Ears Wide Open: Just an Animal (f/k/a Red Cortez)

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For Harley Prechtel-Cortez, Ryan Kirkpatrick, Diego Guerrero, and Calvin J. Love – the guys Los Angeles knew as Red Cortez – it was a matter of “recalibrating our ears.” That’s how Kirkpatrick described the quartet moving on and becoming Just an Animal, whose music bears only a faint resemblance to the amped-up rock-and-blues Red Cortez, a band that as recently as February did a residency at the Satellite. Few groups who carved out a niche in the L.A. scene in recent years tried as hard as Red Cortez, who started out as the Weather Underground, and their music was equally in-your-face, blue-collar but literate and challenging. “Basically, the situation just exhausted itself,” Prechtel-Cortez told host Zowie Vasquez on Moheak Radio last week. So the 11 new songs Just an Animal recorded with producer/guru Richard Swift mark a drastic change in dynamic – Prechtel-Cortez’s vocals are dialed back, arrangements are spare, the loopy textures brought to the table by Swift prevail. (Swift, who also did the Gardens & Villa album and worked on the forthcoming album by Everest, will join the Shins as a touring member, by the way.) Different? Yes. Says Kirkpatrick: “The only way it’s the same is that we’re the same four guys with the same four social security numbers.”

||| Download: “Bombs” (unmastered)

[audio:http://www.mediafire.com/file/w4v3jz0b1w51c1s/Just%20an%20Animal%20-%20Bombs.mp3]

Photo of Just an Animal in Oregon via Facebook