Premiere: Coma Girls, ‘Crown’
Kevin Bronson on
1
If you heard the “Southeast version” of Coma Girls — the music made by Chris Spino before he packed his bags and hightailed it from Atlanta to Los Angeles — you might not recognize the new single “Crown.”
Somewhere on that cross-country drive, or during the time he settled into life in L.A., Spino found some new musical religion. The lo-fi garage-pop on Coma Girls’ 2015 debut album seemed so yesterday. Spino had moved on, and his music was moving with him.
The new single “Crown” is a shimmering slice of pop-Americana, riding gentle waves of guitar and draped in weepy pedal steel while Spino contemplates then vs. now. The song is from a 7-inch Coma Girls will release on Dec. 20 and one of the first two tunes (“Smoking Gun” is the other) that the songwriter penned after arriving in L.A. “I hit this wave of creativity as soon as I got here,” he says, “and these songs just fell out of me.”
The tunes were recorded to tape by Tomas Dolas (Oh Sees, SASAMI, Mr. Elevator and the Brain Hotel) and co-engineered by Joe McMurray (Mac DeMarco’s drummer). The pedal steel comes courtesy of Thayer Sarrano (Drive-By Truckers, Of Montreal). The sessions feature Shepard Martin on drums and Anders LaSource on harmonica.
“I never want to keep doing the same thing,” Spino says. “I always want to keep pushing forward and trying new things, new sounds. The genre or aesthetic is arbitrary. I just want to get lost in a song, whether that song sounds like Motown, or shoegaze, whatever, I just care about how it hits me when I listen to it.”
This one hits a sweet spot.
||| Stream: “Crown”
[…] If you heard the “Southeast version” of Coma Girls — the music made by Chris Spino before he packed his bags and hightailed it from Atlanta to Los Angeles — you might not recognize the new single “Crown.” READ MORE… […]