All of me wants to believe that most of the time, Nightlands is working in the darkness. They go into places and they immediately turn the lights off, shutter all the windows, draw the curtains and just operate in a place unseeable. They want to only see the outlines of one another as they piece it all together, to pull with hands and arms that they can't witness, but can still feel are attached.They might set a candle off in the corner of the room, at the far end, but it's a short candle that they can bet on burning down to a waxy puddle before they've finished what they wanted to get done - or sometimes it might expire on itself just as they're getting going. They would prefer there to be nothing there though, just that feeling that you're not in a room alone (and you can always feel when you're not in a room alone) and some faint breathing, the light buzz of guitar amps. They actually like that they're not in the room alone. It's not that they don't want to see each other. It's more that they'd prefer that sensation of knowing that they're not at all alone, but they're getting to experience it in an intangible way. It's strange and strangely comforting as well.It's much like the way that Dave Hartley writes his music. The bass-playing extraordinaire - currently logging the bulk of his time playing in The War On Drugs - derives great poignancy from such untouchable feelings, many of them in the variety of nostalgia and dreamland derivations. He sings about remembering, or equating the feeling he got as a child - when it rained, to getting high. It was the rainy days that couldn't have been more welcome, revered even more than the sunny ones. On "300 Clouds," he sings, "Oh, oh, the fireside/Oh, oh, the flames," and it sounds like a hymnal. You can feel an absolute heat radiating off of the song, directly from his words. It's as if the fire has burst forth in that dark room where the band is playing and they're in awe of it as it quickly spreads its fingers.