Photo credit: Chona Kasinger
After months of anticipation, La Luz‘s lush, lysergic new album Floating Features is finally out today. Shot through with rays of smoggy LA sunshine, the record navigates disorienting dreamscapes throughout its 11 impeccable tracks particularly ‘Mean Dream,’ which has a new music video from director Ryan D. Browne that premiered this morning on Brooklyn Vegan. Watch it below.
Press quotes:
“Stealthily yet rapidly spirals into a psychedelic phantasmagoria, multiplying voices, guitars, drums, reverb and feedback…” – The New York Times
“Cleveland’s riffs are as steel-edged as ever against Pino’s propulsive drums and the chorus’ séancey harmonies.” – NPR
“This is by far the band’s best offering to date.” – Exclaim!, 9/10
“Easily La Luz’s best move yet.” – London in Stereo
“Phantasmagorical and just plain fantastic.” – Louder Than War
“La Luz should be your new favorite band.” – NARC
“The La Luz ladies flex their instrumental and tonal refinement to trophy levels.” – Skinny Mag
“A solid third from the LA dream rockers; an album you won’t regret picking up.” – Bristol Live Magazine
La Luz
Floating Features
01. Floating Features
02. Cicada [stream] [vid]
03. Loose Teeth
04. Mean Dream [vid]
05. California Finally [stream]
06. The Creature [stream] [vid]
07. My Golden One
08. Lonely Dozer
09. Greed Machine
10. Walking into the Sun
11. Don’t Leave Me on the Earth
Bio
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 jetstreams 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.
To bring these visions to stereophonic life, La Luz pivoted from the DIY trailer-park brio of It’s Alive and the gritted-up urgency of Weirdo Shrine toward lush, hi-fidelity production value. Li Pino’s drums have never sounded more thunderously muscular, Simon’s basslines more robust-yet-agile, Sandahl’s organ melodies more complementary, Cleveland’s layers of guitar more versatile, or the group’s trademark harmonies more bewitching and rapturous. For every one of Floating Features’ seismic crescendos, there are just as many small, evocative details coloring its somnambulist soundscape.
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.
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