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Laena Myers

Luv (Songs Of Yesterday)

    Wildly creative free-form L.A. singer-songwriter and multi instrumentalist Laena Myers releases her highly anticipated debut solo album, ‘LUV (Songs Of Yesterday)’. Released on Taxi Gauche Records, the 11-track collection is the first to feature the genre-spanning composer, in-demand session player/singer and classically trained violinist putting her own name to her recordings.

    Formerly known as Laena Geronimo and L.M.I. / Laena Myers-Ionita, Laena is perhaps best known as lead singer, songwriter and guitarist of critically-acclaimed and internationally touring rockers FEELS, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. She’s also known for her time as bassist for goth-punk band Numb.er as well as the Motown-inspired pop outfit The Like, and as the go-to-violinist for a myriad of artists from the L.A. music scene and beyond - contributing to released recordings by John Frusciante, Jhené Aiko, Ty Segall, Shannon Lay and The Allah Las to name a few.

    Describing herself as “An awkward, shy kid who played in the Jr. Philharmonic Orchestra of California and wore headphones blasting NIN, The Velvet Underground and Sonic Youth all the time”, Laena cut her teeth in a busking band, performing purely improvised material on street corners in Hollywood and spent the entirety of her young adulthood as a supporting player in countless L.A. bands - at times as many as five simultaneously, while working full time and sleeping in her car during lunch breaks.

    Inspired as much by the soft weight of Hope Sandoval and Patsy Cline’s dramatic powers, Patti Smith’s poetic punk and Nico’s avant-garde musings as she is by contemporaries like Angel Olsen, Aldous Harding and Cate LeBon, her musical roots run deep. She is the daughter of American drummer Alan Myers (DEVO, Skyline Electric, Jean Paul Yamamoto) and Romanian singer/songwriter and visual artist Greta Ionita (Babooshka).

    As a solo artist, Laena's punk background of guitar-based songwriting and swagger merges with her innovative classical/experimental roots and love for singing ballads, and this is shown throughout ‘LUV (Songs Of Yesterday’), leading to a depth of emotion that cuts to the heart of even the most hardened, revealing a more tender side to her vocal and lyrical prowess over lush string arrangements.

    The album’s opening track ‘LUV’, with it’s only lyrics “When I say I’m in love you best believe I mean love L.U.V.” is a nod to The Shangri-Las and New York Dolls, and was used to evocatively soundtrack fashion brand CELINE’s Spring 2020 campaign. “Half the songs on the album are about relationships in which I thought I was in love - true love - but it turned out to be something else”, Laena explains, “so ‘LUV (Songs of Yesterday)’ seemed a fitting title: sounded like love, looked like love, but it wasn’t real love.”

    “The overarching theme of the album is strength in vulnerability” Laena explains, “it’s a collection of songs that were too personal and dreamy for FEELS, songs of haunted love, melancholy and hope, selected and woven together with instrumental segues and field recordings into a whole experience.”

    The record’s first single, ‘Give ‘Em Hell’, written six months after her father passed away, is about keeping the flame alive and having the courage to believe in yourself. “We were very close” she says. “One night before I got on stage he stopped me and said “Give ‘em hell, kid”, and this phrase has become a mantra to me, to not hold back and give it my ALL. Many of these songs come from heavy times”, she continues, “but there is always the glimmer of a brighter tomorrow. Reach out when you need to, move through the gears and you’ll come out the other side.”

    The songs contained in ‘LUV (Songs Of Yesterday)’ are picked from over the course of a decade, written purely from a place of honest expression and filled with texture, depth, and meaning. They were recorded between tours mostly in sweltering summer bedrooms by friend and co-producer Scott Cornish (Angel Olsen, Big Thief, No Age), and mixed during the pandemic. The album features Laena’s vocals, guitar, bass, and violin playing and huge-sounding, lush string arrangements supplemented with drums and percussion by Nick Murray (Cate Le Bon, White Fence, Thee Oh Sees), synths by Jeff Fribourg (Numb.er, Froth), lap steel by Cole Berliner (Kamikaze Palm Tree), and sax by Gabe Flores (Grave Flowers Bongo Band), as well as field recordings — birds singing at daybreak, footsteps and bells making their way into a cave, the wind on a peak in Angeles National Forest. 


