Under the moniker of Night Beats, Texas native Danny Lee Blackwell has spent the last fifteen years exploring a nexus of vintage rhythm & blues, after-midnight soul, and sun-scorched psychedelia. On Night Beats’ latest offering, Blackwell presents two markedly different renditions of his song 'Behind the Green Door'.

Side A delivers a down-tempo, minor key track drenched in the haze of vice, as if an aspiring Motor City outfit had traveled down to Austin and snuck into the studio while The 13th Floor Elevators were on a smoke break—perhaps a meeting between Ray Charles, Skip Pence, and Link Wray, or Joe Tex grappling with Gram Parsons, or even Duane Eddy pairing up with Cedric Bixler-Zavala. Ultimately, it’s the culmination of years of Blackwell distilling and translating the sounds around him into his own concoction, an invitation to enter the kingdom and dwell in the garden while the shadow of doubt looms nearby, a subconscious journey into the delights and pitfalls of unknown territories.

Side B features the Rah John version of 'Behind the Green Door', an interpretation from an enigmatic artist Blackwell discovered on the island of Koh Khram Yai, off the coast of Pattaya in the Gulf of Thailand. Little is known about Rah John beyond his love for '70s Thai disco and dancehall tapes received from local sailors, but hearing a streak of revelry in Night Beats’ tune, he summoned a sunnier, breezier, and more exotic side to the rhythm and blues sway of the original.

TRACK LISTING

1. Behind The Green Door
2. Behind The Green Door (Rah John Version)

As Night Beats, Texas-born, LA-based artist Danny Lee Blackwell creates music like one might assemble a puzzle. The Western psychedelic auteur builds his work from one moment, an initial spark, that must fit a certain criteria: it must give him goosebumps. If that sensation arrives, Blackwell will pursue the idea relentlessly until he has a new song; if not, he moves onto the next moment, constantly looking for the perfect molecule of a song. On his sixth Night Beats album, 'Rajan', the songwriter is at his strongest, creating works that shine with captivating melodies and hypnotic rhythms, but are underscored by subtle choices of craftsmanship that can only be achieved after countless hours in the studio. Blackwell creates a work that lands somewhere between Spaghetti Western film score and psych-pop opus, a career-defining album that reveals much about Danny Lee Blackwell’s artistic philosophy while keeping that ever crucial air of mystery intact.

TRACK LISTING

1. Hot Ghee
2. Blue
3. Nightmare
4. Motion Picture
5. Anxious Mind
6. Thank You
7. Osaka (feat. Ambrose Kenny Smith)
8. Dusty Jungle
9. Cautionary Tale
10. 9 To 5
11. Morocco Blues

For Night Beats’ Levitation Session, Danny Lee Blackwell and his band ventured out into the Mojave Desert and recorded a discography spanning 13 track set on reel-to-reel tape, featuring classic Night Beats tracks + our first chance to hear some jams off their new LP “Outlaw R&B” in the live setting. Recording with all analog equipment in the blazing Mojave heat was a test of both the band and their vintage gear (they even had to put ice on their guitar pedals to keep them operational), but well worth the trouble because they emerged from the desert with a dusty, warm-hued rock n roll artifact ready to share with the world. More than just a cool location, the desert provided Night Beats an opportunity to tap into something deeper in the Mojave: "For our Levitation Session we recorded on reel-to-reel 1/2 inch tape in the middle of the Mojave Desert in Antelope Valley. Due to my natural tendencies to explore the layers of my ancestry and being forever inspired by the beautiful sounds coming out of the Saharan desert, I wanted to challenge myself to produce a recording that doesn't filter but fully embraces a similar environment. A search for symbiosis between the music and the ground it’s made on. Thanks to a place I love and respect, a welcomed challenge, and some of my closest friends, what you are hearing is Night Beats in one of its truest and rarest forms. Thank you for listening and thank you to those who lived on and cherished this land before us." - Danny Lee Blackwell // Night Beats

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Dusty 12-bar groove and psychedelic fuzz from Night Beats here on their raucous live session from the literal desert here. Imbued with a sort of heated urgency that being BOILING HOT and recording a career-spanning live set brings, it's a dizzying and heavy psychedelic experience.

TRACK LISTING

1. Stuck In The Morning
2. New Day
3. Shadow
4. Right / Wrong
5. Sunday Morning
6. Cream Johnny
7. Ticket
8. Never Look Back
9. No Cops
10. H-Bomb
11. That's All You Got
12. New World

Few artists loom larger in the garage-rock legend than THE SONICS. With raunchy, cult classics such as “SHOT DOWN” and “HE’S WAITIN” off their 1966 album, BOOM, the pioneering band staked their claim on rock ‘n roll, putting the Pacific Northwest scene on the map and cementing their place as heroes for future generations. Those that followed include Danny Lee Blackwell’s NIGHT BEATS, a group with its own underground origins as well as a direct, fuzz and feedback-coated link between the impact of THE SONICS and their own potent sound. It’s this connection that led NIGHT BEATS to record BOOM in its entirety, a proper homage to their musical forbearers. Blackwell, along with an arsenal of ace musicians manage to maintain the spirit of original recordings like “CINDERELLA,” “DON’T YOU JUST KNOW IT,” and a particularly unhinged version of “LOUIE LOUIE,” while injecting their own brand of earth-quakin’ soul-shakin, maximum R&B. Blackwell takes the lead on vocals and guitar, interpreting Gerry Rosalie’s mean scream with ease. Mike Brandon holds things down on drums as his partner in crime, bass genius Nate Ryan, while Julien O’neill grooves things up on keys and Joe Santa Maria wails on the horns. Finishing touches come from Marlon Rabenreither on acoustic guitar, plus Cole Alexander and Dan Gerbang on backing vocals—all working together to keep THE SONICS’ legacy intact, even as they tear the whole place down. Next time you hear a loud boom and your windows rattle, it’s probably a sonic boom alright; but on the other hand, it might just be “THE SONICS BOOM.”

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.

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 the napalm-coated psych-rock headtrip of past albums—Myth Of A Man has him pulling from the surrogate wellspring of Nashville, Tennessee.

It was there that he worked with the eminent Dan Auerbach, and a murderer’s row of battle-worn session musicians—the combined weight of experience that comes from working with every legend from Aretha Franklin to Elvis not lost on Blackwell. “I was just humbled by being accepted,” he explains, “Big hearts all around.”

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. 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. “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. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Her Cold Cold Heart
2. One Thing
3. Stand With Me
4. There She Goes
5. (Am I Just) Wasting My Time
6. Eyes On Me
7. Let Me Guess
8. Footprints
9. I Wonder
10. Too Young To Pray

Night Beats release their new album ‘Who Sold My Generation’ on Heavenly Recordings. Their third album and first for Heavenly, it follows the release of their self-titled debut in 2011 and ‘Sonic Bloom’ in 2013.

Recorded on old two-inch tape in Echo Park, Los Angeles at the home of producer Nic Jodoin and featuring co-production and guest bass playing from Robert Levon Been of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, new album ‘Who Sold My Generation’ goes beyond merely being a retreading of well-worn garage / R&B path. Instead it offers a contemporary take on the psychedelic experience, a heady set of hoodoo voodoo songs.

Very much a record in the great Texan musical tradition of acid-drenched outlaw music, ‘Who Sold My Generation’ picks up where the likes of The Elevators or The Red Krayola left off.