The Moodiness and Craft of Women of the Night

Messing around with the Women of the Night can be a little risky, but we here at Garagerocktopia aren’t really about getting into your business. We do have one bit of friendly advice, though. If that’s the kind of thing you’re going to do, Maybe these Women of the Night are the ones you should check out first.

The Women of the Night we’re talking about aren’t the freelance businesswomen that frequent many New York City streets in the evening, however. We’re talking about a very cool rock and roll band.

At first listen, Women of the Night recall another band from New York, the Velvet Underground. But where the Velvets and Lou Reed sometimes got just a little too weird for their own good, Women of the Night echo the atmospherics of Reed and the Velvets, yet never lose accessibility.

Guitarist and singer Jordan D’Arsie, aka Jords, says there’s no emulation going on here but acknowledges his music has its similarities to the Velvets.

“It seems to be a common thread that a lot of people link us to him and his writing style,” said Jords. “He's not someone I spent a lot of time listening to growing up but my sister was obsessed with him and played him constantly. I guess I was soaking it in without realizing.”

The band does show good versatility too, though, on two EPs released thus far, Pastel Colors I and II. “I Am Well and Missing You” has a more jagged, proto-punk vibe, while “I Couldn’t Fool Them” is a punk-blues song that recalls the Stooges and Richard Hell. Jords instead pointed to a much wider array of artists as maybe having some impact on WOTN’s sound.

“I'd say Rowland S Howard, Bowie, You Am I, The Sleepy Jackson, The Real Kids, Iggy Pop, the Beasts of Bourbon, there's just so many, I love em all,” Jords commented. “I get so excited with bands and artists, listening to them intently especially full albums and lyrics and all the threads throughout the body of work it's just something deeply important and special to me.”

We should reinforce that there aren’t actually any women in the band; the band takes its name from a street encounter with a passer-by in seeking some of Fun City’s world-class off-the-books entertainment. The other gentlemen of the band are Grey Watson on bass and Kyubae Lee on Drums. The band is truly international, whose members hail from Alabama, South Korea and Australia.

Another thing that jumps out immediately is that WOTN does not sound like a bunch of newbies. As readers of this blog figured out long ago, our raison d’etre is to celebrate no-frills, fun rock and roll, music that by its very nature is fairly simple to play (though not so simple to play well), and that simple music should not be confused with limited ability. All of the artists we have profiled on this blog are seasoned musicians, many with multiple decades of playing professionally under that belt.

And few bands demonstrate this better than WOTN. Listening to their pedigree, one can be forgiven for recalling the Jamaican family from the ‘90s comedy show, In Living Color.

“Before Women of the Night, I was the frontman of Quitty and the Don'ts and had a very short stint with the Skull Practitioners,” Jords recounted. “In Australia, I was playing solo.”

“Kyu has played with The Black Skirts in Korea and still is an active member of Mineri whenever he's back in Korea, plus he also plays in a slew of other Brooklyn bands. Grey has played with the Killer Drones in Korea, and also has played with Tallulah Bankhead and Belle Adair. Greys has a project with Kyu called Grey Watsons Infinite Hourglass of Elastic Time. The guys are truly talented and just top blokes. I feel blessed to play with them.”

The travails of being a band just getting started, grinding it out day in, day out, all to make a name for yourself that might be spoken beyond your own zip code, are legendary and well-documented both in prose and song. But there are other pitfalls as well, the mundane and infuriating ones that we all face as well, even if we don’t have guitars in our hands. Sadly, the band recently smacked right into one of those.

“We were working on a full length at the moment and were excited to get it finished soon,” said Jords. “But my backpack was stolen from a bar in the Lower Eastside last week. All our music notes and digital files were stolen. We're holding out hope it's returned but are now planning to hit the Studio Nov 1st to do it again.”

“We were gutted about it but looking at it as a positive chance to really rip this session.”

For now, most of the band’s guigs have been in NYC. And, truth be told, a band probably could do very well for itself just playing in the environs of the Big Apple. But, WOTN has its sights set just a little further than the five boroughs.

“We have only played New York. We would like, however, to put together some touring jaunts next

year,” Jords detailed. “We Really wanna hit the West Coast and down south a bit. The dream tours for us are Australia, Korea, Japan, Mexico. hopefully we can check some of those off soon.”

For now, the band has gotten some airplay in some of the places where music, such as we profile here at Garagerocktopia, gets played.

“Earlier this year we did a live session with WNYU radio,” Jords said. “Recently we did live interview with Matt Attack from the Rodent hour. We've also been played a lot by Drew on the Revolutions per Minute and by Wayne at Ice Cream Man Power Pop and more. Also Mike Sin played us on WFMU recently. I think that's the most common places we've been played, I sincerely hope I didn't forget anyone.”

Don't Forget to listen to Garagerocktopia Radio, alternating with Blue Mood, Tuesday nights on KUCR Radio, 88.3 FM Riverside, California. We play artists like Women of the Night, plus many others who have appeared on our hallowed pages and whose music has inspired us.

We have some other features already in the works here at Garagerocktopia. Artists have been sending us some very cool stuff. As always, we don’t make any guarantees in stone but we’re happy to say we’ve gotten a lot of very promising music sent to us, and we’re always happy to spread the word about about bands that are playing the way-out kinds of music we profile here. Send us a line and we’ll talk.

Also, we do have a Facebook page for this blog. We don’t put personal stuff on it – no pictures of grandkids (which we don't have anyway) or our dinners or politics or anything like that. What we do post are announcements about upcoming features, maybe extra stuff about the bands, and any cool music, movies or TV Shows we stumble across that might have even the most tangential connection with the music featured here. While we don't spend all day thinking about it, we do like "likes" if you're so inclined ...