    TRACK LISTING

    1. LUV
    2. Pulsar
    3. Bouquet
    4. Give Em Hell
    5. Reflectors
    6. Strong
    7. The Choir
    8. Splendour
    9. Kitchen Humming
    10. About A Thing
    11. I Wouldn’t Mind

    Chloe Gallardo

    Defamator

      Defamator is the long-time-coming debut project of 24-year-old Chloe Gallardo. It tells a story of betrayal in love and friendship and the painful reality of overcoming love lost and former heartbreak. Drawing influences from artists such as Broadcast, Grouper & My Bloody Valentine Gallardo adds her own haunting, folk-style vocals and hyper-specific lyrics to create a sonic unique to her. A style that she describes in her words as “dark shoegaze bedroom indie pop”.

      Album opener “Bloodline” epitomises this bittersweet modus operandi. 15 seconds into its dainty acoustic strum , Gallardo adamantly sulks “I’m fucked up” - the salvo of a lyric about feeling like a family disappointment. As the track lifts up into a cascading gaze-pop rush, recalling the likes of Bachelor and Snail Mail, we’re blessed with a pristine elegance that belies the song’s raging core. “I have always written music this way.”, she says of this fundamental contradiction. “It’s funny because I try so hard to write darker-sounding songs and they always come out way too pretty. So, I’ve resorted to writing the most gut-wrenching and intense lyrics to compensate.”

      Written mostly during peak-pandemic times in Gallardo’s bedroom - (“you can hear how scared and alone I was.”) - the songs that made their way onto Defamator arose from a concerted period of healing. Drawing from the teachings of therapy, the songwriting process gave her the means to channel some deeply entrenched emotional scars.

      This venting of anger is implicit throughout the record. The album’s title - Gallardo’s own neologism - uses the concepts of “defamation” and “defamatory speech” to innovate a kind of pejorative accusation. As a result, it is like we are actively listening to Gallardo forcefully take command of her past. Of the title track she explains: “The song Defamator is about someone who spoke untruthful things about me in order to manipulate me and the way people perceived me and I felt that was an underlying theme in most of the album.”

      Recorded at Jazzcat Studios in Long Beach California with Jonny Bell (Hanni El Khatib, Adult Books, etc.) Defamator marks Gallardo’s first time in a “legitimate recording studio”. And it shows. Bell’s production is vital moving part here. There’s more stripped back affairs - ‘There Will Be Blood”; ”The Way’ - songs which gently seethe and purr like Grouper’s spectral dream-pop; Gallardo’s fluttering folk-ish voice gloriously pushed to forefront.

      TRACK LISTING

      1) Bloodline
      2) God Is Dead
      3) There W`ill Be Blood
      4) Defamator
      5) (Untitled)
      6) New Jersey
      7) To See You Go
      8) The Way
      9) Last Dance
      10) New Jersey (Reprise) 

      Harvey Rushmore & The Octopus

      Freedomspacecake

        Cannot recommend this LP more for fans of Moon Duo, Spacemen 3 and Black Angels.

        Following a much needed hiatus Harvey Rushmore & The Octopus release their third studio album, a heady mix of garage, psych and Krautrock.

        ‘Freedomspacecake’ is the band’s 46 minute dystopian and fuzz-soaked answer to a world tripping over one disaster to the next with the sting of the thrilling ride.

        The members of the band have known each other for over 15 years - Massimo Tondini and Jakob Läser, were former members of the band Navel – and as with fellow veterans of psych rock such as The Heads and Wooden Shjips they plough a tantalising locked groove.


