I rarely go to the Silverlake Lounge, but I should! The problem is that, on Mondays, there are too many choices, the Echo/Echoplex, the Satellite, and the Bootleg free residencies, then ‘It’s a School Night’ at Bardot, and I am just talking about my immediate neighborhood. The Silverlake Lounge also has its totally free residencies and the band Nacosta had its own one during the month of June. Again, a band I had not heard about, but I am getting used to this, I am well aware that I could go out every night and discover a new local band.
So I caught Nacosta’s (pronounce ‘nuh – coast – uh’ according to their Facebook page) last residency night and discovered a music which seemed to be inspired by different horizons of psychedelic pop-rock of the 70s. First of all, they are a quintet so there are a lot of people on stage and the music is layered, partly folk with cool acoustic guitars and lots of vocal harmonies – which can even remind you the best days of Crosby Still and Nash,… just listen to ‘Strangers’ – and partly psychedelic with a touch of synth and electronics as well as wild outbursts of fuzzy rock.
The band was founded by brothers Brandon and Shane Graham and has, last March, released a full-length album, ‘Under the Half Moon’, that you can listen to on Bandcamp. Their tunes are not especially easy to capture at first – except for a few of them, like the catchy ‘Paradise Cough’ – but they have big, atmospheric, open-field textures with a lot of nuances, often moody and changing, revealing a taste for complex and spacey compositions. One of their songs, called ‘Fall Apart,’ curiously reminded me what Sean Lennon does with his band, the Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger, and it was a bit eerie because they decided to follow it with ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’! They had apparently decided to cover a Beatles’ song each night of their residency, but this was quite interesting.
They have been described as evoking ‘the summer of ‘75 while layering on a healthy dose of ‘90s shoegaze fuzz’, and I would say that, especially after this Beatles song, I was more concerned by the 70s than the 90s, as it was obvious these guys were revisiting an idea of American classic rock from this fertile era, with a modern twist. They played a new song, a long, ascending harmonies-filled tune, culminating into a 70s type of psychedelic guitar-synth jam, just like some of their other songs. Los Angeles has such a dense musical scene with so many influences from all over the world, that I wonder how new bands can find a new sound, or is there such a thing that finding a new sound? Probably not, but still new bands have to find their own musical identity and this is not an easy task in this ever-growing scene.
