Review: Night Beats Who Sold My Generation

The press release accompanying the third album by psychedelic Seattle quartet Night Beats claims it was recorded “against a backdrop of burning Stars and Stripes flags and with the whiff of napalm hanging in the air”. Thankfully, Who Sold My Generation does not live up to this overwrought billing and instead ushers the listener back to the vintage era of acid-spattered conceptual rock, with Texas psychedelia godfathers The 13th Floor Elevators a clear influence.

A further clue as to where Night Beats are headed is provided by the presence of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s Robert Levon Been in the producer’s booth. Certainly, there’s something distinctly BRMC-esque in the swamp-rock gyrations of opener ‘Celebration 1’, while the sonic drama is ratcheted further on the rumbling ‘No Cops’ and ‘Sunday Mourning’. If not quite the call to arms the band imagines it be, Who Sold My Generation is nonetheless cogent in its anger and, the occasional jam-band longueurs notwithstanding, punchy and plain-talking when it needs to be.

_Ed Power// Out Now.