La Luz with Color Green

The darkly beautiful psychedelia of California rock band La Luz return to SPACE!

“I was in a dream, but now I can see that change is the only law.”

With a credo adapted from science fiction author Octavia E. Butler, an album title from a collection of metaphysical poetry, and an expansion in consciousness brought on by personal crisis, guitarist and songwriter Shana Cleveland learns to embrace a changing world with unconditional love on News of the Universe, the new full-length from California rock band La Luz.

News of the Universe is a record born of calamity, a work of dark, beautiful psychedelia reflecting Cleveland’s experience of having her world blown apart by a breast cancer diagnosis just two years after the birth of her son. It’s also a portrait of a band in flux, marking the first appearance for drummer Audrey Johnson and the final ones from longtime members bassist Lena Simon and keyboardist Alice Sandahl, whose contributions add a bittersweet edge to a record that is both elegy for an old world and cosmic road map to a strange new one.

But is there any band in the world more suited to capturing the chaos of change in all its messy beauty than La Luz? Formed by Cleveland in 2012, La Luz is beloved for their ability to balance bedlam and bliss, each new record another fine-tuning of the band’s mix of swaggering riffs with angelic vocals borrowed from doo-wop and folk; a band so reliably great that it makes the huge step forward in confidence and sheer musicality that is News of the Universe all the more formidable. Cleveland, also a writer and painter, has developed into a truly original songwriter with her own canon of haunted psychedelia that, in recent years, has drawn upon the changing landscape around her rural California home for inspiration, notably on last year’s critically acclaimed solo release, Manzanita, a magical realist documentation of her pregnancy and early motherhood that appeared on many year-end lists.

Yet if Cleveland has spent years writing songs about ghosts, what lurks in the shadows of News of the Universe is nothing less than death itself. “There are moments on this album that sound to me like the last frantic confession before an asteroid destroys the earth,” says Cleveland. 

Sonically, the record is all urgency. Songs trip over themselves as if trying to outrun the apocalypse: the breathless pitter-pattering of toms on “Strange World,” the title track’s finger-tangling opening riff drenched in murky distortion. An atmosphere of doom hovers hazily over the Sgt. Pepper-esque baroque pop song “Poppies,” on which Cleveland sings of a wavering orange idyll about to be set ablaze by the late summer sun. On the similarly kaleidoscopic “Dandelions,” she figures the yellow flowers for unsuspecting “little suns” soon to be “turning into moons” as the season marches on. The synthesized sounds used on the band’s last record, 2021’s La Luz, to mimic the languid buzz and crackle of a summer’s day in the countryside have been cut adrift in space—now they are silvery comet tails, dapplings of space dust, showers of stars.

These earthy observations are inspired by Cleveland’s walks around her home in the shell-shocked days post-diagnosis when she found she had to be very intentional about what she consumed. “Seeing the cycle of life, seeing things grow out of decay, the decay of other living things—was super comforting to me. I had to get to a place where I felt more comfortable with the idea of death,” she says.

But for every moment of fear, there is one of pure ecstasy. Shimmery chamber pop song “Blue Moth Cloud Shadow” puddles into a twinkly organ-driven reverie; “I’ll Go With You” starts out with the record’s sludgiest riff before turning into its prettiest song. “Always in Love” is a real power-of-love ballad that serves as the record’s centerpiece and is capped off by a fiery and jubilant guitar solo, Cleveland’s own “November Rain” moment.

The powerful sense of openness that permeates News of the Universe is at least partially due to the fact that it is a record made entirely by women—from the performing, writing, and producing all the way through to the recording, engineering, and mastering. “There is something inherently and simultaneously sweet and brutal about womanhood,” says Cleveland. “That is something I hear on this record.”

Working with producer Maryam Qudos (Spacemoth), the all-female environment allowed Cleveland to feel safe tapping into difficult places and expressing hard emotions women are socialized to suppress. “Having that kind of connection and that comfort straightaway let us push it further,” she says. “We didn’t spend the first half of the session being careful not to offend someone’s ego.”

Qudos also helped shape the songs, bringing ideas to the table “that to me felt like choices that I would not normally make, but I was really stoked about,” says Cleveland, pointing out that the dubbed-out effects on “Moon in Reverse” were all Qudos. “Sometimes she would have ideas about the structure of the songs, which a producer often doesn’t really mess with. But as a songwriter herself, I think she felt really comfortable with us.” Their working relationship was so organic that Qudos has since joined La Luz full-time on keyboards to replace the departing Sandahl.

Unashamedly vulnerable, unabashedly feminine, and undeniably triumphant, News of the Universe is another knockout record from a band so reliably great that it has perhaps led people to overlook how pioneering La Luz really are: women of color in indie music forging their own path by following their own artistic star into galaxies beyond current musical trends, always led by an earnest belief in the cosmic power of love and a great riff. Never is that more true than on News of the Universe, which might be La Luz’s most brutal record to date but also their most blissful. After everything, how could it not?

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For the California-based quartet Color Green, playing music together is all about stepping into the unknown. “When we play live, I don’t really know what’s going to happen,” says Noah Kohll, one of the band’s two guitarists and four vocalists. “You really have no idea what you’re going to get with this band, which keeps things fresh for us and maybe makes the live experience special.” In a very short time, they have developed a word-of-mouth reputation as a dynamic and unpredictable live act, grounding their cosmic jams in earthy melodies and drawing from ‘60s SoCal folk-rock, ‘70s classic rock, ‘80s underground rock, ‘90s psychedelic dance-rock, and any other sound that catches their ears.

Adaptable onstage and off, Color Green has shared stages with a range of groups that reflect both the sophistication and the wild malleability of their sound, including Fuzz, Kikagaku Moyo, Circles Around the Sun, Hiss Golden Messenger, and the Brian Jonestown Massacre. Yet, because they see boundless possibilities from one note to the next, they anchor their music in the urgent present rather than the distant past. Color Green can be a million different bands without losing their essential hue.

They capture that wild, mercurial quality on Fool’s Parade, a meditation on loss, grief, confusion, frustration, and the clarity to which they all lead. The album has the dynamic of a tight live set, full of ebbs and flows, highs and lows, quiet moments like the devastating “5:08” and reckless jams like the epic “Kick the Bucket.” “Four Leaf Clover” bustles and shimmies like the kaleidoscopic dance rock of the Stone Roses, while closer “Hazel Eyes” recalls the elaborate orchestrations of Brian Wilson and the whimsical melodies of Buddy Holly.

The next year they followed it up with a self-titled full-length via Aquarium Drunkard, with various friends helping to round out the songs. “These things happen in an interesting way,” says Kohll. “There’s been a lot of weird synchronization with this band. It’s all very organic. After we put out our first album, we thought, Oh, this needs to be a live band, too.”