Kevin Bronson on February 3rd, 2017

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Harley Cortez (Harley Prechtel-Cortez when he was fronting the shamefully overlooked projects The Weather Underground/Red Cortez/Just an Animal) has been off the music radar for a while. Or, as he says, “stuck in some capsule floating in the nucleus of his own mind,” during which time, “we’ve entered a strange parallel universe where a former reality TV star causes [us to] cringe, our musical gurus have descended, left is up, right is down, etc.” Etcetera indeed. In fact, after putting his side project Halfbluud on hold, Cortez has spent a lot of time focusing on his visual art (painting), traveling, studying musicology and working on music for film. Today he unveiled a new single from his forthcoming solo album. “The Hours” is a breezy meditation on the passage of time produced by Matthew Logan Vasquez (Delta Spirit), and its B-side “The Following” (of the social media variety) is so languorous and so Spacemen 3 and so spot on that you won’t have the energy to click “like.” The latter was produced by Malachi de Lorenzo (Henry Wolfe, Langhorne Slim) and features vocals from Sandi Denton (Tashaki Miyaki, ex-LSD & the Search for God). Neither of the new songs possess the fever-pitched proselytizing of some of Cortez’s former bands, but they display his always-sharp knack for strong commentary.

||| Stream: “The Hours” (or stream both songs and the interlude via Bandcamp)