Hardly Art is pleased to announce the return of L.A. shredders La Luz, whose new album Floating Features will arrive on LP, CD, digital, and cassette Friday, May 11th. Propulsive first single ‘Cicada’ offers a taste of Floating Features‘ blissed-out hi-fi sound.
Watch director Ryan D. Browne‘s soap opera-satirising music video.
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.
Photo credit: Vikesh Pakoor
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” catalyses nightmare fuel into a propulsive, intentionally-disorienting collision of honeyed harmonies and Takeshi Terauchi-esque jetstreams of distorted surf guitar. ‘Mean Dream’ unsurprisingly mines dream-state 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 Shrinetoward lush, hi-fidelity production value. Li Pino’s drums have never sounded more thunderously muscular, Simon’s bass-lines 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 colouring 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.
Photo Credit: Vikesh Kapoor
PRESS QUOTES:
“Sturdy, passionate, mysterious, fully committed…” — The New York Times
“The undercurrent of darkness in La Luz’s music is what makes their work so fierce and intelligent.” — Pitchfork
“There’s a deep intensity and knowing behind all that mellow.” — NPR
“La Luz aren’t just operating at a higher level than their surf-influenced contemporaries, they’ve moved into a completely different headspace.”
— Consequence of Sound
“The last time that the surf-rock aesthetic sounded anywhere close to this vibrant or vital was when Quentin Tarantino decided to bookend Pulp Fiction with ‘Miserlou’ by Dick Dale and ‘Surf Rider’ by The Lively Ones.” — The AV Club
“Like the great original surf acts, La Luz’s technical precision is difficult to overstate, and a joy to behold.” — Bandcamp
La Luz Floating Features
01. Floating Features
02. Cicada
03. Loose Teeth
04. Mean Dream
05. California Finally
06. The Creature
07. My Golden One
08. Lonely Dozer
09. Greed Machine
10. Walking into the Sun
11. Don’t Leave Me on the Earth
LA LUZ ONLINE: FACEBOOK | TWITTER | I