        TRACK LISTING

        1. Plastiq
        2. Speedmaster
        3. The Wiper
        4. Bakerman
        5. Rainbow Machine
        6. Trip In The Mountain
        7. Spacegarage In Your Head
        8. Harvey Stardust
        9. Freedomspacecake

        Adult Books

        Grecian Urn

          Adult Books is the brainchild of Los Angeles-based writer and multi-instrumentalist Nick Winfrey. With the help of childhood friends Sina Salessi (drums) and Alex Galindo (guitar/synth), Winfrey crafts lyric-driven dark pop gems that recall the hook-heavy guitar work of Johnny Marr, the just-below-the-collar angst of Mission of Burma, and the doomsday bellow of early Echo and the Bunnymen.

          After a well-received string of bedroom demos and cassettes, Adult Books released their first full-length album, Running from the Blows , in 2016, trading in their previous home-recorded sounds for a cleaned-up act that allowed Winfrey’s pop savvy and understated lyrical wit to shine through. Two years of heavy touring followed, after which Winfrey found himself both burned out and uninspired by the business of music.

          Following a much-needed hiatus, Adult Books is finally ready to share their sophomore LP, Grecian Urn . Recorded with Jonny Bell (Crystal Antlers) and mastered by Dave Cooley (Animal Collective, J Dilla) , Grecian Urn was crafted over the course of nearly two years; however, the seeds of the album were sown more than a decade earlier. When sitting down to write Grecian Urn , Winfrey revisited old demos, forgotten voice memos and unfinished fragments of songs to create something wholly new.

          The end result is a self-assured and intensely personal album that places Winfrey’s evocative images and economic storytelling approach front and center. A loose concept album of sorts, Grecian Urn draws on classical Mediterranean imagery and mythos as a means of exploring Winfrey’s past traumas and struggles with chronic anxiety.


          TRACK LISTING

          1) Innocence
          2) Receiver
          3) Grecian Urb
          4) Holiday
          5) Florence
          6) 100 Dreams
          7) Apologies
          8) Cassy
          9) Adriatics
          10) Sparrows On The Razor Wire

          Gauche

          People’s History Of Gauche

            A People's History of Gauche, a collective catharsis of anger, frustration, and trauma through creativity. Jason P Barnett, Adrienne CN Berry, Mary Jane Regalado, Pearie Sol, and Daniele Yandel find their agency and joy through creating and performing music together in 36 minutes of groove-filled power punk. When asked about the genesis of the title of their Merge debut, Daniele cited this definition: A people's history, or history from below, is an account of events from the perspective of common people rather than leaders, the story of mass movements and of outsiders. It's a fitting title for an album that tackles such heavy topics as anxiety, capitalism and colonialization, and healing ancestral traumas, as well as dismantling and dissecting patriarchy, creating beauty in the face of oppressive forces, and resisting exploitation. These are vital songs manifested in a celebratory manner, created quickly through the group's self-proclaimed "Gauche magic." Recorded with Austin Brown (Parquet Courts) and Robert Szmurlo in Brooklyn, NY, and with Jonah Takagi (Ex Hex) in DC, A People’s History of Gauche marks the first time the band worked with people outside of their ranks, resulting in a fuller sound that boasts more intricate instrumentation.

            From the very first line of album opener “Flash”—“Light’s supposed to show the way, not over-expose it”—Gauche are here to compel us to dance while singing along about society’s universal struggles. Gauche undoubtedly make art, but their guiding tenet is craft. "When I say that, I mean in the sense that Art with a capital A is thought of as something rarefied, something outside the context of everyday life, outside of everyone's grasp or potential," expounds Daniele. "That sense of craft, of something you return to every day and is valuable because it is something you share in common with all people, is how I think of music. Well, good music at least." Gauche bring us music and movement and struggle and light, and now it is our job to dance! 

            TRACK LISTING

            1. Flash, Cycles,
            2. Pay Day,
            3. Surveilled Society,
            4. Copper Woman,
            5. Running. 
            6. Boom Hazard,
            7. Dirty Jacket,
            8. History,
            9. Rent (v.),
            10. Rectangle..

            (7” Flexi Track Is “Conspiracy Theories”). 


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