Austin Sound

Undoubtedly one of the best live acts to emerge in Austin in the past few years, The Bright Light Social Hour are as relentless in their jam sessions as they are expansive in stretching the range of their sound. Across a BLSH show, there are moments of staggeringly tight indie guitar-fueled freak-outs, swaggering retro soul, funked up dance-punk, and psychedelic synth rockers, yet all expertly wrangled into a singular, engrossing experience - so much so that the quartet’s self-professed descriptor as simply “an American rock band” may be the only real recourse to genre. Even more impressively, The Bright Light Social Hour manage to capture that live energy on their eponymous debut LP, which the band will be releasing this Friday, September 17 at Antone’s. Joining them for the party are Brass Bed and the Frontier Brothers.

If you have a camera, we recommend you keep it away from the Bright Light Social Hour. At least based on their video for their new single “Back and Forth,” the spazzy boys in the band will scream at, molest, and generally do untoward things to your lens. We feel kinda bad for the video director Jon Salmon, but who knows, maybe he liked it. After all, they do look good in drag! The quartet recently just brought their brand of Franz Ferdinand meets funk revue rock to the Austin City Limits Fest, courtesy of their winning the coveted Sound and the Jury competition. If you missed them on the big time stage, though, you can catch back up with them as they crash back down to the lonely land of spattered local notoriety with a Halloween show at the Mohawk on Wednesday, October 28. It should actually be a pretty damn crazy event, as not only will the BLSH be going nuts, but their bringing along the Black and White Years to help raise some hell as well. Check out the video for “Back and Forth” below, and start planning your costume accordingly.