Originally posted on Instagram, April 12, 2019.
It seems weird to be making an album post the day before Record Store Day, but I like to keep a certain flow to my page, so it was time! Plus, this record is so good, it just needed to be shared with other people.
I didn't know what to expect when I picked up Shana Cleveland's latest album. The description that her label sent my store when I was placing orders was intriguing, but I couldn't really imagine the sound of this album from the description they gave. All I got was, "this is not going to sound like La Luz"- La Luz being the heavily surf-influenced rock band that she sings and plays guitar for. Still, the most recent La Luz album was my favorite album of 2018, so in my mind, Shana Cleveland could do no wrong.
Guess what? She still can't. This album is beautiful. As promised, it doesn't sound anything like La Luz. That said, it does remind me of some other music I really like- most strongly, it makes me think of the gentler side of post-Syd Barrett, pre-Dark Side Pink Floyd. That's a convoluted comparison, and probably unhelpful to most people, but as soon as I dropped the needle on this record, the label's description of this album as both "spacey" and "pastoral" started to make sense, and the only thing I'd ever heard that was remotely like it was a few semi-obscure Pink Floyd songs. But despite that, and despite lyrical references to San Francisco and the "face of the sun", this is no hippie throwback album. Shana's delicate guitar, somehow right at home in a strange sonic landscape, could be coming to you from any time, any place, any solar system, any galaxy. It's our good luck that it's coming to us from Shana Cleveland and it's coming to us now.
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