Year Long Disaster paints it blacker on 2nd album
Kevin Bronson on
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In a way, the title of the sophomore album by Year Long Disaster makes a promise it can’t keep. “Black Magic; All Mysteries Revealed” – oh, really? Forty-two minutes with one of Los Angeles’ best power trios is going to settle this whole good vs. evil thing for me? Maybe fill in the blanks on a little mythology? Shed some light on my dark side?
Not quite. But the album, the follow-up to 2007’s self-titled debut, takes a mighty righteous swipe at it, while delivering on another promise: Singer-guitarist Daniel Davies, bassist Rich Mullins and drummer Brad Hargreaves can fashion some of the gnarliest psychedelic blues this side of Jack White, and paint them blacker.
||| Watch: The video for “Show Me Your Teeth”
“I was just trying to get into making the album as personal as possible,” says Davies, the 29-year-old son of the Kings’ Dave. “We had been on tour nonstop. It’s an isolated lifestyle around a lot of people, if you know what I mean. You get home and you don’t know what to do with yourself – you’re body’s still moving but you’re in one place.”
So Davies immersed himself in reading, and between his own fasciantion with rock and literature and his personal history as someone who grew up too fast – and confronted his own demons in rehab (where Mullins was a brother in arms) – he arrived at “kind of a theme” for the band’s second album, which comes out March 9.
“I felt old when I was very young,” Davies says. “I remember being 14 and thinking, ‘Wow, a lot of stuff has happened to me in my life.’ But it’s been my lifestyle, I guess, the whole rock ’n’ roll thing.”
The creative energy from his bandmates and the support Year Long Disaster has received on tours supporting the likes of the Foo Fighters, Motorhead, Velvet Revolver and Clutch has kept him upbeat. “I’m just like anybody else – I want to go out and hear songs that I like,” he says. “I think we might be getting our ideas from an older place musically, but we’re trying to give that to people.”
Meanwhile, any notion that the trio rode the coattails of its frontman’s famous last night is gone, washed away by the sweat of their hard work. “I never really paid too much attention that anyway,” says Davies, whose band will actually open for his father’s on Feb. 5 at the El Rey Theatre. “I’ve always thought, ‘He’s my dad, that’s what he does, and I’m me, and this is what I do. I think people see that.”
||| Live: Year Long Disaster plays tonight at the next two Mondays at Spaceland, and Feb. 5, opening for Dave Davies, at the El Rey Theatre. On Jan. 25 at Spaceland, Mullins’ old band, Karma to Burn, also performs.
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