La Sera
Music For Listening To Music To
Polyvinyl Records (2016)
Sounds like: The Smiths, Books of Love, Beach Fossils, The Smith Westerns
Score: 8.0/10
Being in a successful band is as mind-numbingly tough as being in a functioning marriage. Mix those two things up and you have yourself a dangerous cocktail set for endless arguments and disagreements. Yet, on La Sera’s latest effort, Music for Listening to Music To, Katy Goodman and Todd Wisenbaker manage to beautifully sync those two things up for an album full of dreamy, well-crafted guitar licks and harmonies.
La Sera frontwoman, Katy Goodman, has been on my radar since her days playing bass for now-defunct Brooklyn-based punk band, Vivian Girls. La Sera went from a sideproject to now a thriving collaboration between several prominent LA-based musicians, the latter being Todd Wisenbaker, who is Goodman’s main guitarist, collaborator, and now husband. With the help of Ryan Adams stepping in on producing duties, Music for Listening to Music To is the band’s most accomplished set of songs, dabbling into newer, twangier genres.
On “Higher Notes,” the first single, and the album’s opening track, Adam’s fingerprints can be found throughout. A series of productive chemistries floods the entire album. First, the powerful creative connection Goodman and Wisenbaker have cultivated throughout two albums (Wisenbaker produced the band’s previous record, Hour of the Dawn). Second being Adams’ and Wisenbaker’s musical relationship. They were the leading force that found these two guitar virtuosos recording a cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989.
“One True Love” is the first song Goodman and Wisenbaker have built from the ground up together, and finds the couple sharing vocal duties. The waltzing guitar tones meet harmoniously with Katy’s falsetto voice on “Take My Heart.” La Sera borrow a page out of Ryan Adam’s book on “I Need an Angel,” where the hip-shaking jangle makes for one of the album’s more upbeat songs.
With the help of Greta Morgan (The Hush Sound, Gold Motel) and Adams — who both play synth on “Nineties,” — and drummer Nate Lotz, La Sera have reached a crucial point in their career. They’re locking into a wholesome-yet-simplistic sound that can only come from two people who completely know each other creatively.
-Alan Madrigal
La Sera will be in Vegas for Neon Reverb, which takes place March 10-13 in Downtown Las Vegas. Details and ticket info can be found on http://www.neonreverb.com/
No Comments