It's summertime, which means that, right now, all across the land, lifetime friendships are being forged and virginities are being lost, and the fond reminiscences thereof will be forever associated with whatever songs happen to be playing in the background. Because the soundtrack to our lives is often accidental and serendipitous, comprising random tunes that turn up on the radio, or on shuffle, or in a DJ's playlist at just the right moment, thereby conflating a certain song and a certain shared experience into the best night of your life. But JEFF the Brotherhood ask: Why leave it all to chance? Why not just reach for a record that's already as up for a good time as you are?
The fraternal Nashville duo's seventh album-- and debut for Warner Bros.-- is their version of celebration rock, if not quite Celebration Rock. Where fellow two-piece Japandroids' recent second album is a paean to the good times as seen in the rearview mirror, Hypnotic Nights captures the memories as they're being made-- specifically at 3 a.m. in the overcrowded kitchen of a home belonging to some classmate's oblivious, vacationing parents. And from the sound of things, Jake and Jamin Orrall's idea of the perfect house party involves little more than The Blue Album on full blast and a thick cloud of pot smoke. Hypnotic Nights continues with the Weezer worship introduced on 2011's We Are the Champions, but answers the fuzz-pop frivolity with equal doses of motorik groove and psychedelic drone: In the giddy, phased-out thrust of "Hypnotic Winter" and bubblegum-covered Krautrock of "Wood Ox", you can imagine what kind of record Rivers Cuomo might've made post-Pinkterton had he gone to Cologne instead of college.
JEFF the Brotherhood's concerns are so basic in their everydude needs-- "I want a place where I can smoke meats/ Where I can drink and swim in a creek," Jake offers by way of mission statement on "Country Life"-- we might as well call them J-Brah. But coming from a band that has just two members and three guitar strings to its name, Hypnotic Nights covers a deceptively wide swath of sonic terrain: Dan Auerbach's production incorporates everything from saxophones and piano to synths and sitars into the mix, mostly to thicken the band's distorto-rock drive rather than provide a respite from it. However, Auerbach does coax an impressively straight-faced performance out of the duo on the mid-60s-styled psych-pop reverie "Region of Fire", an effective late-album comedown that makes the closing cover of Black Sabbath's cigarette-lighter igniter "Changes" all the more superfluous. Even if it's meant to suggest that every epic bender must ultimately come to a sobering end, the gospel singer-assisted reading is too melodramatic to be introspective, and-- by swapping out the original's piano melody for amateur-hour synth taps-- too half-assed to be taken seriously. Given how well Hypnotic Nights otherwise lives up to its name, the Orralls' ersatz-Ozzy act proves to be an unnecessarily rude awakening.
