I’ll meet you under the cover of darkness
Take a walk with me and show me what I’ve missed
Descending glow like a nocturnal rainbow
Illuminating shadows stretching over me
Rani Sharone has lived enough musical lives to make most careerists look like they’ve been standing in line at the deli. Session musician, ghost writer, touring player, bandleader, concert-hall composer, animation-house insider; the résumé reads like somebody kept changing masks at a party and every mask came with its own passport stamp. There is something delicious about And It Was Night, a project that takes all that mileage and pours it back into a form built for mood, movement, and the old glamorous unease that goth has always sold best when it remembers to loosen its collar.
His latest single, What’s Beyond the Light? feels like the work of somebody who understands that darkness is rarely empty; rather it is crowded, busy, suggestive, full of half-seen impulses and private little panics dressed up for an evening out. Sharone draws from Depeche Mode, The Cure, Nick Cave, and the broader back room of dark alternative pop, but he handles those influences with enough poise that they feel like old debts paid in full rather than names dropped for atmosphere. The result has body and reach. The beat keeps moving with a dancer’s discipline while the guitars spread a soft blur around the edges, and the electronics give the whole thing a narcotic glow, like the moon reflecting off a windshield at the exact moment you realize you may have missed your turn ten miles back.
The song’s central idea is a beauty: a guide leading someone through the night while perception starts slipping around like loose floorboards under wet shoes. Moonlit walks inspired it, and you can hear that origin in the way the track treats darkness as both seduction and setup. Night reveals, but it also rearranges. Familiar things take on strange proportions. Fear sidles in beside wonder. Love becomes a lantern with weak batteries. Sharone understands that the mind is a terrific special-effects department when it gets left alone with a little weather and a little desire.
The force that keeps this from drifting into perfume-counter gloom is the song’s sense of purpose. It wants the club, certainly, but it also wants that private internal cinema people carry around without admitting it. You can picture the dry ice, the black clothes, the solemn faces trying very hard to look blasé, yet there is real feeling under the makeup. The track moves with elegance, but there’s unease in its bloodstream, and that tension makes it live.
For a third single, this is a strong statement of intent. Sharone sounds like a man returning to his first love with better tools, sharper instincts, and enough lived-in mystery to make the romance worth following into the dark.
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