Tuesday, March 3, 2009

The Greater California Area


Hailing from the burghs of Long Beach, the band Greater California bring us a whole new distinct sound on their third album All the Colors. Produced with Ikey Owens (Mars Volta, Crystal Antlers) and includes an impressive list of guest musicians (most notably percussion genius Steven Hodges of Tom Waits), All the Colors is a summertime landscape likened to the works of Brian Wilson, the Zombies, Harry Nilsson, the Velvet Underground and the Byrds, full of jangly 12-string guitars, rich vocal harmonies, a big bag of percussion, vibraphones and marimbas, a stray trumpet, and the ever inviting sounds of the Hammond organ and Wurlitzer electric piano.

Greater California are a theatrical bunch that utilize that whole list of instrumentation above to create lush, dramatic pop that's hypnotically cool. The plodding piano on "Disappearing," marches throughout the song making it so easy to latch on to, you'd have to be missing ears not to. The tune sort of reminds me of something like an American version of the Bad Seeds meets the Tindersticks in a Vaudevillian theater somewhere. It's cool, spooky stuff.

Download: Disappearing

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