THE DAMAGE IS DONE

The Features
“Bring On The Night”
Live @ The Boro
January 11th, 2003

Man, listening to this brings back a lot of memories from the Boro. The bar and grill, conveniently located literally across the street from MTSU’s campus, was home to many epic Features shows. It would get crowded and hot really easily, but that overpacked cramped atmosphere was where the Features of this era thrived. Pure raw energy, captured here in this muffled and raucous recording of one of the band’s lost gems.

I haven’t been inside the Boro in six years probably, but my oh my are those memories still clear in my head.

OTHER VERSIONS

The Features
“Bring On The Night”
Live @ The Red Rose
February 28th, 2003

You can click on the Other Versions link below to go to this song’s first entry and bone up on its history, or you can just listen to this incredibly punchy version that I’m posting right now. Because holy hot wow is this a rollicking version of this forgotten gem. I mean, it makes sense because this was played towards the end of the night on February 28th, 2003. The band sounds incredibly primed and worked up on this recording, which BTW clocks in at a whole twenty seconds shorter than the official recorded version (again, just click the link below to hear it).

This band is awesome.

OTHER VERSIONS

The Features
“Bring On The Night”
Krampf Sessions (2002)

To me, this has always sounded like the Features channeling good ol’ early ’80s English pop/soul. The keyboard just screams XTC and Squeeze to me, especially that downright jaunty keyboard solo. This makes “Bring On The Night” one of the most upbeat, optimistic, and downright fun songs in the Features arsenal. One can almost picture Pelham singing these lyrics to a girl, suavely convincing her to go along with him and hit the town “right between the eyes” (along the lines of the “The Way You Make Me Feel” video by Michael Jackson, God rest his soul). I actually think it’s great that the whole point of this song is having a good time “if it’s the last thing we do.” There’s nothing off-putting about this song at all, unless you just plain dislike fun.

“Bring On The Night” debuted on June 21st, 2002 and was played heavily for the next three months. The song was played with less frequency from November 2002 to February 2003, and was last played on February 28th, 2003. The song only appears in my database 14 times, which is actually quite a big surprise to me as I thought it was a much more popular song with the band. It was demoed with producer Craig Krampf in 2002 at the same sessions that produced the “Buffalo Head” single, most likely during the song’s infancy. By early 2003, this blast of pure pop fun had disappeared.