, with some songs starting with a lot of whoah-oh-ohs that could put any Arcade Fire fans in serious alert, and soaring choruses with several-part harmonies, even male-female parts with the help of the two women playing synth and bass. Just listen to ‘Dust and Bones’ and you will get what I mean, it’s a catchy pop anthem if I have ever heard one, and if currently a large chunk of the radio-friendly music is really about this kind of climatic pop-rock anthems and repeated bombasts, they should be very famous very soon.
Gorbel’s voice was interesting, always confident, almost operatic, deep at times, pronouncing all the syllables with attention, sweeping the place, and reaching the ceiling, hey they were too big for the small room of the Echo! Some songs sounded more dark-side-of-the-80s-inspired, with a bit of slow dance beats and more of these whoah-ohs in the mix (like ‘Fall into You’) whereas the romantic ‘Young and Vicious’ – I am not sure about the romantic part, but just the title suggests a bit of that – could soon be a hit in the making like many of their other songs. Blake Sennett had some impressive guitar solos as if he was getting a bit nuts on some complex riffs, and I must say I didn’t lose any interest at any moment despite the familiarity of their solidly crafted sound. I am not familiar with Gorbel’s previous work, but all this sounded quite different from Sennett’s other projects.
I was in the front the whole time and people seemed to greatly enjoy the show, I didn’t spot anyone famous, but I read on this blog that Spiderman himself, Tobey Maguire, was rocking front row at one of their previous shows at the same place in July!
They played an acoustic, more intimate and super melancholic song, and Gorbel sounded a bit like Beck for a few seconds, but overall, there was some sort of end-of-the-world vibe in their songs, and it was even more real for their last one, ‘Always Take You Back’, and its U2-like-climbing-energy. Their orchestrated electro-pop sound was voluntary big, much bigger than the tracks you can listen to online, and they could have filled a small stadium for sure,… maybe after all it was a bit too packaged-for-success, a little bit too grand-ballads-with-swelling-choruses, but it obviously worked very well on a crowd for an entire month.
