The Davies, mostly made up of singer-songwriter John Dufilho and bassist/multi-instrumentalist Jason Garner along with a rotating array of additional sidemen, continue to craft hook-intensive, distortion-heavy guitar dirges. But on Midnight, the band incorporates surprising touches into its still insouciant songs -- including Oriental-sounding chord progressions, horns and plenty of mysterious intros and outros. There's a general darkening of the once all-sunny sound.
"The Staring Contest" is a short, moody instrumental that sounds like a musical Japanese ghost story - an indication that Dufilho and company are in an experimental mood. The song segues into "Gone Against the Tide" with odd, dissonant chord patterns, fuzzy guitars, a subtle sprinkling of horns and layers of warbling guitar leads. On "The Girl Who Stole the Eiffel Tower" Dufilho sounds like a more cheerful Jim Reid of the Jesus and Mary Chain, with a deeply echoing vocal track that sounds as if it were being sung from inside a refrigerator. And the guitars, it appears, remain on perpetual freak-out mode from top to bottom.
Aside from a short middle stretch in which two or three songs sound a little too much like each other (and like outtakes from The Day of the Ray), Midnight is a fine record that suggests the Deathray Davies have graduated from the garage to, say, the basement of Dufilho's parents' house.
