GARAGE ON STEROIDS
I've been listening to New York band "The Mystery Lights"' pages on line for quite a while. Their music has largely a garage feel, punctuated with some psych highlights.
I've been lucky enough to see them three times, once at Mercury Lounge (7/30/12), once at Baby's All Right (1/29/14), and just a couple weeks ago at Johnny Brenda's (3/26/15!). Philly was the last stop on their recent national tour. While they do a lot of shows, they very rarely come to Philly. And their many shows in Manhattan and Brooklyn are late for me, seeming to be either the night before I have to work early, and/or too late for the last NJT/SEPTA departure home.
So I was very "psyched" to see that they were going to be playing at Johnny Brenda's on a free night. High energy is one of their trademarks, and while they've been able to carry that high energy over into their recordings better than some other bands, it's even better to see them do a live show on stage.
I like the intensity of their music. There's just the right amount of "rough-around-the-ages" garage sound combined with more sophisticated writing and arrangements to make their sound a unique experience. At the Johnny Brenda's show, they played songs from their new album released last month, "At Home W/The Mystery Lights". They also played tracks from their March 2014 ep, "The Mystery Lights EP". At Johnny Brenda's the band played around with some of the tempos and arrangements as they had at Baby's All Right, so a listener is essentially hearing new work even as they play songs already heard.
One of the songs they played out of last year's album is "What Happens When You Turn the Devil Down", which is more representative of the psych portion of their persona. Listen to the lush arrangements. It's playing right here :::
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6/27/20 UPDATE! ::: OOPS! Looks like the band removed this song from their page!
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I like "What Happens When You Turn the Devil Down" a lot; I wanted to feature it with this writeup, but I also like the song "Before My Own", also appearing on the 2014 album. I listened to both songs a zillion times, but still couldn't decide which one to show here, so I'm including them both. "Before My Own" is more representative of their "garage on steroids" persona, and is playing right here :::
The Mystery Lights has an upcoming show soon; they're going to be headlining at Alphaville on April 21. In the meantime, if you'd like to visit them on Facebook (with links to their music), here is the click ::: The Mystery Lights on Facebook (CLICK HERE).
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UPDATE UPDATE :::: June 22, 2016 :::: The band has evidently deleted all tracks from its Soundcloud page as well as most tracks from Bandcamp. :( ... I don't know what that's about. ... It's especially difficult for somebody when you're not familiar with a band and are considering going out to a show, but the band has only one sample song on their site. That normally for me is a negative ("What's up with them?"), but in this case you'll have to take it from me that these guys are good!
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NEW UPDATE UPDATE ::: December 8, 2016 :::: The band has new music up as well as new versions of some of their original standards. Check out more recent music and comments here!
