A prison in a prison
Insidious addiction
It takes me out of
Space and time
In The Twilight Zone’s The Fever (1960), Franklin Gibbs arrives in Las Vegas with the smug certainty of a man above vice. By night’s end, he is pacing before a slot machine like a penitent at an altar, hearing its siren-call in the dark. Its coins jangle with the presicion of a rattlesnake’s tail; its lights leer; its hunger becomes his. That fall from sanctimony to surrender is the fever Rani Sharone inhabits in The Fever, the latest single from his solo project And It Was Night.
The Fever channels that descent into a four-minute drama built on a goth-tinged synth pop chassis. It moves with the mechanical compulsion of a one-armed bandit, each hook a pull of the lever, each beat another spin. Depeche Mode’s sleek machinery is in its bones, The Cure’s romance in its bloodstream, Nick Cave’s menace in its eyes, and Danny Elfman’s playful macabre stitched into its grin…with an unexpected wink toward Regurgitator’s irreverence.
The lyrics tell the story from inside the trap. “Calling my name and it’s fucking with my head / like Dr. Jekyll,” the voice confesses. The cycle is clear: seduce, abuse, repeat. A poisoned mind believes it’s winning, even as control slips away. The voice is icy, the beat insistent, the synth lines loop like clinging, obsessive thoughts. It’s addiction rendered as a toxic relationship…one that only tightens its grip.
Beneath the club-ready surface, the track mirrors the original TV episode’s tension. Franklin Gibbs’s hallucination of a slot machine chasing him down a hotel hallway becomes, here, a rhythm that feels as if it’s stalking the listener. The refrain circles back again and again: play it again, until I win, capturing the logic of compulsion: the next pull will be the one.
Listen to The Fever below and order the single here.
Sharone’s résumé is as eclectic as the influences packed into this song. Beyond touring with Puscifer and playing bass for Stolen Babies, he has worked as a session musician and ghostwriter for top Hollywood composers. His original composition premiered at Walt Disney Concert Hall by Hilary Hahn revealed his classical reach; his years as an in-house composer for a leading animation studio honed his instinct for pacing and mood.
With The Fever, Sharone steps from the scoring stage into the front light again. The result is both personal and theatrical: a parable of compulsion set to a dark dance beat, built to move the body while keeping the mind in the tightening grip of the machine.
The house, as always, grins in the end.
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