Black Hollies not a 'dark' version 1960s pop group

Justin Angelo Morey acknowledges that his band's name, The Black Hollies, might be a bit misleading at first.

However, he says he has no idea where the dreary Graham Nash comparisons are coming from once people actually hear the music, especially since the name is a reference to the Nash opposite of disco subculture.

"I don't hear The Hollies. I don't even particularly like them," he says. "But a lot of people actually will say, 'Oh, Black Hollies, that's the evil, darker version of The Hollies when, actually, black hollies was slang for 'speed up' here in these parts in the '60s and '70s. We read about these people going to clubs and being on purple hearts or black hollies, and we thought that black hollies sounded kind of cool."

"These parts" would be the band's stomping grounds of New Jersey, where they formed roughly four years ago from the remnants of hard rockers Rye Coalition. Morey's former band found a lot of success through work with big names like Dave Grohl and Queens of the Stone Age.

But while many would be impressed by this, it's a contentious topic for him.

"Some write-ups I see say, 'The Black Hollies, featuring members of Rye Coalition,' and I don't like that. If people like Rye Coalition and they go to our show, they're going to throw apples at us, because we don't sound anything like that," he says. "It's like going to see a band that features ex-members of Spacemen 3 and they sound like Metallica. How bummed out would you be?"

The Black Hollies certainly are not a hard rocking band, per se. They might not perform the sometimes jangly '60s pop of The Hollies, but they do bear a resemblance to the psychedelic buzz of the same decade, most notably The Zombies and occasionally The Who.

Their latest release, "Softly Towards the Light," is a race-to-the-finish time capsule of fuzzy guitars

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