Song(s) of the Day # 2,678 Night Battles

 

MORE Post Punk. As ubiquitous it seems on the Modern Pop Supermarket shelves now  as Campbell's Soup tins were on real sipermarket shelves back in the Sixties. This time Raleigh, North Carolina's Night Battles come to the oche with their latest album Year of No Days. 

It's hardly laugh out loud stuff. Opening track Sunyata comes on immediately like Joy Division, if they'd been brought up on Black Sabbath rather than Iggy & The Stooges. Feet mired in the Lockdown experience, it's immediately evident that Night Battles may not have had the greatest experience all told.

Things proceed in a similarly gloomy manner. This is a good record but certainly not a great one. Not to be mentioned in the same breath as Protomartyr for example, who take a similar road but show much greater nuance and have a far greater element of surprise and genuine attack.

Sonically Year of No Days is pretty impressive. It has a piledriver intensity that barely lets up. Thematically it's less satisfying. Lyrically it's rather heavy handed, ham-fisted sometimes, in the way that Soundgarden often used to be, laying on the gloom on occasion with a trowel. Still, a diverting and involving listen so long as you don't take its sentiments at face too seriously.