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PRETTY LIGHTNING

Pretty Lightning

Night Wobble

    ‘Night Wobble’ is the sixth long-player from Saarbrücken, Germany duo Pretty Lightning and their second instrumental record following 2022’s ‘Dust Moves’. Due for release February 21st 2025 on Fuzz Club, it’s a set of downtempo, repetitive grooves that course through dusty spaghetti-western psychedelia, Tuareg-derived desert-blues, library music and '70s progressive. It’s always cinematic but shot through with trippy, off-kilter moments that bring a sense of alien to the widescreen panoramas here – this is an “oozy, woozy cowboy groove”, as they put it. If it was David Lynch who directed ‘Paris, Texas’ then Ry Cooder’s soundtrack might have sounded something like this. “With our previous and first fully instrumental album ‘Dust Moves’ we actually thought we’d only be only taking a little detour from our ‘Fuzz/Rock Duo’ path to explore slightly more experimental ideas”, Sebastian Haas (guitars/keys) and Christian Berghoff (drums/percussion) recall: “But as things came together surprisingly easy and the whole process of making the record just felt very fluid and effortless, we somehow came to appreciate making exclusively instrumental music more and more. It was like a door opening up to a new exciting territory, which we happily embraced. These kinds of tunes just hit a special spot and never bore us at all, quite the contrary, it´s rather inspiring.” Though ‘Dust Moves’ was both a musical and thematic excavation of the desert, its follow-up ‘Night Wobble’ wades through less arid surroundings: “Night Wobble can be perceived as the soundtrack accompanying an imaginary story of a journey into the forest after dark, conjuring all the arcane images and strange magic that can happen in the woods at night. The rhythm serves as a proposal for the pace in which one roams through the night, but it’s the moments of idle that invite you to hang out and have a deeper look around.”

    TRACK LISTING

    1. In Place Of Bees, Glow Worms
    2. Spectre Crackle
    3. Nightroamer
    4. Yonder Holly Oak
    5. Dingle Dangle Ditch
    6. Glade Runner
    7. Shadow Portal
    8. Peek-A-Boo
    9. Mellow Swirl
    10. Owl Hour
    11. (How To) Moonbow
    12. Furrows
    13. Sonic Broom

    Pretty Lightning was formed in 2007 , in essence a raw psychedelic-blues duo that on the surface could be seen as kindred spirits to the likes of Wooden Shjips or Moon Duo, Pretty Lightning also appear to mirror a freak-folk sensibility found in the likes of Sunburned Hand of the Man and their Stateside compatriots. But they also reflect their closer geographic roots - echoing the communal, ritualistic krautrock of Amon Duul II or perhaps the primitivism of Sweden’s International Harvester (both Berghoff and Haas are also part of the Saarlouis-based Datashock collective).

    But if such comparisons serve to place the band in some kind of loose context, they should not undermine such a heartfelt outcome, nor steer the listener away from the band’s melodic leanings - ‘There Are Witches in the Woods’ delivers hooks and harmonies on a grand scale. Recorded in Autumn 2010, the album is the result of the band shutting itself away in a cavernous room to capture the breadth of their sonic vision. Formed around a crux of drums, vocals and a variety of guitars, the arrangements are bolstered by shruti-drones, organ loops and theremins, giving a sense of space and scope to eleven sweet, succinct chapters, and the album as a whole.

    STAFF COMMENTS

    Andy says: Pretty Lightning are Christian Berghoff and Sebastian Haas, two Germans who have crashed into our lives, seemingly from nowhere, sounding precisely like the Black Keys! Not a Black Keys that are headlining the M.E.N. but one that's got lost in the woods and eaten some funny mushrooms! This pair plays heavy, thumping, fuzzed-up blues, but this is rock to the Black Key's pop. The riffs are stoned; slow and grinding, but laced with drone and space-rock elements on the same (astral!) plain as U.S. heads Wooden Shjips or even Sunburned Hand of the Man. Without wanting to get too geographical, a further departure from the blues-duo template is Pretty Lightning's sense of creepy, hazy, freak-folk doominess that, considering their nationality, is tempting to compare with, maybe, Amon Düül II. The use of theremin, shruti drone box and orchestration, combined with those enormous riffs, ferry you away to those dark, early '70s days of fantasy and black magic, rather than a bewildering night at the M.E.N. Arena. It's a trip worth taking.

    TRACK LISTING

    1. Down With The Moon
    2. We'd Rather Be Some Criminals
    3. Blazing Bright
    4. Hail Hail
    5. See No Evil
    6. Old Lord
    7. Brother Gold Miner
    8. The Sound Of Thunder
    9. An Old Wives´ Tale
    10. The Wizard
    11. The Ghostwalk #2


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