Stream: Fernando Perdomo, ‘The Golden Hour’ (full album)

on
1
Fernando Perdomo
Fernando Perdomo

For somebody still in his mid-30s, Fernando Perdomo has played a lot, seen a lot and felt a lot. His vast experience imbues his new album “The Golden Hour” with that dichotomous sense of melancholy and hope, a slippery slope of emotions you might get gazing upon a beautiful historical artifact. Which “The Golden Hour” is, to no small extent.

Perdomo made much of the album at Ardent Studios with Big Star collaborator Adam Hill, using some of the iconic power-pop band’s gear (the vintage Gibson used by the late Chris Bell, Big Star’s original Mellotron). And remarkably, everything you hear on “The Golden Hour,” instrumentation and vocals, is Perdomo. His resumé speaks to his skills as a master craftsman — Perdomo the producer runs Reseda Ranch Studios, and as a sideman he has performed with the likes of Beck, Todd Rundgren, Jakob Dylan, Fiona Apple, Emitt Rhodes and Linda Perhacs, not to mention a host of local bands.

On “The Golden Hour,” his fourth solo full-length and the follow-up to last year’s “Voyeurs,” Perdomo fashions paeans to idyllic love and deep-seated longing, pleading on the title track, “Will you meet me at sunset / We’ll fall in love in the golden hour” and on “Sleep” begging for his dreams to come “’cause I know it’s gonna be the only time I see you again.” The album’s crowning moment, though, is probably “I Feel (Therefore I Am),” one of only two tunes on the record to top 3 1/2 minutes, and one that easily could have been plucked from the catalog of Ardent Studios’ former occupants. “The Golden Hour” also includes “Look at the Moon,” which was co-written by Jordan Zevon, the son of Warren Zevon. The collaboration happened after Zevon watched Perdomo play his original version of the song on Facebook Live and was inspired to write a bridge for it.

The 1970s are long past, but “The Golden Hour” suggests the Golden Age is far from over.

||| Stream: “The Golden Hour”

||| Live: Fernando Perdomo celebrates his album release with a show tonight at the Hotel Café.