A couple of years ago Nightshift made a taut and bristly synth punk album, full of zinging sharp basslines and drone-y, a-melodic choruses. The music came out on cassette on the Glasgow label Cusp Records, garnering very modest attention (i.e., I couldn’t find a single review online). In the interim between that 2019 release and now, which were, of course, the COVID years, the band began experimenting with remote collaboration among its four regular members (David Campbell on guitar, Andrew Doig on bass, Eothen Stearn at the keys and singing and Chris White on drums) and, crucially, added a new one in singer/guitarist/reed player Georgia Harris. This reconfiguration had a dramatic effect on the sound, which became dreamier and more elliptical. Though still strung together out of tight pinging chords, still jittery and irregular, Nightshift’s music turned airier and more ethereal. Where before you might have thought about Shopping or the Fire Engines first, now, with Zöe, you grasp for reference points like High Places, White Magic and Good Fuck. It is hardly a punk album at all on some levels, and yet it also is, just gauzier and more inferential.
Consider, for instance, the odd disequilibrium of “Outta Space,” with its trebly abstracted guitar shards, its minimalist drums, its space rocket zoom. High soft unearthly singing holds it together, just; though quiet, the song feels like it could fly off in all directions at any moment. Later, a clarinet, which provides the same uneasy through-line. And, it’s not just Harris who has changed the band’s sonics. The rest of the instruments have realigned around her, in a looser, more free flowing configuration that leaves plenty of space for wonder.
“Make Kin,” a single, is more emphatic with a big, booming drum line and rupturing buzzes of bass, but it retains a certain deconstructed anomie. Stearn chants in rapid, uninflected spates, making cool, incisive observations about relationships, familial and otherwise. A clarinet executes curving scraps of melody, not softening the cut’s hard edges as much as engaging with them.
“Power Cut,” the disc’s longest, at first seems to hew most closely to the post-punk template, with its growling, bumping bassline, its thick layers of synth sound, its steady, not very syncopated drum rhythm, but it slips blearily, intriguingly out of focus. Harris’ vocals haunt these angular grooves, weaving in and among sharp edges with a spectral, unhurried grace. The song stretches out woozily, foggily, so that you can only see a few feet ahead. It seems like it might go on indefinitely, with its warm blasts of saxophone, its regular pulse of inchoate rhythm, but eventually the mists fade to wisps and you’re clear.
The post-punk revival has thrown up a lot of same-y sounding bands, many of them fine on their own merits, but a little dull as a steady diet. Nightshift has made a very odd, fetching record that doesn’t resemble any of them. It’s otherworldly, elusive and well worth checking out.
This is Zöe by the way, my girl. Named by a 2 way connection when I brought her home.
1) I’m a Firefly fan, and this girl is black and bad ass.
2) When I got her home, a little dog approached me, I took her to the vet who scanned her chip and she was named Zoe.
So my post earlier is about my sweetheart. And if my lucky goes well, she’ll be joined in the garage by a Ducati Cafe in May. Dont know what I’ll name her.
My scooter is a Stella (from Genuine), which is designed and built or were, in the factories from Piaggio, which is why she looks like a vintage Vespa. She's avocado green and her name is Bamboo, because of the green and she was built in a country that has a lot of Bamboo export.
