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Devil, Repent!

Overview

Devil, Repent! --- 2021-04-02

The Night Guild is a side project of singer/songwriter Pete Devlin and experimental composer James Joys, both of art-pop band Ex-Isles. Established to make more collaborative and cross-disciplinary work, their album Devil, Repent! is the first Night Guild instalment, and features conspiratorial alliances with artist Alana Barton, experimental percussionist Steve Davis, and renowned vocal group Landless, among many others. Devil, Repent! takes as its starting point ingrained cultures of abuse and neglect within powerful and ostensibly unimpeachable institutions. With musical nods to devotional incantation and hymnal vocal harmonies, as well as an expansive and ambitious sound palette featuring brass fanfares, organs, and bells, Devil, Repent! seethes with brutality and yearns for euphoria. Their album quarries the dissolution, surrender, and disavowal of our own voices to authority in unquestioning deference to immutable truths. That we have allowed sex, guilt, and debt to be weaponised against us is a telling aspect of these institutions’ power. Devil, Repent!’s music uses sensual, heavy, club inspired grooves and rhythms, and passages of free improvisation as a way of resisting the self-righteous, celibate strictures of institutional religious doctrines that have mutated and controlled our culture and our politics. "We find thus by experience that there is no good applying to heaven for earthly comfort. Heaven can give heavenly comfort; no other kind. And earth cannot give earthly comfort either. There is no earthly comfort in the long run." released April 2, 2021