Listening to the new album from The Bateleurs, “A Light In The Darkness”, is like finding a perfectly worn leather jacket in a forgotten wardrobe. Not one from London or Los Angeles, mind you, but one discovered in a dusty Lisbon alley, smelling faintly of sea salt and old cigarettes. It fits perfectly, but it carries the shape and the stories of someone else’s life, and putting it on feels both like a costume and a revelation. This Portuguese quartet deals in the hallowed currency of Blues and Rock’n’Roll, but the exchange rate is subject to their own particular, soulful inflation.
This is not polite rock music. The engine room of Ricardo Dikk, Ricardo Galrão, and Rui Reis doesn’t so much play as it does churn. There’s a palpable sense of friction in their sound, a glorious and gritty resistance, like gears grinding on purpose to generate heat. The riffs have the thick, satisfying texture of swamp mud, sticky and dark, while the soaring laments promised in the liner notes are delivered with staggering honesty by Sandrine Orsini. Her voice is the filament in the bulb, glowing hot and vulnerable, refusing to burn out even when the current threatens to overwhelm it.
The album is laid out like a pilgrim’s grubby, hand-drawn map of a difficult spiritual country. It starts in a place of utter desperation with “A Piece for My Soul,” a raw-knuckled bargain with whatever entity is on duty to listen. It’s a song that feels like it’s being sung on one’s knees in the dirt. From there, we wander into the resigned misfortune of “Widow Queen,” a track that perfectly captures the taste of rust and the feeling of holding a losing hand in a game you never even agreed to play.
But this journey doesn’t wallow. It bucks. The shift into “For All To See” is a declaration of defiance that feels startlingly courageous. To pledge, “if I’m gonna fall let it be for all to see,” isn’t simple bravado; it’s an acceptance of vulnerability as a form of power. It brings to mind, for some strange reason, those old daguerreotypes of 19th-century bare-knuckle boxers—men with terrible form and magnificent heart, standing proudly to be beaten in public. There is a bizarre and profound dignity in refusing to hide your own collapse. The album then swivels its gaze outward, sneering at the puppetry of modern life in “Dancing On A String,” a necessary jab at the hollow men before the real inner work of “Never Back Down” can begin.
The Bateleurs chart a course through hope, offering a steadying hand in “The Lighthouse” and a sun-drenched second chance in “Best Of Days.” You think you’ve reached the destination. The light has been found. But then the path takes a turn down a much stranger, more seductive alley. “Gardens Of Babylon” isn’t about finding a god, but about realizing you’ve had a neglected, overgrown Eden locked inside you all along. Then, immediately, we’re tempted off the path entirely by the sinisterly sweet promises of “Down The Garden Path.”
And in its final moments, the album does something brilliant. After all the cosmic wrestling and anthems of resilience, it ends not with a bang, but with a pang. “Before The Morning Is Done” brings the entire grand struggle crashing down into the small, intensely personal space of a memory, of a conversation that can no longer be had. The search for a light in the darkness, the fight for one’s soul, resolves into the quiet, universal ache of wanting to tell someone they still matter.
Is the journey from damnation to redemption supposed to end in a half-forgotten room, filled with nostalgia and regret? “A Light In The Darkness” doesn’t provide an easy answer, because it understands the question is the entire point.
