Imagine a retro-vintage sound, the 60s more precisely, revisited with a huge amount of distortion bathing into a bluesy psychedelia, and you may have the sound of Night Beats, although I am not sure it can honestly be described, like any music anyway. Iman raved about them on the East Coast when they opened for the Black Lips, now it is my turn.
When the Seattle-based trio played at the Echo on Friday night, Lee Blackwell, on lead guitar and vocals, did not seem to use a lot of pedals but he was getting this interesting, powerful-shrill scream from his guitar, an ear-splitting-kind-of-sound, extracting your earplugs at the first riff, then sprawling into more grinding and crushing hallucinatory soundscapes, and even more distortion,.. yeah there was a never-ending distortion from which many hooks and aaa-aaa-aaahs-catchy choruses were emerging. Beside the strident-as-a-drill noise coming from the amp, their sound was murky and fuzzy, bleeding all over the place, experimental and at the same time nostalgic of the golden decade of music. It’s not for nothing that the band was named after Sam Cooke’s album, regarded as one of the best R&B albums of the period, because did I mention that, behind all this noise, they were kind of bluesy at time?
One thing is sure, they weren’t taking themselves seriously for a minute, with his thunder-struck look, Blackwell played a guitar with ‘Dial 666’ (one of their songs) taped on it, James Traeger on drums seemed the more focused of the three, whereas Tarek Wegner, on bass, was swallowing the mic and jumping in the crowd; they were aggressive in a playful way, ending the show by making a messy scene, with a friend on sax joining them on stage, spilling the rum offered by Sailor Jerry, the sponsor of the free night.
The band has released a self-titled debut LP last June via Trouble In Mind, and they have already shared the stage with The Raveonettes, The Black Angels (band), Warlocks, The Strange Boys, Black Lips, The Growlers, Warpaint, Silver Apples, Sleepy Sun and others.
With a razor sharp guitar, they managed to create an amalgam of blues-psychedelic-garage-rock, chaotic but damn calculated, otherwise there is no way they would had found their way trough this maze of distortion and curious chord progressions.