Postcards From The Dark Highway

about this album

Postcards From The Dark Highway is an epic tale of love, war, death and rock'n'roll. Le Chat Noir’s third studio album, released in May 2009, is a thematic prequel to the band's previous two albums, returning to the fictional setting of Silver City and the surrounding Wild West-inspired landscape. Over the course of its 14 tracks the album relates the story of Jack Valentine and Roxy Lecoeur - a pair of desperados who fall foul of the law, fall in love, form a band and ultimately meet their untimely ends out on the Dark Highway. Fans of the previous albums will find out why Mary Lee became a femme fatale as well as meeting a rich host of new characters including the corrupt vigilante priest Father Blackheart, the relentless lawmen of the Silver City Regulators and the saviour of rock'n'roll himself: the legendary Johnny Moorview! LINER NOTES: "The process of recording and writing Postcards From The Dark Highway was a long and at times frustrating journey. We were determined to capture our live energy so that people who haven’t been able to see us yet could get a flavour of what we’re really about. After several aborted attempts we decided to strip things right down and record the music ‘live’ with our gigging equipment; no overdubs or embellishments, just the in-your-face sound you’d expect to hear at one of our shows. In a studio situation you’re faced with the option of layering more guitar parts, adding bass and so on. We’ve resisted the temptation to do this and have

why this is interesting

This thematic prequel rewards careful listening by constructing a complete narrative arc across fourteen tracks, tracing how two marginal figures—Jack Valentine and Roxy Lecoeur—navigate love, criminality, and artistic creation within a richly imagined frontier setting. What distinguishes the album is its commitment to character development through music rather than exposition; the listener gradually pieces together motivations and consequences through lyrical detail and sonic shifts. By positioning itself as a prequel, it invites retrospective interpretation of the band's earlier work while standing independently as a cohesive story. The fusion of rock aesthetics with Western mythology creates something genuinely unusual—neither pure concept album nor simple genre exercise, but rather an exploration of how

tracks

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Deadwood

Phonic FM Session 23/05/08

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Tales From Silver City

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July 2008 Recordings

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