Posts Tagged ‘La Luz’

LA LUZ – ” La Luz “

Posted: September 23, 2021 in MUSIC
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On their self-titled fourth album, La Luz launch themselves into a new realm of emotional intimacy for a collection of songs steeped in the mysteries of the natural world and the magic of human chemistry that has found manifestation in the musical ESP between guitarist and songwriter Shana Cleveland, bassist Lena Simon, and keyboardist Alice Sandahl.

To help shape La Luz, the band found a kindred spirit in producer Adrian Younge. Though primarily known for his work with hip-hop, soul, and jazz acts, Younge saw in La Luz a shared vision that transcended genre. “We both create music with the same attitude, and that’s what I love about them,” he says. “They are never afraid to be risky and their style is captivating. It was an honour to work with them.”

The result is an album that is both the most naturalistic and psychedelic of the band’s career. All the elements of classic La Luz are still present—the lush harmonies, the impeccable musicianship, the gorgeous melodies—but it’s a richer, earthier iteration, replete with inorganic sounds that mimic the surreality of nature—the humming of invisible bugs, the atmospheric sizzle of a hot day. After spending the last few years living in rural northern California, Cleveland’s lyrics have become more grounded, less interested in traveling to other dimensions than in peeking behind the curtain of this one.

La Luz shimmers into existence with a tender strumming of electric guitar on the ghostly “In the Country.” The record then charges ahead with the dynamic “The Pines,” propelled by Simon’s thunderous bassline and punctuated by eerie vibrating keys while Cleveland’s voice hovers high and sweet overhead—no reverb, no fooling. Sandahl leads the way with a soulful Hammond organ on the dreamy, funky “Watching Cartoons,” while the women’s voices weave in and around each other, coming together in a cascade of “ba ba ba ba’s” in the chorus.

Later, the band cranks up the atmospherics on madcap stomper “Metal Man” with a frenzy of ultra-fuzzed out guitar, blaring galactic synths, and epic clanging bells. The record’s themes coalesce on breezy 70s folk-tinged pop song “I Won’t Hesitate,” an ode to finding intimacy in a weird world, and the languid ballad “Lazy Eyes and Dune,” which features lovely Mellotron work from Simon. La Luz is an album that celebrates love—of music, of friendship, of life in all its forms.

–Mariana Timony 

Releases October 22nd, Hardly Art Records.

LA LUZ – ” Watching Cartoons “

Posted: July 22, 2021 in MUSIC
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La Luz has always been a band with a vision. Their discography is a study in balancing both heavenly and haunting sounds for a lush style of rock music that’s all their own. On their self-titled fourth album, La Luz fearlessly launch themselves into a new realm of emotional intimacy with a collection of songs steeped in the mysteries of the natural world and the magic of human chemistry that has found manifestation in the musical ESP between guitarist and songwriter Shana Cleveland, bassist Lena Simon, and keyboardist Alice Sandahl.  
 
To help shape La Luz, the band found a kindred spirit in producer Adrian Younge. Primarily known for working with hip-hop, soul, and jazz acts, Younge saw in La Luz a musical kinship that transcended genre. “We both create music with the same attitude, and that’s what I love about them,” he says. “They are never afraid to be risky and their style is captivating. I don’t work with many bands, but I love taking chances on people that share the same vision. We both love to be ourselves, and it was an honour to work with them.” The album was recorded at Linear Labs Studio in Los Angeles.
 
On the heels of La Luz’s previously launched single “In the Country,” the group is sharing a new video for “Watching Cartoons,” directed by Nathan Castiel.

 This mixed media adventure follows the band as they spend the day watching cartoons but it becomes clear that something is not quite right! After being gifted a mysterious TV, the band starts getting sucked into their favourite cartoons. Will Shana save Alice and Lena before it’s too late? Tune in to “Watching Cartoons” and find out.

La Luz recently announced a 34-date world tour with North American shows in 2021 and European dates following in April and May 2022. 

