Blue Black Hours
Story by Jeff Milo
Photo courtesy of Blue Black Hours
The first weekend of March brings us the third annual Hamtramck Music Festival, a four-day celebration of local music with several unique venues and bars hosting lineups of live performances, featuring more than 150 bands. (www.hamtramckmusicfestival.com)
There can be a lot to choose from, but Ferndale Friends picked power trio Blue Black Hours for their potent and enthralling live presentation, creating atmosphere around the vibe of their signature rock sound with optimized lighting effects, haunting fog and trippy video projections.
Blue Black Hours defy concrete categorization, blending the wavy haze of psychedelia to the muscular thrum of proto-metal and the sludgier, swirlier and sometimes supernatural sensibilities of ‘70s rock. Not pop. Not garage. Very much their own thing.
Blue Black Hours features John “Spurzo” Spurrier on vocals/bass, Scott Lyon on guitar, and Ken Blaznek on drums. Lyon and Spurrier have been playing music together for more than 20 years, pairing with various drummers as the band has evolved. Ken Blaznek joined the band earlier in 2015. Blue Black Hours officially formed in 2005.
“Though we have many varied musical influences,” Spurrier noted, “we never set out to play any particular style or genre. Instead, we would play a lot of improvisational jams and structure our sound around what comes naturally from there. When it comes to writing, we prefer to be in the moment, letting the inspiration flow and acting as conduits for how the song would want to be created. With the music, lyrics and overall vibe, we always had a vision of connecting or reconnecting with an “otherworldly” realm.”
Now, the band has dropped a few names online through their Facebook and Bandcamp pages just to give listeners a reference point: Hawkind, The Doors, Black Sabbath. But it’s better to infer that BBH are conjuring the spirit or the energies of those bands, affecting an ethereal sense of escape or transcendence through a delicate storm of reverb and distortion, often surging or swelling their collective sounds into some kind of aural vortex (the fog is quite evocatively apt for this mad metaphor I’m cooking,) to where the music, the tones, timbres and tight percussion, start to seem as though they’re enveloping the audience (or listener.)
Perhaps you could just picture those blue, black hours, a time of evening darker and more foreboding than twilight and yet also something as spurring or enticing as that gossamer glimmer of pre-dawn light, sparking some sense of the celestial right here on earth, optimally past sunset, now…that…is part of the essence of BBH’s brew of rock. (Telling song titles include Darkness To Light and Sunlight and Dust.)
“That prog or psych genre label seems to tie in with an ‘otherworldly’ vibe, which we are naturally drawn to,” Spurrier said. “Most prog or psych tends to be ‘above the belt’ music, whereas most straight-up rock ‘n’ roll tends to be ‘below the belt.’ We’re fans of both sides of the proverbial ‘rock belt,’ therefore, we play rock ‘n’ roll that covers the whole body. We have the dark, gritty sound of the oil and graveled streets of the city in our music, but with the serene nature of the woods and rivers of the Upper Peninsula in there, too.”
You can wind up tumbling down an Internet rabbit-hole, through message boards and blogs, when it comes to debates or postulations over where a certain band fits, genre-wise. For BBH, it’s more about forging a composite vibe utilizing several of rock’s more sublime elements to hone an optimally transportive experience. BBH co-produced their self-titled full length with Jesse Wozniak in 2012 and began gaining more momentum, locally, since then. It wasn’t until 2014 that they properly released Blue Black Hours. At that same time, they put out a sensational EP titled Sunlight and Dust. Both are currently only available on BBH’s bandcamp: https://blueblackhours.bandcamp.com/
The band said that they are planning to get back into the studio to record the third album soon. Also in the near future, Blue Black Hours and Sunlight and Dust will be available on CD (again) as well as cassette. The two recordings have started bending a few ears toward their direction, some locally, but some internationally. “We plan on doing some touring soon and hopefully hit Europe, where it seems we’re getting some good recognition.”
Meanwhile, close to home, “We are excited to play the Hamtramck Music Festival,” said Spurrier. “We’re glad this is going back to the tradition of what was once known as ‘The Blowout!’ This will also be our first show back with our new drummer, Ken Blaznek, at Paychecks Lounge, on March 5 (a Saturday).”
You can find official set times and the full lineup here: http://hamtramckmusicfestival.com Highlight Paycheck’s Lounge, however, as that’s where you can hear (and see) BBH.
After ten years, Spurrier looks back on he and Lyon’s adventures as “…a series of very interesting inspirations and synchronicities. Honestly, this musical journey would make for a very interesting biography, someday… Really, we were brought together by what would seem to be a sort of divine intervention.
More info:
https://blueblackhours.bandcamp.com/
http://facebook.com/blueblackhours
http://hamtramckmusicfestival.com
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