Saarbrücken, Germany band Pretty Lightning are today releasing ‘In Place Of Glow Worms’, the second single to be lifted from their newly-announced ‘Night Wobble’ LP. Their sixth full-length to date and second instrumental record following 2022’s ‘Dust Moves’ arrives February 21st 2025 on Fuzz Club.
On the new single, the band say: “In Place Of Bees, Glows Worms was the first song we made for Night Wobble. It spawned the conceptual idea that guided the writing of the songs to follow and outlines the scene we´re in: it´s dusk at forest´s edge and the opening guitar warbles along to a setting sun until the first beat cracks through the creaking branches. The ramblers enter the woods while a lap steel´s mangled, distant howling hints that an extensive woodland awaits them. They sneak on carefully to gentle ringing chords, gain pace only slowly by the tapping of the bongos and eventually find themselves in a pleasant trot that makes them flow even further into the night. Well, this could be a story, or one could just skip the talk and only listen to the music.”
The newly-announced ‘Night Wobble’ LP is a set of downtempo, repetitive grooves that course through dusty spaghetti-western psychedelia, Tuareg-derived desert-blues, library music and ’70s progressive. It’s always cinematic but shot through with trippy, off-kilter moments that bring a sense of alien to the widescreen panoramas here – this is an “oozy, woozy cowboy groove”, as they put it. If it was David Lynch who directed ‘Paris, Texas’ then Ry Cooder’s soundtrack might have sounded something like this.
“With our previous and first fully instrumental album ‘Dust Moves’ we actually thought we’d only be only taking a little detour from our ‘Fuzz/Rock Duo’ path to explore slightly more experimental ideas”, Sebastian Haas (guitars/keys) and Christian Berghoff (drums/percussion) recall: “But as things came together surprisingly easy and the whole process of making the record just felt very fluid and effortless, we somehow came to appreciate making exclusively instrumental music more and more. It was like a door opening up to a new exciting territory, which we happily embraced. These kinds of tunes just hit a special spot and never bore us at all, quite the contrary, it´s rather inspiring.”
Though ‘Dust Moves’ was both a musical and thematic excavation of the desert, its follow-up ‘Night Wobble’ wades through less arid surroundings: “Night Wobble can be perceived as the soundtrack accompanying an imaginary story of a journey into the forest after dark, conjuring all the arcane images and strange magic that can happen in the woods at night. The rhythm serves as a proposal for the pace in which one roams through the night, but it’s the moments of idle that invite you to hang out and have a deeper look around.”
Thoughts Words Action 