Description
Label Review.
2019 album also available in Vinyl.
Our Overview.
Fronted by Texan native Danny Lee Backwell, ‘Myth Of A Man’ is Night Beats’ fourth studio album and their second for Heavenly Recordings, following the release of ‘Who Sold My Generation’ in 2016. Night Beats play pure psychedelic R&B music that spikes the punch and drowns your third eye in sonic waves of colour. Theirs is a bastard blues, contorted and distorted into new shapes for 21st century wastoids — once tasted never forgotten. This is music to melt your sorry little minds.
While Blackwell has always fed off the musical legacy of his Texas roots - Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, The Red Krayola, The Black Angels and more paving the way for the napalm-coated psych-rock headtrip of past albums - ‘Myth Of A Man’ has him pulling from the surrogate wellspring of Nashville, Tennessee.
In short, it’s an album that holds its own next to the classics, less of the bloodshot acid trip of ‘Sonic Bloom’ (2013) and ‘Who Sold My Generation’ (2016 here, Blackwell has recalibrated them, slowed them down just enough and allowed them the space to breathe and exist as something new. It’s the same book, just a different chapter.
Written during a particularly destructive period of the band, the album is populated by fallen angels, blood-sucking wanderers and vindictive lovers - sketches of people the band has surely come across during their cosmic roving through the underground - but the character most present is Blackwell himself. “‘Myth Of A Man’ can be summed up as a personal display of vulnerability and guilty conscience,” he explains, “Destroying the mythos of what it means to live and function in society.”
With its bold steps forward, ‘Myth Of A Man’ serves as both a takedown and reintroduction of the band as we know it - the strongest evidence that you’ll never be able to pin Night Beats down.