Stream: Emerson Star, ‘Great Escaper’ (full EP)

Kevin Bronson on September 9th, 2016

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Emerson Star’s melody- and harmony-rich new EP is a work of guitar-pop finery that, breezy at it feels, transcends a lot of the California clichés. The L.A. quintet’s sound is psych-pop but not stoned, surf-y but not nonchalant. Or, “Great Escaper” (out this week) is exactly the opposite of the chorus in the song “La Dolce Vita”: “I wanna stare into the sun / I wanna be dumb like everyone.” The EP is the follow-up to the 2014 full-length “Let It Burn” from Emerson Star — Taylor and Shannon Inouye, Sean Thomas, Garret Lang and Colin Fahrner. Come for the build-up in the title track, relish the vocal harmonies in “Armchair,” hang for the cascading keyboard melody in “In the Beginning.”

||| Stream: “Great Escaper”