Nightlands (With Sighborg Singers) @ Johnny Brenda’s.

Text and image by Nikki Volpicelli.

Four piece, space-risen Nightlands unveiled their new choir, the Sighborg Singers, Friday night at Johnny Brenda’s.

They opened the night with “All The Way,” a song that’s nostalgically familiar if you recall last October’s Space Odyssey symphony, where frontman and Nightlands’ founder Dave Hartley scored the nearly 3-hour movie live, including this track in a mesmerizing vessel detachment scene that was the build-up.

Nightlands has a hypnotic effect on the audience. Everyone upstairs and down looked stoned – not here, up there, floating above the stage somewhere and fixated. Hartley and his fellow performers (Sighborg Singers included) moved minimally, closing and opening their eyes, taking cues from instrumentals.

Nightlands is an idea based on heavily layered, calculated and specific sounds born from Hartley’s mathematical brain that he experimented with intimately and intrinsically. It seemed, however, that those facts and figures have fallen a bit by the wayside to make room for what matters most. It was visible that Hartley and his band were doing more up there than just thinking over their next sonic moves. They were feeling them out, maybe even excusing their minds for a few breaks here and there to let what’s left work independently. Harmonies flowed organically, ebbing over hypnotizing sounds of Oak Island‘s “So It Goes,” and a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “That’s All For Everyone.”

Even when Hartley stopped to admit that he was “sweating like Patrick Ewing,” that current didn’t break.

Nightlands ended with a few covers, including “99 Miles from LA,” which sounded like the group’s own creation, driving home the fact that the Sighborg “science experiment” (as Hartley affectionately introduced earlier) is a success, both in on-stage chemistry and that organic, don’t-think-just-feel-it-out musical capacity.