Johnny Blue Skies’ ‘Mutiny After Midnight’ Review: Sturgill Rages

When Sturgill Simpson announced the existence of Mutiny After Midnight — his second album under the Johnny Blue Skies moniker, and his ninth overall — he promised a piece of physical media that could only be heard as a vinyl record, compact disc, or cassette tape. Railing against the status quo of streaming services and compressed bitrates felt very Sturgill, even if the promise of “a dance record” filled with “pure, unfiltered, unapologetic, relentless disco-hedonism” didn’t. Then, during a weekend filled with wartime anxiety, Simpson uploaded the entire album to YouTube, giving Mutiny After Midnight a digital life after all.

Railing against the rules — even one’s own rules — also feels very Sturgill. This is a man who doesn’t just give us albums; he gives us left-hand turns, from anime collaborations to alter egos. With Mutiny After Midnight, he heads into the glittering corners of the 1970s that his music previously ignored. Disco, country-funk, and hard-driving rhythm & blues all share equal space here, laced with syncopated guitars and Soul Train bass lines, whipped into shape by a red-hot band that’s been playing three-hour arena shows in recent years.

If Johnny Blue Skies’ first album, Passage du Desir, placed more emphasis on the songwriter himself than the musicians backing him up, then Mutiny After Midnight evens out the balance. This is a record inspired by the carnal things that happen after the clock strikes 12, and the Dark Clouds — Simpson’s wrecking crew of guitarist Laur Joamets, keyboardist Robbie Crowell, bassist Kevin Black, drummer Miles Miller — set the late-night atmosphere with swagger, steel, and sax. Simpson’s lyrics were reportedly written on the spot, so if there’s more emphasis on Mutiny‘s strut than its content, it’s easy to forgive. What matters here is groove and mood.

Everything starts with “Make America Fuk Again,” an early candidate for song title of the year. Recorded live at Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Studio, it’s a song for Trans Am stereos and shag-carpeted bedrooms, mixing mirror-ball nostalgia with rough-edged roadhouse country-rock. The magic-carpet ride continues from there, and although Simpson’s clearly got a bone to pick with Donald Trump — just listen to the mutinous “Ain’t That a Bitch,” where he calls the sitting president “a bad cartoon in an ill-fitting suit, grabbing women by the poon” — he’s also interested in another type of bone.

There’s simply no disguising Mutiny After Midnight‘s horndog heart. Simpson fills the album’s apolitical tracks with the sort of bold, Brut-slathered come-ons that would be problematic if they weren’t so tongue-in-cheek. “Baby, let me be the banana and you can be the split,” he sings in “Stay on That,” a song whose lyrical refrain — “Stay on that D, baby, ’til you hit that G” — drives home the album’s hedonistic promise. On “Everyone Is Welcome,” he sings the praises of multi-partner sexcapades, singing, “Two is enough but three’s a whole lot of fun/Four’s a fuckin’ party where everybody cums.”

Mutiny After Midnight isn’t a thinking man’s record. It’s an indulgent, immersive record for dark corners and raging libidos, purposely evoking a bygone era where Trump was working for his father rather than running the country. The handful of lines that do feel topical — such as “Hard to move with your knee on my neck/Hard to have a conversation with fourteen fists,” from the high-speed rocker “Excited Delirium” — don’t ruin the mood as much as give it heft. Daylight may be coming for all of us, but Mutiny After Midnight‘s escapism and electricity are a convincing argument to stay up late.