Stream: Elle Belle, ‘In the Garden’
Kevin Bronson on
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Songwriter Christopher Pappas had no sooner released his debut album as Elle Belle — the sprawling, ambitious, audacious and sometimes-even-ridiculous 20-track “Wako Gumbo” — than the 2016 elections knocked the breath out of him. (And plenty of others.) “We failed to stay politically diligent,” Pappas says now. And as he retreated to his room in Los Feliz, the melancholy persisted, seeping into his next batch of songs.
“I started writing during that time,” he says, “and what came out felt like a breakup song.” It was the title track to Elle Belle’s second album, “No Signal” (out June 29). It’s a song about a chasm in communications that could easily have sprung from a disintegrated romance if it weren’t actually rooted in the disheartening disconnect between two Americas. “I realized that it felt like I was writing a breakup album,” Pappas explains. “I was going through all the same stages of grief. Everything was a love song gone wrong so I kept following that feeling.”
The album, coming out on the Little Record Company imprint founded by Rilo Kiley’s Pierre de Reeder and recorded at de Reeder’s Highland Park studio, wavers between retro and modern, mixing fuzzy garage- and psych-pop with trippy synths and electronic percussion. Pretty like sad can be, wistful with a whoosh. And waiting for 2020.
||| Stream: “In the Garden” and “The Real World”
||| Also: The video for “The Real World”
||| Live: Elle Belle celebrate their album release with a show Wednesday at the Hi Hat, joined by Tampa and Veers. Tickets.
||| Previously: “Straight As an Arrow,” “Knock on the Light”
[…] Previously: “No Signal,” “Straight As an Arrow,” “Knock on the Light,” “Failed […]