The problem with surf rock is that it’s so narrowly understood within our minds, stock mental footage consisting almost exclusively of Wipe Out, Dick Dale, The Beach Boys and Quentin Tarantino.
Whilst its bubblegum did admittedly often get stuck to your shoe, if you stripped away the Hawaiian shirt and pecs there was something darker and more primal within this early strand of rock n’ roll: listening to The Cramps doing their beyond-parodic version of Surfin’ Bird should give you the idea.
La Luz formed in Seattle a decade ago but relocated to LA, vocalist Shana Cleveland citing one of the motivating reasons as: ‘To me it seems like a place that encourages…mysticism and open-mindedness.’
Now a trio, over the course of a decade they’ve built up a catalogue which has playfully related to their adopted home’s eccentricity. As proof, take for instance 2015’s sophomore release Weirdo Shrine, a concept album based on a graphic novel where teenagers spread an STD which – trust us – you didn’t want to catch.
As well as this they’ve been steadily navigating through a nano-genre dubbed Surf Noir, a platter which combines day and night-time moods, rock and roll, psychedelia and skewed sixties’ pop.
Throw it all together and you’ve got the recipe for their self-titled fourth album, one which the band – Cleveland plus bassist Lena Simon and Alice Sandhal on keyboards – says vibes on their personal chemistry and, ‘The way reality becomes mystical when you stop and let it reveal itself to you’.
As a listener you’d be within your rights here to think anything could happen, however a couple of plays reveal this isn’t a wildly different rodeo to the ones which have gone before. Opener In The Country has a familiar big wave riff, but Cleveland’s voice is soft and the harmonies tight, whilst the occasional spaced out woosh adds some cosmic kitsch to a frothily potent brew.
This is mood music – and they do swing. At the melancholy end of the scale the winsome Oh, Blue plays out as skeletal, stop-start heartbreak, whilst the equally doleful Lazy Eyes and Dune marches to a place where all the leaves are brown and the skies are most definitely grey.
There are at least some interesting outliers though; The Pines opens with some wonderfully ugly bass then wigs out to a steepling retro-keyboard-solo, hepcat hymn Metal Man tempts the robot guy in question to ‘Do what you gotta do’, whilst reverb heavy instrumental Yuba Rot feels like the long-deleted soundtrack to some incomprehensible Aquarian cult pic.
It’s this permanent feeling of make believe that does Cleveland and her friends something of a disservice. Playing it straighter reveals a crew who can do more than hide within a spell, the sweetly gauche Walking Down The Street and the eastern-tinged I Won’t Hesitate’s ode to love (of the earthly kind) both quirk-free grooves that satisfy on their own vibrant terms.
Maybe La Luz are victims of our own closed off attitude towards surf rock, a genre that was perma-shaped decades ago into suspended animation, and for which the only thing we care to care about of it is to dress up whichever corpse its wearing.
Making it be different is a job the trio didn’t have to take on, but they did, and the consistent inconsistency of the results says the big one is still out there, waiting to be ridden.
