Johnny Blue Skies & The Dark Clouds - Mutiny After Midnight
★★★★★
HIGH TOP MOUNTAIN/ATLANTIC
In her Meditations In An Emergency newsletter of February 2, the author Rebecca Solnit outlined an uplifting strategy to counteract the American political moment. “For the survival of our democracy and our planet,” she wrote, “understanding that interconnectedness, that capacity to relate and the abundance, joy, love that spring from it, are no longer abstract topics but an urgent political matter.”
The latest album by Sturgill Simpson in his Johnny Blue Skies guise has a broadly similar message, though he expresses it in less elevated and more lubricious terms. The first song on Mutiny After Midnight is called Make America Fuk Again, and over nine tracks Simpson posits sex and dancing as radical acts of resistance. It’s a high-concept party protest record, where he channels his “Hunter Biden energy” to excoriate ICE, Trump, stacked courts, oligarchs and the “hegemonic system” in general, all the while driving his Dark Clouds band into ever sweatier country-funk workouts. Weaponised hedonism, designed to “start a revolution and watch it begin.”
Simpson has been near this zone before, notably on the electro-boogie of 2019’s Sound And Fury and the frantically overdriven roadhouse disco of A Good Look (co-written, weirdly with John Prine). Mutiny After Midnight, though, is greasier and more organic, and one of the ways that it manifests joy is through the ecstatic collective playing of The Dark Clouds. Make America Fuk Again had already made it into the repertoire of jam bands before it was officially released (Umphrey’s McGee segued it into ELO’s Don’t Bring Me Down), and you can imagine Simpson’s band live mixing it up with a long and exuberant cover of Dancing In The Street, 1977 Grateful Dead style. Situation struts like Daft Punk in cowboy boots, but the peaks and accelerations are man-made not programmed, and Tony Joe White could conceivably be the guest vocalist. Excited Delirium, meanwhile, with its allusions to George Floyd’s murder and its taunting of ICE, has a furious intensity that suggests Queens Of The Stone Age had they turned off the freeway and onto the dirt tracks after Songs For The Deaf.
There are occasional moments of tenderness: Don’t Let Go is a swashbuckling love song to file alongside Jupiter’s Faerie and One For The Road, the key tracks on 2024’s previous Johnny Blue Skies record, Passage Du Désir. Mostly, though, Mutiny After Midnight revels in an agile, punchy brand of crudeness, in Simpson’s pulsating hyperfocus. It climaxes with Ain’t That A Bitch, ostensibly a Dylanesque stream-of-consciousness protest song riding the most raucous and exhilarating of grooves. Simpson’s indignation can be sloppy – condemning someone for “grabbing women by the poon” doesn’t exactly reclaim the language of the oppressor, and there’s a weird bit involving Katy Perry on a flight to Mars. But the urgency is tangible, as is the sense that while Simpson is smashing up genres as a rapid response to extreme times, he’s also landed on one of the best ideas of his increasingly remarkable career. Mutiny After Midnight doesn’t propose an escape from the now, it demands we confront it head-on, by being our most righteous and uninhibited selves. As Public Enemy framed it in 1988, you’ve got to Party For Your Right To Fight.
Mutiny After Midnight is out now on Hightop Mountain/Atlantic.
ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade | HMV
Tracklisting:
1. Make America Fuk Again
2. Excited Delirium
3. Don't Let Go
4. Stay On That
5. Viridescent
6. Situation
7. Venus
8. Everyone Is Welcome
9. Ain't That A Bitch
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