Many waves to the thick of it, a sonic memory, a tremolo boat in the summer sun. Nothing withers away full speed ahead, here comes 'Semi Trucks' with Georgia Overdrive. Across 10 tracks, Brenden Sepe (guitar and vocals) Finn Beard (guitar and vocals), Bronwyn Bradshaw (bass and vocals) and Ian Collins (drums), craft their pop morale with a crude underpinning. An ever ending daisy chain. Shackled loosely in big blue, in the wide open sun stained streets, in a garage on Lexington, in the small bars where everyone acts like stars. Clean guitar, flaccid guitar, noise guitar.

“Well I heard you say, You’re going far away so you can see the shape and the state I’m in, and what was found was lost someway..”

Recorded in the spring of 2024 in Los Angeles with Robbie Cody (Wand, Pink Trash Can) Georgia Overdrive plays like a best-of, hit-laden gut punch. Rocking back and forth as they sing barefoot, sprawled out in a grass field clutching a summer hits floppy disc. Moments pass you with an air of Velvets or Sonics to the late 80’s SST rockers Opal, or down the way, sometimes recalling indie expressionists Summer Hits to culminate in a tenderness and noise wrangling that is homegrown in their native city of Los Angeles. This being the first Semi Trucks album with a full band line up (Sepe released 'Vs California' as a solo bedroom effort in 2021), they went hard and took great care to strike with depth and precision, weaving feedback and sugar-coated hooks. Sepe’s effortless vocal melodies dance with the breathy delivery of Bradshaw’s. The interplay and volleying is effortless as the record unfolds to reveal deeper revelations. A wildfire. Cracked ceramics. Orange and pink flakey chrome in a can. Blissful underpinnings, darker than the night, full speed ahead, nowhere to turn off.

“When it gets loud we can turn the stereo up, say we don’t need the world..”

TRACK LISTING

1. Flower
2. Motorbike Riding Star
3. Darker Than The Night
4. Lou And Edie
5. Famethrower
6. Mustang
7. Secret
8. Hey Lover
9. Somewhere Far Away
10. Birthday Song

Hello and welcome to 'Decide Which Way The Eyes Are Looking', the new record by Lina Tullgren. It is a deeply gorgeous intervention, a carefully ornamented dilemma, the most inviting crisis. Made with a host of Los Angeles musicians, 'Decide' exposes Tullgren’s daring and trust. Each song is a ring of curious sound: the skip of harp strings, the flutter of woodwinds, the ratchet of percussion, the euphonium’s sigh. And at the center of each wreath, Tullgren sings, finding this space between Judee Sill and Sam Jayne. It’s a tone that signals weariness, but a weariness hand-in-hand with tenacity. There’s a clarity, a kind of immovability.

Lina Tullgren’s first record came in 2016, a homemade, under-the-skin set of laments. Subsequent LPs and constant touring cemented Tullgren’s reputation as a composer of “wide-eyed wonder paired with a resonant despair.” 2019’s 'Free Cell' showed Tullgren lingering in the margins of their songs, finding places both aloof and spare. Floodgates opened; Tullgren spent the subsequent years exploring deep listening, improvised music, and extended technique. They developed a patience and faith in cooperation that ranged at the far edge of song. Collaborations with Mayo Thompson and Claire Rousay furthered this development. This was not a break with the past for Tullgren, rather it was an opportunity to see how far a song could go. And from that distance, deep in a landscape of drone and tension, Tullgren returned to the bright vulnerability of a lyric and a hook. Weaving together the affective and the radical, Tullgren took the quiet isolation of a shoreline cabin to write the songs that would become 'Decide Which Way The Eyes Are Looking'.

For Tullgren, 'Decide' is a culmination of all the work they’ve done throughout their life: the melodic, the dense, the confessional, the unknowable. It’s also a tribute to collaboration. Describing the sessions as having “a lot of space and a lot of ease,” Tullgren invited musicians from a vast field of songmaking to play on the recording: Leng Bian, Zach Burba, Luke Csehak, Corey Fogel, Jenny Hirons, Tara Milch, Tim Ramsey, Michael Sachs, Jude Tedaldi, Marta Tiesenga and Ben Varian. Jonny Kosmo’s backhouse was offered as a cozy, easygoing space for the players to create their parts together, and the record was completed by Tullgren and Luke Csehak together at their Los Angeles home. In Tullgren’s words: “I feel really strongly that this album is a portrait of the community I found in Los Angeles.”

'Decide Which Way The Eyes Are Looking' is a quiet masterpiece: a generous, memorable journey. It is the result of five years of labor, the product of abandoning the pop song entirely and starting over. Whatever wanderings or doubt fueled it, 'Decide' is also entirely at ease: a record on which Tullgren sings “and I know/what to do now” and “I know exactly what to do” in subsequent songs, clear in the revelations this path has given them.

TRACK LISTING

1. A Day Walks By
2. Glow Emits
3. Window Dream
4. Poem
5. Flex
6. A Go To
7. Explain A Green
8. Something New All Day
9. Shedding Shredding
10. Do You Know What I Mean

To address the weight of the world without speaking of weariness. To march the song to breathlessness but loosen your grip when the band wanders. To tell all your secrets but shield your loved ones from vulnerability. To dress up in the charm and temptation of the pop song but maintain a core of peculiarity, of a single voice trying to navigate this world. This is the project of the Spatulas.

Think of the few songwriters who know they’re the only ones in the world who could write their songs. The ones who sing in the confidence that the song couldn’t exist without them: Peter Jefferies, Jenny Mae, Ron House, Heather Lewis. Jonathan Richman? Put Miranda Soileau-Pratt and the Spatulas on this list.

All eleven songs on debut album ‘Beehive Mind’ share a percussive, unshadowed presence, a steady, clear-voiced clop. Every note on the record is a little bit sad on its own but then they’re organized in a way that you don't actually notice. Credit this to the band’s skill - Jon Grothman, Lila Jarzombek, Kyle Raquipiso and Miranda Soileau-Pratt all play with no limits and they all play with profound ease.

The songs breathe in warmth and patience, they are immediate and sweet. And then they start to meander. The guitar skitters with the deliberate unpredictability of a wild animal. Parts repeat and reset with the obsessiveness of an anxious mind.

The lyrics open doors to unexpected scenes of lovers, family, and violence. This is all intentional: “I need to play music and listen to music as a form of therapy,” explains Soileau. This means safety, this means encouragement, this means trauma, this means hard questions. Only a band so comfortable at the margins, only a band so capable, only a band so trusting can achieve all this.

Miranda Solileau-Pratt wrote the first Spatulas song in 2020, while living in Oregon. Since that time, the band have released two cassettes and toured the United States. Members of the Spatulas have also played in The Blimp, Honey Bucket, Hot Gum and Meerkaz. The band have shared stages with Helen, Lavender Flu, Debt Rag, Pink Reason, Blues Ambush and Kath Bloom.

TRACK LISTING

1. Ariel Tram
2. Somewhat Alike
3. Facedown
4. Maya
5. The Long Way
6. Suzie Girl
7. Shedded Life
8. Mother Brother
9. Get Along
10. Beehive Mind
12. Frontotemporal