Artful production and clever lyrics make the band’s fourth album in six years a standout.
A note to any songwriters out there: if you’re going to write of the struggles or doubts in your relationship, it’s probably best to avoid demoing those songs in a place where your other half can hear them. This was an issue for Night Moves frontman John Pelant when he started crafting the band’s fourth full-length album, “Double Life”, at home in the Minneapolis duplex he shares with his fiancée. So, Pelant took himself to the band’s rehearsal space and used that as a makeshift office, persisting and working away diligently, even if he was located in an industrial zone, surrounded by garbage dumps, foundry fumes, and had a noisy neighbour with drug problems.
Pelant’s songs are so confessional that it’s surprising to learn that he actually likes to start with the music and sit with it for a while before he thinks about crafting lyrics around that. Take the synthy ‘Hold On to Tonight’, a snapshot of a night that feels like it was pulled straight from the pages of his diary: “It was your place, it didn’t look like it,” he reflects after the death of a loved one. “Pageantry stitching your scene / I couldn’t find anything about it / Not a connection in sight, how the reminiscing turns me blind,” he adds sadly, tragically realising that all he has left now are memories that will only fade with time.
There is a distinct hint of 70s funk to ‘Trying to Steal a Smile’, a song which finds Pelant worrying a loved one is moving away from him as he questions his place in the world, feeling that he hasn’t “been [himself] for awhile” and he’s just “trying to steal a smile”. Inspired by the license plate of the band’s van being stolen, ‘Daytona’ concludes with a surprisingly sympathetic view of the culprit, musing that they “only wanted a win” and were just trying to start afresh.
Pelant’s vocals soar to impressive heights on ‘Almost Perfect’ and on it, along with ‘This Time Tomorrow’, the 80s influences are unabashed, drawing obvious musical comparisons to the War on Drugs, while ‘State Sponsored Psychosis’, on the other hand, drips with 90s R&B. On the joyous ‘Ring My Bell’, Pelant confidently assures that he’ll be there whenever he might be needed: “You’ve got a sadness hanging in your eyes / Well I just wish that I could change your mind / You can ring my bell, honey, anything you need?” The pedal steel and harmonica-driven ‘White Liquor’ is a sad look at addiction (“What are you running from? / Can you take my pain away?”), while ‘Desperation’ feels gloomy and introspective as it looks at how a longing for commitment can be forced to fight against wanderlust (“Got a feeling that I can’t quite quit / Feels like I’m just wishing on the wind / Blowing thru in a Cadillac breeze / Burning bridges headed down to my knees”).
Pelant’s fiancée may have taken issue with the songs that ended up on “Double Life” in their rough form, but I’d like to think that now they’ve been fully realised, she can see them for what they really represent: the struggles of a man at a crossroads in life, assessing the world around him as he questions how to move forward without losing the precious things he’s already acquired. With influences spanning various decades, slick production from the band and Jarvis Taveniere, along with Pelant’s excellent, frank lyrics, “Double Life” is an album that deserves not just to be listened to, but to be turned up loud.