LA LUZ – ” In the Country “

Posted: June 18, 2021 in MUSIC
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La Luz is a band from Seattle, WA, started in the summer of 2012 by Shana Cleveland (guitar), Alice Sandahl (keyboard) and Lena Simon (bass). Everyone sings. Songs by Shana and La Luz.

Available June 15th La Luz is sharing its new single “In The Country” the group’s first new material since the release of Floating Features, their acclaimed album of 2018, available today at all DSPs from Hardly Art.  Shana Cleveland, the band’s frontperson, offers this, “I moved to the country a few years ago after living in cities for most of my life. Being out in the middle of nowhere makes it easy to imagine how it would be possible to leave society altogether. I love how in this track some of the most unnatural elements of the arrangement (synthesizers, fuzz, effects) create an atmosphere around the instruments that ends up feeling very natural–I can hear bugs buzzing around and bird sounds in different directions.”

You can watch La Luz’s new visualizer for “In the Country,” which was created by the band’s own Lena Simon, 

La Luz has announced a 34 date world tour with North American shows in 2021 and European dates to follow in April and May 2022.  

LA LUZ – ” Tale Of My Lost Love ” (Female Species Cover)

Posted: April 20, 2021 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Los Angeles’s La Luz have released a new Numero Group 7″ single where they cover “Tale of My Lost Love” which was originally written and performed in 1966 by Female Species. The flip side features the original song and it’s out to promote the new Female Species compilation the label just released.

Our Los Angeles friends La Luz just cut this cover of “Tale Of My Lost Love,” originally written and performed in 1966 by Female Species. The surf and undertow-inspired La Luz are one of the best in the business right now—check their three albums on Hardly Art if you don’t know. Their compelling version of “Tale” is the first fresh take on a Female Species original in many a moon. We suspect it will not be the last.

Behold the Female Species! A once-in-a-decade discovery of two sisters, married to music for life, always charging forward, indefatigable, indomitable, at last seen and heard. From their origins as the archetypal mid-’60s southern California girl group to their destiny as top-flight songwriters in the ’80s and ’90s Nashville country-industrial complex, Vicki and Ronni Gossett have never been much further than 20 feet from stardom. Fifty-five years into their remarkable story,Tale Of My Lost Love was the Gossetts‘ debut album – an ode to what could have been, and still might be.

Tale Of My Lost Love (Cover) · La Luz released through Numero Group on: 2021-04-16

SHANA CLEVELAND – ” Night of the Worm Moon ” Best Albums Of 2019

Posted: December 12, 2019 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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At long last, “Night of the Worm Moon”, the highly-anticipated new album from La Luz singer/guitarist Shana Cleveland is out on LP, CD, digital, and cassette. Critics are already calling the album a “miniature masterpiece” (Uncut) and “a triumph entirely of its own kind. It’s like a garden of quiet yet cosmic folk delights with chasers of old west sounds” (The Big Takeover) that “silently explodes and blossoms out like a magical cosmic flower, arriving just in time for the Spring Equinox” (SLUG Magazine). LP copies on “Face of the Sun Yellow” at Shana’s merch table on her upcoming North American tour while supplies last.

Night of the Worm Moon, the new solo album from Shana Cleveland, the singer/guitarist of acclaimed surf rock band La Luz, watch Shana’s music video for album standout “Face of the Sun” . Cleveland directed this homage to ’70s-era anti-drug PSAs herself. Night of the Worm Moon sees Cleveland expanding her sonic palette, incorporating psychedelic folk sounds with out-there subject matter and inspiration including Afro futurism and alternate dimensions.

An idyllic day takes a turn for the surreal in this music video for “Face of the Sun,” from Night of the Worm Moon, the solo album by La Luz’s Shana Cleveland, Also check out the psychedelic music video for Shana Cleveland’s “Don’t Let Me Sleep,” off the solo album from the La Luz singer/guitarist, The video, from director Ryan Daniel Browne, stars Cleveland as an extraterrestrial exploring a woodland environment under a full moon as the landscape transforms around her.

