The Nightblinders

Your Reviews

What do you think?

The following is a place for you to tell us what you think about the music we play. Review a live show! Review a record of ours! Send it to us and we will post it! You don’t need to be a writer to submit! Although the idea came to me when our friend Ryan who is a poet,teacher, and a writer sent us a wonderful review! You don’t have to be for us to post it!

REVIEWS

Miketon & The Nightblinders - “The Guiding Light”

Review by Ryan McLellan

When I got the chance to preview this record, after months of brutally teasing social media

posts and much personal anticipation, it was like getting told the secret knock for a private

clubhouse, or like a buddy had just given me a smack in the face to help me sober up before

I had to drive home. I hit play like I was about to open the door to a barroom full of pals

who’d already had a few rounds and were bound to spot me and start hollering as soon as

they saw me. This record is full of feelings like that: a (maybe drunken) search in the dark

for a doorknob or a missing set of car keys, here, a photo album with a few torn out pages,

there, and small rooms full of the people who are really fuckin’ excited you came to hang

out for a while.

“Flaming Rocks” (3:39), the opening track, begins with a few quick chords from Miketon on

his acoustic, a fitting beginning, but a new tone is set once the rest of The Nightblinders

kick into gear. Maybe it’s the first note on Mark’s electric (no more banjo, folks!), the power

behind Lee’s drum kit, or Mike’s switch to electric bass (bye bye, upright!) giving the

rhythm section something extra...Whatever grabs you, there’s a distinct rush of energy and,

by the 2-minute mark, it’s obvious that we’re in for a different kind of ride this time around.

“Assisted Living” (3:17) begins with a painful verse about loss and some haunting notes

from Cam’s fiddle, a powerful presence throughout the record, but as soon as the band

kicks into gear one can’t help but picture a bunch of couples leading one another, most by

the hand and maybe a few by beltbuckles, toward the dancefloor, hips swaying and shoes

moving. The lyrics are an honest journey through loss and memory and there is a powerful

blend of grief and joy that helps the listener along on this rollercoaster of mourning.

“Bit Player” (4:08) begins with Mike’s electric guitar and a well-placed opening fiddle solo,

and is a lyrical meditation on personas and the masks we wear. Lee’s drums are the engine

driving a train that moves the narrative along and Mike’s bass is a steady chugging

presence as we take a look behind the curtain. Though the speaker of the song “finally

[sees] through 4th wall” to a “person wearing a mask that’s poorly crafted”, we can’t help

but see some of the characters we’ve played along the way, or the roles we’ve tried to

convince others to play for us.

“Carnosaur” (4:40) opens with a little high-hat

and picking on the acoustic, sounding like we just happened to walk into the room at the

right time and catch them at an unexpected gig. It’s a song about looking back, reflecting on

who we were, and wishing we could cut out certain pages from the memoir. Mark’s solo

adds another level and almost feels like a sound from a different decade, maybe the one in

which we wrote that letter to ourselves, hoping we’d find it when we needed it most.

“Better Man” (6:56) is longer and slower than many of the other songs on the record but

the storytelling lyrics make time pass quickly and leaves you wishing the tale wasn’t over at

the end. We’ve all had moments when we knew things had changed and wouldn’t be the

same again, and this song is about those moments; when we say - as Miketon does - “wake

me up, this aint real”, but we know it is. The lyrics muse on what it feels like “when hope

turns to dirt and slips through” but reminds us - right around the middle of the song, right

when things look grim - that there’s always a reason to hope.

“Knocked Down” (3:35) begins with Lee on the drums and it had me feeling like I was about

to throw open the drapes and walk to a wrestling ring. It’s a song about love, making a

home that’s your own (even if it’s got some cracks in the foundation or drafty windows),

and not getting bogged down in normalcy. The lyric, “while everyone's waiting for lady luck

to call / you’re dancing toward the edge you don’t care if you fall / they hide behind the

their fence / and you, you’re just knocking it down” made me want to disrupt a fancy

dinner party and the distortion is turned up a bit on this track, which fits the speed and

rock & roll tone of the tune.

“Foolhardy” (3:13) starts with a riff that immediately made me think of The Bouncing

Souls, so I was ready to sing along by the time the rhythm section kicked in. Cam’s fiddle

drives the hook of the chorus and then settles nicely into the background throughout the

verses. Fear, it seems, brought out some of the lyrics but the word is nearly redefined by

the end of the song. In a world that demands good behavior, sometimes we have to be

reckless and brash, sometimes we need to look in the mirror for the support system we

need, and sometimes we need to find the strength to do it ourselves.

“Dance of the Night” (2:31) invites you back onto the floor with a quick pause and a twirl, a

smirk and a nod. It’s the first track on the record that I clearly heard and noticed one of my

favorite aspects of this band: Miketon and Mark’s harmonies, and it’s a pleasant addition to

the hook and chorus. It’s a springtime song full of yearning with a touch of apocalyptic

imagery; makes you wonder if that’s why we couldn’t go outside. It’s a beck and call to

enjoy what could be our last chance and I couldn’t help but picture the band beneath some

decrepit revival tent, hopping around on a dusty clapboard stage, welcoming in all the lost

souls. I hope with all my heart that I find that tent when it all goes to hell.

“Safety Drills” (3:30) immediately drops us into our childhoods and what begins with light-

hearted and innocent memories quickly becomes a frightening reality full of adult fears and

warnings. It’s a reminder that, though the grown-ups might have scared the shit out of us

kids by saying how hard the real world can be, they weren’t lying. The electric guitar fills

out the opening riffs with a familiar tone and, for me, this was the track where it became

completely clear that Mark’s decision to drop the banjo adds a versatile element to this

band that was lacking before.

“Nights Right” (2:52) is a “maybe-just-a-little-bit” drunk love song full of all the best and

worst parts of a night of imbibing. Uninhibited lust and adulation, flattery and flirtation,

followed by a morning with some regrets, some sickness, and missing clips from the film of

the night before. There’s a breakdown around the one-minute thirty-second mark that’s

pop-punky and fun, and lyrically we’re told that sometimes the only thing you should strive

for is being alive. No matter how many times we might say we’re “never doing this again”,

sometimes a slurred-word conversation with someone we love, even if we regret it the next

morning, helps us through.

“The Guiding Light” (4:08), the title and final track on the record, begins exactly how I

hoped it would: the whole band, all at once, blasting into this song full of love and pain, a

group of pals coming together to ward off the dark thoughts that wake us up in the middle

of the night. There are some missing memories (“too young to remember the first time /

you hauled me onto your shoulders”) and some excruciating truths (“she said it’s pay-to-

play with the child that you raised”) in the lyrics, but what I appreciate the most about the

finale of this record is the belief that, even if we’ve said “I love you” to someone a thousand

times, we should still say it every night, for as long as we can.

You can feel the growth in this record. You can feel the work that went into it. You can feel

the sun shining through the dark parts. You can feel all this, yourself, by buying and

listening to this record as soon as you can. See that light through the fog? That’s the life you

should be living, and Miketon & The Nightblinders will help guide you to where you want to

be.