Record Review // Night Slaves "THREE AND A HALF" (Swimming Faith Records)

$20 //

Edition of 300 //

https://nightslaves.bandcamp.com/album/three-and-a-half //

Right away you can tell that this is the type of sound which is best captured on record.  You can stream this one if you want to but on record is the best way to listen to this and you might even go old school and put it from record to cassette if you still happen to have a tape deck in your car.   My car is all digital- not even a CD player- which at first I didn’t like but now it’s grown on me because I can listen to this one at home on my stereo with the record and in my car digitally through the Bandcamp app.

Night Slaves take us on a journey of fuzzy psych rock.   The first song starts off with the hook "Hey you / It's me / I'm back on the scene again" and the second brings us "Disorder will set us free", which is actually not too far from the truth.  There is also an underlying theme to these songs about truth, as it is mentioned a bit but the songs can also be about sin and things which just are branches on that overall truth tree.

This reminds me a bit of The Gadjits when they went gospel-ish and yet “RUN” also reminds me a bit of BRMC as it has that bikers type of way about it, like something out of “Sons of Anarchy”.   “MIDNIGHT” is slow and dreamy though, while “ENOUGH” gives us the lines “You don’t pray enough / You don’t pay enough”, going back to the theme of truth and also just bringing out those ideas of how I feel like most religions are money based.

The more I listen to this record though the more I realize it has those rock n roll qualities about it.   It’s note quite like The Doors in the way that it makes me want to go on a spiritual quest through the desert, but I do suppose if The Doors ever played a show to a crowd full of motorcycle gangs inside of a church while on acid, this could be the result of that.  This big piano piece comes up near the end and it makes me think of Queen too, just showcasing how well Night Slaves can walk the rock n roll line while not fully sounding like any other band.