The Mystery Lights: Purgatory – Album Review

The Mystery Lights return with an eclectic pick ‘n’ mix of lysergic and chaotic garage that rises to dizzying heights on perhaps their best album to date.

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Mining the depths of the original garage rock sound of the 60s and the RnB sounds that fed into it, on their latest album, The Mystery Lights have written an album that could have been released any time in the last sixty years. It drips in the authentic garage rock vibe that flowed from the bored suburban streets of the US as kids picked up their Kay guitars from Sears and realised that they too could create something with a new energy, something to surpass the generations that had gone before.

Throughout the album’s twelve tracks, there are threads that pull at your subconscious, pick at the brain stem of memory. Is that a Bo Diddley Who Do You Love?-inspired melody that I hear on the opening track and recent single Mighty Fine All Mine? A haunting organ playing the protagonist on Together Lost, recalling Release Of An Oath-era Electric Prunes, a jovial occultism running beneath? Crashes and whips around a wonderful classic fuzz sound on Cerebral Crack, flute flourishes and cascading guitars that recall the very best of Love? The effect is hypnotic as you are swayed between past and present.

The title track is as intense as they get, a dense and decaying fuzz stomper that peters out at the end before they hit you with the spiked groove of the fantastic In The Streets. It sees them in a choppier, more new-wave territory, the guitars and organs jabbing at and jostling with each other before tripping out and dousing your ears in aural LSD. Sorry I Forgot Your Name adds a more rebel country vibe, akin to the last Reigning Sound album and, as the band pick selectively through the classics of the decades, Automatic Response sounds like a lost Velvets hit that should never have been left on the cutting room floor. Don’t Want No Don’t Need No sees them throwing more joyful moves but, as the album closes, it is the final track Snuck Out that hits hardest. Out of the fuzz and into a homegrown acoustic psych arrangement that tells the tale of escape from domestic turbulence, the way you are able to focus almost solely on the lyrics gives the song all the power it needs to close the album.

What’s clear is that The Mystery Lights are continuing to mine the depths of garage rock – the attack, the RnB, the psych leanings – and within it they create some of the finest modern garage songs around. This is by no means revisionism, never revival, but a band showing that the garage rock sound never truly went away, and never will. Purgatory is a triumph from start to finish and one of the best garage records you’ll hear this year.

Live dates
30th Sept – Brighton, UK – The Hope & Ruin
1st Oct – London, UK – Jazz Cafe

The Mystery Lights are on Facebook, Instagram, and X.

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Words by Nathan Whittle. Find his Louder Than War archive here.

Nathan also presents From The Garage on Louder Than War Radio every Tuesday at 8pm. Tune in for an hour of fuzz-crunching garage rock ‘n’ roll and catch up on all shows on the From The Garage Mixcloud playlist.