La Luz – La Luz (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 37:34 minutes | 807 MB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Hardly Art
On their fourth album, California surf-rock band La Luz chill out a bit. There’s little of the needling, propulsive dance music that have inspired audiences to stage dive and crowd surf. Sure, you could still do that to songs like “Metal Man,” with its spaced-out Jetsons synth and hip-shaking bells, but you don’t necessarily want to be aloft when the slow-dredge chorus rolls in. With its throbbing bass, haunted-house keyboards and jangling tambourine, “The Pines” might be the band’s most “dance-y” song on this record. But this is lava-lamp lounge grooviness, not a Pleasure Seekers garage stomp. Excellent “In the Country” is dusty, high-plains-drifter mood music—Spaghetti Western guitars, spooky harmonies and all—undercut by bursts of shooting lasers. “Why leave?/ We can have all we need/ Growing out in the country,” Shana Cleveland sings, perhaps hinting at her life over the past few years, since the new mom left the hustle of Los Angeles for a large piece of land in Northern California. Wurlitzer-propelled slow jam “Watching Cartoons,” which sounds like it could be a Bachelor cover, likewise reflects a new insular desire: “The days all seem so bright/ If you look for me, I’ll be inside/ Watching cartoons.” Meanwhile, “Yuba Rot”—one of two instrumentals on the album, along with foreboding closer “Spider House”— is described in the press materials as “a meditation on the cycle of birth and decay that can feel like the only truth in a world turned upside down.” It’s also a heavyweight swim through molasses. As always, the band’s harmonies are some of the coolest around. They take on a doo-wop style for dreamy ballad “Oh, Blue,” with Cleveland’s mooning earth-angel vocals floating over drunken guitar. “Goodbye Ghost”—with its punchy drums and blustery guitar solo (Cleveland has cited Japanese hot-lick virtuoso Takeshi Terauchi as her greatest guitar inspiration)—finds bassist Lena Simon, and keyboardist Alice Sandahl harmonizing half a beat behind Cleveland, and it’s intriguing. So are the drawn-out, off-kilter harmonies (“leave you reeeeling … I meaaaaan it” of country folk “I Won’t Hesitate.” “I won’t ever hesi…tate” the band sings with just the slightest tease of a pause, like a nod to Carly Simon’s “keeping me wai-ai-ai-ai-aiting” on “Anticipation.”
Read more
La Luz – Floating Features (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 35:48 minutes | 427 MB | Genre: Indie Pop
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Hardly Art
Los Angeles has often been described as a ”dream factory”- both a mecca where dreamers converge to pursue long-held aspirations, and a topography of hallucinogenic contradictions: enchanting tangerine sunsets diffused by smog, crystal-clutching spiritualists mingling with deep-pocketed narcissists, rows of scenic palms competing with garish billboards for commuters’ attention. It was against this backdrop that the four members of La Luz–singer/guitarist Shana Cleveland, drummer Marian Li Pino, keyboardist Alice Sandahl, and bassist Lena Simon conceived of Floating Features, the band’s third studio album. For this, their most ambitious release yet, La Luz consulted landscapes both physical and psychological. References to dreams abound on Floating Features. ”Loose Teeth” catalyzes nightmare fuel into a propulsive, intentionally-disorienting collision of honeyed harmonies and Takeshi Terauchi-esque jet-streams of distorted surf guitar. ”Mean Dream” unsurprisingly mines dreamstate imagery, and the lyrics and melody for ”Walking Into the Sun” actually came to Cleveland During a particularly-vivid night of deep sleep. Looming over the album s Coterie of surreal figures (gargantuan cicadas, a monstrous ”Creature,” The Sun King, aliens, the titular ”Lonely Dozer”) is the magnificent ”Greed Machine,” a skulking, insatiable engine of consumption-Nathanael West’s ”business of dreams” fearsomely manifested. Only La Luz could conjure up Floating Features’ Leone-on-LSD vibes, and the album finds the L.A. band at the height of their powers–golden rebels in a golden dream.
Read more