Night Beats - Myth Of A Man Myth Of A Man is a reckoning, a shoot-out at dawn, the ear-splitting peel-out that leaves nothing but a cloud of red dust in its wake. It marks a new era for Night Beats and its frontman, Danny Lee Blackwell—an era marked by independence, expansion, and undiscovered facets of an undeniable talent. The outlaw rumble and screeching guitar of “Eyes On Me” offer the familiar garage groove of the Night Beats sound, but the lyrics reveal a pivotal shift. “Will I rise or will I fall / Crash against the canyon wall / Give the people what they came to see / Everybody’s eyes / On me,” Blackwell sings. The song may have been inspired by a failed Evel Knievel jump, but it’s Blackwell himself that seems to be poised at the edge of Snake River Canyon, a lone figure against the dusty ridge and setting sun, staring down both doom and glory. The result is an album that’s less of the bloodshot acid trip of Sonic Bloom (2013) and Who Sold My Generation (2016) and more of the hazy comedown. The moody organ comps and slow stroll of the 12-string on “Her Cold Cold Heart” evoke the noxious feeling and hypnotic state of toxic love, the spirit of Bill Withers is flowing through the acoustic guitar and sun-soaked shuffle of “I Wonder,” and string-trimmed ballads like “Footprints” and “Too Young To Pray” evoke the imaginative, cowboy psychedelia of fellow Texan, Lee Hazlewood. “Let Me Guess” with its searing riff and Elevators-esque organ assures us that the scuzzy sound we know and love is alive and well, while “One Thing,” a song about being used and abused—or as Blackwell sharply puts it, “being rolled up and smoked”—has plenty of fuzzed-out guitars to let us know he might just be happy about it. 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. 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.    

There’s a palpable mood at the heart of Highway Dancer,  the latest LP from Canadian perennial Calvin Love. A mood as mercurial, dream-like, and haunted as a late night on the open road—the kind where you’ve been driving for hours, the sun set long ago, and you can feel each vein in your bloodshot eyes as they scan the headlights coming from the other side of the road. “I’ll sing this song for all the hundreds of highways / And the cities that never sleep,” Love sings at the top of the title track—a love song to the journey, to the quiet hours, and all the places our minds drift to as the miles go by. I see Calvin Love at every intersection on earth, the gentle subtle poet, weaving an array of genres through his own retro-future lens.