Artist:     Black Light Animals

Album:     Playboys of the Western World

Label:     Groove King Records

Release Date:     8.20.21

92

BUY DIGITAL

BUY PHYSICAL

Playboys of the Western World, raise a glass to Black Light Animals and toast their suave, cinematic debut album, as the Midwestern psychedelic soul jet setters float through a series of cosmic ‘70s soundtrack reveries and casual trip-hop seductions with dress shirts unbuttoned and black ties loosened.

Similar in philosophy and lazy aesthetics to Khruangbin, Black Light Animals traipse through dreamy minefields of eclectic influences, triggering slow R&B grooves and hallucinatory guitars and keyboards, like those in magnetic pulls “SFX”—with its softly melting, wah-wah flashed ooze—and the spindly, kaleidoscopic “Halo.” Sweeping, ambitious pop splendor is lifted to the heavens in “A Ballad,” laden with rich, beautifully arranged strings and wistful melancholy, and a tantalizingly soulful “The Revolution’s After Party,” while the dazzling and sensual opener “Dark Fantasies” is introduced with spires of synthesizer shimmer and a soaring choir, before shadowy, creeping funk enters the eerie stillness, eventually interrupted by a wild, psych-rock freak-out. It’s a wakeup call that’s unexpectedly jarring, but necessary.

Carried by alluring, hypnotic bass lines and the yearning, expressive croon of Cole Bales, whose falsetto climbs easily and is not afraid of heights, the flowing amalgam of vintage spaghetti western and Italian horror soundscapes, glam-rock euphoria and hip-hop science is wonderfully inventive and unique. Outliers like “Montage,” which falls into a dub/reggae spacewalk, and “A Star is Born,” with its echoes of European style and architecture, still fit into the grand scheme of Playboys of the Western World, its often dry, instrumental openness – “Victor (Interlude)” is as empty as the surface of the moon – filled with tragic lyrical comedy and wry commentary on civilization’s crumbling descent into madness. Broken piano and a light blanket of sparsely atmospheric reverb do their best to comfort “Burning Cathedral,” which ends it all in quiet contemplation. If the apocalypse is nigh, lounging around with Black Light Animals is not a bad way to go out.

—Peter Lindblad