The Blasters - Dark Night

This week at Rock Song of the Week, the question is a simple one – how bluesy do you want it? If the answer is anything less than “entirely”, maybe you’re in the wrong place. Or, at least, you’ve turned up on the wrong week. While you might look at the release date for this one and think, “have the editorial team somehow added twenty-five or more years to the actual date it came out”, you’d be pretty quickly forgiven; it’s a track that lives quite far out of time, when you get down to brass tacks. 

Not that The Blasters could ever be accused of being “in” the time they sound like they are in too often. The Californian four-piece (currently) use a blend of roots rock, rockabilly, and every down south, important part of American music culture to create something that feels like it’s an original rather than a greatly crafted homage, such is the quality of it. It’s what makes our Rock Song of the Week pick this week such a good one – as much as it keeps you guessing where or when it might have come from, you’re always going to agree that it’s one hell of a track all the same. 

Consider this, then, your invitation to set your dials to eleven and your bars to twelve, because we are storming in hot with Dark Night, a thumping bit of roots-infused goodness that will turn any part of you that is static into a metronome. If you’ve never had the pleasure of accepting The Blasters into your ears (a sentence which I am sure has never been uttered before in this context), you are one of today’s lucky 10,000. If you have heard them before? Then enjoy it all over again, at our pleasure. We don’t half work hard in the song mines for these, you know.