For the many of you who may be going “La… who?” right now, allow me to bring you up to speed.
La Luz is an American rock noir band originally from Seattle, currently based in Los Angeles. They have been active since 2012, and consist of guitarist Shana Cleveland, drummer Marian Li Pino, keyboardist Alice Sandahl, and bassist Lena Simon.
The ladies are known for their “surf noir” sound with lovely layered vocal harmonies and more than a few touches of psychedelia. Their brand of psych-rock comes with a suitable amount of musical nostalgia, and La Luz has always kept an eye on the traditions of decades past. Consequently, on their third album Floating Features they look both ahead and backwards.
The band’s strength is to take classic psych attributes – dreamy melodies, swirling vocals, surf riffs – and repurpose them to create a collection that is classic, but also current, placing their distinctly modern perspective squarely in the limelight.
What Floating Features does not do is signal a drastic change of formula. Their style has remained more or less the same since their debut album It’s Alive (2013) and follow-up Weirdo Shrine (2015). The band has however clearly grown as musicians and songwriters.
The new album is tighter and more focused than before. Shana shows more ambition in her songwriting without introducing major changes to their aural signature. I see that as a positive. They still have much to explore within the style they have, and crucially: you just won’t hear many bands quite like La Luz. They are unique.
Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys produced the sessions for Floating Features, and while his touch is unobtrusive, he does get a more polished and full-bodied sound out of La Luz. Shana’s guitar cuts deeper on these performances. Alice’s keyboards are notably more playful and bouncier than before. Marian’s drums have more depth, and there’s a sense of detail that flatters the performances. The combination of melodies and vocal harmonies is powerful as always. If you liked La Luz before, Floating Features is certainly not going to change that.
It is also pleasing to hear that the album successfully captures the energy and pure joy that the band deliver on stage (which I can personally attest to, having finally seen them live in 2018!). Floating Features is their first album that is close to nailing that, which in combination with everything already mentioned easily makes it their best album so far.
Ahead of this album, the band relocated from Seattle to Los Angeles. Now that Hollywood is their home, it’s fitting that Floating Features includes references to movement and travel, and cultivates the vintage feel of a good b-movie soundtrack. Look no further than the album’s opener and title track for an example! Floating Features is a soaring instrumental which sets the scene for adventure, and fully embraces 60s kitsch via heavy organ, snappy beats and intricate, knotty riffs. It floats into the next song Cicada, where Lena’s bass cuts through like a rumbling thunder beneath Alice’s punchy and pulsating keys.
The new album has a far more lush, glowing production than La Luz’s previous works. The acoustic-based Mean Dream is a good example – it offers an uncharacteristic change of pace with its breezy, harmonizing pop sensibilities. The song is filled with layers, using Alice’s keyboards for quiet ambience in places and lush backdrops elsewhere.
The music contribute to the vivid and bizarre imagery of the lyrics, which again seem to touch on the relocation from Seattle to Los Angeles. Shana declares a yearning to “go where you go” to the Sun King, “packing in haste, filled buckets up with rain.” As someone who frequently visits Seattle, I know what she means.
The theme continues in California Finally – the band’s ode to finally re-establishing themselves in sunnier climates. It has the impact of a triumphant film climax, our heroines cruising the sunny freeway with wind in their hair. “In the morning, I do what I wanna,” Shana croons, a simple-yet-effective declaration of freedom. The instrumentation is delicious, with each member playing their part while tension bubbles below. You’d swear drummer Marian Li Pino grew an extra arm or two near the song’s end. Good luck trying to find a more perfect soundscape for someone deciding to pack it all up and move about a thousand miles from grey to green.
Shana makes impressive use of surrealism in lyrics for songs like The Creature, a grim and gorgeous ballad about something or someone taking possession of ones mind (with a very interesting video where this happens to Shana who goes after her bandmates!). “The creature let me know that it would be walking with me” she sings to the dreamy musical backdrop. Incredible.
As the album continues, we are led through several stories from the lost west. My Golden One blankets the listener with harmonies as Shana sings about finding a true love she wasn’t looking for, but first appearances could be deceiving. “All of my heroes hung in frames of wood and taped to paint, kept alive that way.” Figuring out what goes on in a La Luz song isn’t always easy, much like making sense of a dream you just had after waking up.
Lonely Dozer leads off with a spaghetti western-inspired riff which leads into an interesting and strange story about a wayward protagonist who is “alone inside at night.” More concrete is Greed Machine, which speaks to the dream of wealth and fame that no doubt plagues many Los Angeles hopefuls. It playfully casts the idea of being broke as a classic movie villain, constantly lurking around the corner to get you. “Oh no, not again!” Cleveland sighs. “What’s the use in trying? We’ll be broke until we die. Just when you thought you’d get ahead; it always finds you where you live.”
The album concludes on a more dramatic and somewhat solemn note with the finale of Don’t Leave Me On the Earth. I can’t help but think of the old Hollywood sci-fi movies of the 1950s as Shana sings to Juniper and pleas, “don’t leave me on the earth; take me with you when you go”. Juniper is normally a plant symbolizing divine protection, but it does not seem like the entity carrying that name in the song is providing that.
The song – and album – seemingly ends with Shana being left behind on the earth after all, and her flat exclamation of “I don’t wanna die.” It is anxious and honest, and confronts existential dread in a way that feels fresh and relatable.
Floating Features is a delight to listen to. It undoubtedly is the soundtrack to brighter and sunnier days than we are seeing in the Norselands these days (as we are enjoying the winter darkness of January), but these songs make it easier to dream of sunnier days.
The album is full of smooth, delicate earworms. Despite its many nostalgic elements, the album represents a new start in a new city, and though it often looks inward, it’s grounded in the present and glances towards the future.
If what it took to come up with an album of this quality was a move to the place these ladies have always seemingly provided the soundtrack for, I am excited about what the future brings for (and from) La Luz.
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