WHEN THE TOPIC is psychedelic or garage rock, then the dangerous word “retro” is always lurking in the background. People hear it and immediately start to compare it to what came before. “It sounds like 1968!” Are modern musicians really incapable of creating something that’s better than the original?
I should acknowledge that I often like today’s music more, because it was composed, recorded, and performed today, and echoes contemporary issues. I have my favorite groups but one of these is certainly The Mystery Lights, a California band that now resides in New York, but is in its bones and soul a California creation. They’re from Salinas originally, John Steinbeck country, where there are harbors and grassy hills. Something more laidback than your average, anxious worrisome East Coast music.
Their newest LP Purgatory (Daptone Records) was released last fall. The songs are fast, energetic, satisfying, creative. The guitars are wonderful. But the themes? “Ascend to heaven/or descend to hell,” they sing in the song “Purgatory.” The video for the title track shows Satan roaming around Manhattan in a Hawaiian shirt, and the band bedecked in red horns. I have some religious friends, so I’d hesitate to share my new favorite group with them, but at the same time, I feel the themes reflect a lot of what is going on in the modern world as well as in myself. I’m reminded that it doesn’t always pay to be good. Sometimes it feels just heavenly to be the devil. The Mystery Lights still haven’t come to Estonia, but they will be performing at Vega in Copenhagen on 27 May.
An Estonian-language version of this review appears in the magazine Edasi this month.
north! 