Year Of Metal #102: Night Sun - Mournin'
For the last time in this project we hit an act obscure enough to have essentially no presence on streaming, and after the torrid time I had with Heavy Load, I worried these old school German rockers might be similar. But while this 1972 record is bizarre and far out, Night Sun have a lot more demonstrable chops to keep things on a level. Opener “Plastic Shotgun” starts in manic fashion, but while the playing is hectic, they soon settle into a groove that you can follow.
The whole effect is wild but in a jazzy way, not an amateurish way. They soon bring in their secret weapon - some fantastic, rockin’ organs. “Crazy Woman” starts strong with a creepy atmospheric build, but when Knut Rössler starts thumping on those keys, we really have lift off. It’s a dated sound for sure - the organ hasn’t yet enjoyed the comeback that the saxophone gets every 15 years or so - but feels wedded to a time in a comforting sense.
This isn’t the heaviest of metal by any stretch of the imagination, but they can rock out fairly hard and get nice and sinister in equal measure when they so wish. “Blind” is a mostly straightforward boogie with plenty of thump to it. The guitars and organs follow the odd strange path and get caught up in zoning out, but in the main, this is a straightforward rocking affair.
Conversely the middle section of the record takes us down a somewhat stranger path. “Slush Pan Man” is a particularly odd track, using atonality and a creeping little riff to generate plenty of tension. That’s followed by “Living With The Dying”, probably the closest in form to what Sabbath and the serious early metal guys were getting up to. Vocalist Bruno Schaab is compelling on the mic, too - he’s technically solid and has a voice that, for all its nasal sharpness, is well suited to whatever weird gear he’s singing about.
The best track is “Got A Bone Of My Own”. At seven minutes and change it’s the longest song on the record, but the deck is slightly stacked there as it builds in ominous fashion for several minutes. When it kicks into full flow, suddenly Night Sun don’t sound like they’re fucking around anymore. It’s the album’s hardest riff, all gnarled and twisted up. Strangely more than anything it makes me think of middle period Arctic Monkeys in terms of tone and sheer cocksuredness, though I don’t imagine Al Turner was spinning a lot of European heavy metal when he was kicking around Joshua Tree perfecting his quiff. The songwriting isn’t enormously complex or impressive - they find a groove, dwell in it for a bit, tear it up and repeat - but the consistently strange choices in terms of riff writing and the constant pounding of that organ help to set this stuff apart.
Maybe that goes some way to explaining why they haven’t been especially well remembered as a metal act - I feel like you’d be hard pressed to take a lot of inspiration from Night Sun without simply pilfering their act - but this is a cool curio for sure.
