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On De Lux’s first two albums the duo tackled the innocence of youth and generational anxiety. Their third album, More Disco Songs About Love, smashed them together to create an ambitious party record about all sorts of stuff you didn’t know you could love. This go-around Sean and Isaac are still funny and profound and their sound remains easy to groove to, but the band is more influenced by the fun 80’s new wave of the Tom Tom Club and the experimentation and imagery of The Clash’s “Sandinista!” than cerebral DFA era disco.
In anticipation of the LA duo’s upcoming fourth album, De Lux are releasing a string of singles and two EPs. The first EP, titled “Uneven”, contains three new songs brimming with a newfound playful confidence that is the result of throwing out the old playbook and embracing the uncomfortable unknown. After writing, performing, recording, and producing three albums themselves, they’ve traded their typically hermetic recording process at their Burbank studio for a more collaborative experience. This time Sean and Isaac invited the members of their live band to record to tape at Jonny Bell’s Jazzcats Studio in Long Beach, CA. While De Lux has always been able to write immediately danceable and quirky pop songs with a strong dose of wit, these recordings get the sonic boost they deserve to match the quality and camaraderie of their intense and acclaimed live performances.
"On and On (Till the End of Us)" is the first song on the EP. It starts with an unrelenting hiccup of a beat followed by disarming 8 bit beeps and boops before fidgety Chic style guitars and otherworldly strings come in that sound as if they could be the soundtrack to an intergalactic mission to save your home planet from being obliterated. Sean Guerin’s faraway sounding vocals are delivered with an urgency that makes you feel like you’re the world’s last hope.
“I’ve spent a great deal of my time wandering through the world, and being mistaken for coming from somewhere else. Certain people seem better at branding themselves based on a sort of... spectacular regional mythos. And what I have observed in regards to my own pedigree is what I could only describe as a lifelong superficial conception of the Californian identity. I got to thinking - what’s a regional identity anyways? Especially in this digitally flattened era. How funny, I thought, would it be to turn this little droll talking blues I had been demoing into an off-handed delivered ‘anthem’ chorus (“uh, I don’t mind)? How Californian?”
Nick Waterhouse debuts single "B. Santa Ana, 1986" with SPIN Magazine “A Day in the Life” feature.
In late 2020, Alex Maas - best known as the frontman for psych rock powerhouse The Black Angels - released Luca, an album of mellow psychedelia named after his son. With tours on hold, Alex and his band decamped to Bastrop, TX to bring the live show they had developed for the album to the world via this performance film, shot in the city’s historic downtown.
Alex explains, “We shot this down in an old opera house built in 1889 and a 100 year old German tailor mercantile building in historic downtown, which is now Astro Records. This session is a glimpse of what a tour on Luca would look like had we not been in a pandemic. It was a joy to get out and get back with the friends and collaborators I created this album with, and bring these songs to life. For now this is the world tour, and a look at what we’re looking forward to being able to do on stage when we are back up and rolling! Thank you to Jonas Wilson of Mr. Pink records who asked me originally to film this in the beautiful city of Bastrop."
The performance film premieres Saturday, March 27 at 7PM CST and features selects from Luca, along with three new tracks from his songbook, seen here for the first time, and performed with some of the collaborators he created the album with: Bryan Richie, Jake Garcia, Rob Kidd. These songs have been crafted over a decade in quiet moments between tours and albums with The Black Angels, are finally being released in the live setting on Levitation Sessions. Today you can catch a sneak peek of the session and one of the new songs -- “Too Much Hate”.
Alex on “Too Much Hate”: "I tried to touch on a few things on this song that would attempt to identify things that make the world more beautiful. I’ve been trying to give solutions and not just speak about the cancer that is eating our culture. Some problems of society are rooted in how we raise our children, how we treat each other and quick uninformed decisions when people shoot from the hip as opposed to sitting back and thinking rationally about how to act instead of reacting."
To purchase tickets to the full performance, visit Levitation.
JIMMY EDGAR releases his first solo album in 9 years, CHEETAH BEND. The album includes features from Danny Brown, Hudson Mohawke, SOPHIE, Millie Go Lightly, 24HRS, Rochelle Jordan, Matt Ox & more.
“Detroit experimentalist and texture king Jimmy Edgar is the kind of producer that opens a doorway in your mind.” - BILLBOARD
"A full-dive into his hybridised vision of modern hip-hop — a world where shape-shifting, liquid-metal Cyberdyne Systems beats are clothed in the fur coat of virtuoso West Coast funk." - DJ MAG (named CHEETAH BEND Album of the Month)
“Assisted by like-minded electronic vanguards like Hudson Mohawke and the late, great visionary SOPHIE, Edgar expands on the sound he’s established while working in the hip-hop world over the last several years.” - BANDCAMP
“Confident, bold and head-turning music” - CRACK
“No one does music like JIMMY EDGAR. He’s constantly explore new sounds and throwing everything we thought we knew about music into the wind, and we absolutely love it. We’ve been tracking this forward-thinking wizard as he’s steadily rolled out single after single, and today that work comes to a head with the release of his new album, CHEETAH BEND.” - THIS SONG IS SICK