Shana Cleveland is in the middle of a nightmare when Night of the Worm Moon begins, scrambling over a fence with an unnamed threat in pursuit. “They’ll catch me alive / Don’t let me sleep too late,” she begs on the chorus. The half-dreamt plea sets a spooky opening scene for an album of eerie acoustic lullabies that take place in subconscious worlds—ones full of menace, but equally full of love. Accompanied by only the sparest of instrumentation, Cleveland uses the meditative quality of fingerpicked guitar to create moments of heightened perception and thrumming reverie. She isn’t quite a futurist—the alternate dimensions she explores in her music exist alongside our own—but where Cleveland lights up entire galaxies with her rock band, La Luz, the intimate universe she spins as a solo act can fit in the palm of your hand. Full of flickering baroque details and gorgeously arranged melodic passages,

“Don’t Let Me Sleep” is the second single from Night of the Worm Moon.

Night of the Worm Moon was recorded during the 2017 solar eclipse and was inspired by Afrofuturism, science fiction, and the surreality of daily life in Los Angeles.

SHANA CLEVELAND – ” Night of the Worm Moon “

Posted: June 29, 2019 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Though she conjures up an electrical storm of rockstar fireworks with her main gig, La Luz, Shana Cleveland settles into a more contemplative mode on solo LP “Night of the Worm Moon”. A mellow set of sci-fi lullabies written on acoustic guitar rank, the songs on Night rank among the most haunted recordings of Cleveland’s career. “Fingerpicking feels more meditative to me so I go to a more introspective place lyrically and thematically when I play acoustic guitar,” Cleveland said in an interview about “Night of the Worm Moon”, and certainly her fingerpicked patterns create a gentle rhythmic flow that becomes nearly ambient in its soothing tones and pensive unfurling. But what anchors Night isn’t just Cleveland’s accomplished musicianship, but how she expertly excavates wisdom from weirdness on songs that toe the line between what is real and what seems half-remembered from a dream. “Nothing’s the loudest sound in a house when no one’s around,” Cleveland sings on the title track, a truly spooky song wherein the artist imagines herself as a constant presence who watches from within the walls. Throughout Night of the Worm Moon, Cleveland uses the potent power of such psychedelic signifiers to illuminate bright emotional truths in a darkening world that will probably never make sense again.

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what an exceptional collection of transcendental lullabies.  Night of the Worm Moon was recorded during a rare cosmic occurrence: 2017’s solar eclipse. “We took a break from recording during [the] totality and looked at the sun’s image through a piece of cardboard projecting onto a garbage can,” Cleveland says. “When we came back inside the studio was covered in dozens of tiny crescent suns, refracted from a mirrored disco ball that [engineer Johnny Goss] had hanging in a window.” Abetting Cleveland during the recording process was a familiar gallery of co-conspirators: multi-instrumentalist Will Sprott of Shannon & the Clams, original La Luz bassist Abbey Blackwell, Goss, pedal steel player Olie Eshelman, and Kristian Garrard, who drummed on Cleveland’s previous solo effort (with then-backing band The Sandcastles), 2011’s Oh Man, Cover the Ground.

SHANA CLEVELAND – ” Night of the Worm Moon “

Posted: April 2, 2019 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Shana Cleveland has long been beguiling listeners as the front-woman for elastic surf rockers La Luz. Inspired in part by one of her musical idols, the Afro-futurist visionary Sun Ra (the album’s title is a tip of the hat to his 1970 release Night of the Purple Moon), Night of the Worm Moon blends pastoral folk with cosmic concerns, including alternate realities to divine celestial bodies. Cleveland first came up through the Seattle music scene as the front woman of surf-rock quartet La Luz. This isn’t her first solo project, but so far, it feels like her most daring. She concocted Night of the Worm Moon while living in Los Angeles,

Shana Cleveland will be hitting the road in support of the new solo record on April 5th, headlining in the west and supporting the Mountain Goats in the east!! These’ll be real special spacey sets and I can’t wait to share this record with y’all!

“Night of the Worm Moon” is the title track from the new solo album by La Luz’s Shana Cleveland, out 4/5/19

LA LUZ – ” Floating Features ” Best Albums Of 2018

Posted: December 16, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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La Luz is a band in Seattle, WA, started in the summer of 2012 by Shana Cleveland (guitar), Marian Li Pino (drums), Alice Sandahl (keyboard) and Lena Simon (bass). Everyone sings. Songs by Shana and La Luz.

