Kevin Bronson on December 11th, 2020

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If the shoegaze and neo-psychedelia of ’90s U.K. bands are your narcotic of choice, you’ll be high on resurgent L.A. rockers Blackout Transmission.

It’s the project of singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Christopher Goett (Silo Halo, Girl Loves Distortion), who ramped up the band after he returned to L.A. after a decade in Washington, D.C. This week, Blackout Transmission announced that their debut album, “Sparse Illumination,” will be out Feb. 19 on the label Goett co-founded, Etxe Records.

Goett is joined on the album by guitarist Adam D’Zurilla, bassist Kevin Cluppert, drummer Anthony Salazar (Teenage Writ) and multi-instrumentalist and co-producer Scott Holmes.

The album’s touchstones include the likes of Echo & the Bunnymen, Ride, the Telescopes and Chapterhouse, but the first single “Portals,” with its shimmering grandiosity, actually recalls the dark, first-album music of the Verve. (“Blue” remains their best song, it says here.) Take it as the first dose of their long-playing intoxicant.

||| Stream: “Portals”