My Dad didn’t wrangle steers but he did pick cotton when he was young. “I grew up with Texan mythology all around us, so as a band its instilled in our blood. “Old cowboy culture is alive and well in Texas,” says frontman Danny Lee Blackwell. These boys represent the best of the Lone Star State’s flipside – that vast dusty hinterland of the soul where it’s easy to drift off the map and reinvent yourself as part of the long lineage of creative cowboys who prefer psychotropics to rodeo riding, guitars rather than firearms. On their third album – and first for Heavenly Recordings - Night Beats perhaps most recall their Texan forefathers and psyche-rock originators 13th Floor Elevators at their ‘69 peak, just before The Man busted young Roky Erickson and dragged him to the psyche ward for barbaric doses of shock treatment. Besides, bad vibrations, blues jams and id-shattering explorations are timeless pursuits – why shouldn’t today’s young generation be allowed to take a ride down the slippery spiral that sits within the centre of each of us? Instead of Nixon and Vietnam, Night Beats have their own epoch of God and guns and bombs and drones to rail against…or flee from. Acid-test heaviness is Night Beats’ currency, but this is no out-right nostalgia trip either. Make no mistake: their new album Who Sold My Generation sounds like it has been created against a backdrop of burning Stars and Stripes flags and with the whiff of napalm hanging in the air - an alternative universe where ‘Helter Skelter’ is the national anthem and Charlie Manson is still on the loose. This is music to melt your sorry little minds. Theirs is a bastard blues, contorted and distorted into new shapes for 21st century wastoids - once tasted never forgotten. Night Beats play pure psychedelic R&B music that spikes the punch and drowns your third eye in sonic waves of colour.
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