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La Luz Weirdo Shrine Hardly Art

02.09.15

La Luz are back from the dead and better than ever. Well, not literally back from the dead, but after surviving a near-fatal car crash in Boise that wrecked their car and their gear, the Seattle surf-rock outfit have unsurprisingly been left shaken and self-admittedly “obsessed with death”.

You can hear it on Weirdo Shrine from the start: a sense of inevitability husks and shimmers across seedy dancefloors, appearing in smoke, mirrors and evil incantations against double-crossed lovers, only stopping to dazzle with breaks soundtracked by Ty Segall-produced fuzz.

The album works two ways: when you’re listening closely, and when you’re not. Traditionally surf-rock doesn’t try too hard to make you think, but with La Luz, you can’t help it – doo-wop harmonies and recognisable riffs entice you closer, and the whisper-in-your-ear vocals make you stay. The lyrics flip from naïve (“I’ll be true to you / Just as long as you want me to”) to something closer to what you’d expect from a 2015 band (“Nobody can tell me / I can’t do as I please”), fortifying the narrator as something between someone made of flesh and blood and what is simply a ghostly apparatus.

You might not have thought surf-rock is as versatile as La Luz make it appear. In Weirdo Shrine, they bend between sultry and lovelorn to defiant and angry, but they lose none of the charm of the genre in doing so. The band have said that after their crash they’ve gained a “new perspective” on what it is to live a life – and, it seems, what surf-rock can really be.