La Luz just might be the greatest rock band in the world. It’s OK if you didn’t know. Since achieving instant hype on the strength of their pretty garage pop songs and haunted girl group vocals floating around guitarist Shana Cleveland’s glow-in-the-dark surf guitar lines, La Luz’s music has possessed an effortless ear candy quality that makes it easy to overlook—if not outright dismiss. But La Luz have always been stealth rock-‘n’-rollers with a taste for the raw; their discography reveals a band gradually ramping up the intensity of their sound while cloaking its creeping menace in soft clouds of four-part harmonies that soothe.

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With the epic Floating Features, La Luz’s slow burn reaches a boiling point, leaving no doubt that the quartet—Cleveland, bassist Lena Simon, organist Alice Sandahl, and drummer Marian Li-Pino—are among the most imaginative, dynamic rock bands currently active. Always technically impeccable, Floating Features is a showcase for the band’s deeply empathetic musical chemistry, embodied in moments of impassioned musicianship delivered with all of the confidence and none of the cockiness commonly associated with rock star moments. And there are a few of them here. Floating Features is a record rife with moments that thrill, from Cleveland’s fearless, heartbreaking guitar solos, her most powerful passages often preceded by howls emanating from somewhere just deep within the sound, to the angelic, enveloping atmospherics of “Mean Dream,” to stunning centerpiece “California Finally,” a song so rhythmically complex it seems to follow its own dream logic; the chorus of “I do what I want” tumbles into echolalia as Cleveland plays catch-up with Li-Pino’s off-kilter beats. A record of luminous beauty and subtle majesty, Floating Featuresis a portrait of a rock band playing at the peak of their powers, La Luz’s very own Houses of the Holy remade in their own heavenly image.

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LA LUZ – ” Floating Features “

Posted: July 2, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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A Seattle by way of Los Angeles four-piece who drag the sounds of 60s girl bands and classic surf rock into a sun-kissed Californian present. Exuding effortless cool, La Luz take the lazy, endless summer mood of Los Angeles at sunset, and essay on it through driving rhythms, honeycombed vocal harmonies, and breezy surf and garage rock guitar figures straight out of the Takeshi Terauchi playbook. On Floating Features, the four-piece write rich, vivid, and impressionistic studies of life viewed through the surreal, hallucinogenic haze of the city of angels, earning their spot in the Californian sun. La Luz hasn’t made one single weak song- everything they do rips. This new album just continues their unbeaten streak.

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With comparisons to Mild High Club, The Shangri-Las, Dum Dum Girls La Luz started in the summer of 2012 by Shana Cleveland (guitar), Marian Li Pino (drums), Alice Sandahl (keyboard) and Lena Simon (bass).

LA LUZ – ” Live On KEXP “

Posted: May 21, 2018 in MUSIC
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La Luz

Ever since they first appeared in 2012 with their lush combination of moody surf guitar and luminous girl group harmonies, La Luz have pushed the expressive possibilities of surf into ever more adventurous realms, with songwriting and arrangements that have grown increasingly sophisticated over time. The band’s latest LP, Floating Features, is the most fully-realized version of their sound to date, a record of complex, cerebral rock songs that feel as light and effortless as pop.

Floating Features was recorded in Nashville, and it marked the first time the group had been able to “take full advantage of all the bells and whistles and the toys that were just kind of laying around the studio,” remembers Simon, the group’s resident gearhead. “Harpsichord, orchestra chimes, marimba, all the different pedals. A Leslie speaker, too. We ran different organs through the Leslie with various effects.”

Like the rest of the band’s discography, Floating Features is a record that hinges upon La Luz’s preternatural talent for writing songs that balance the menacing edge of instrumental surf with sunny harmonies, a mix that’s defined the band from the beginning.

presents La Luz performing live in the KEXP studio. Recorded March 9th, 2013

Songs:
Big Big Blood
Call Me In The Day
It’s Alive
Sure As Spring

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