My girlfriend, East Los pocha Hope Sandoval, and her band Mazzy Star, are BACK BACK BACK with a new album. Hope has the sexiest voice in music, always identifiable, always mysterious, smoky and blue.
Mazzy Star came out of the Los Angeles neo-psychedelic indie-rock scene of the ’80s — a spin-off the band Opal, which dissolved after lead singer Kendra Smith bailed. Hope Sandoval was essentially her replacement; as she murmured over the group’s woozily tuneful folk rock, with a brighter vocal style and dusky fashion-model looks, she emerged as a sort of goth-pop priestess, a mysterious feminine analog to R.E.M.‘s Michael Stipe (see the minor hit “Fade Into You” and “Sometimes Always,” her duet with The Jesus and Mary Chain‘s Jim Reid).
Seasons of Your Day (out Sept. 24) is the first Mazzy Star record in 17 years, and it comes as the group’s sound is being echoed by younger artists — see Baltimore’s shadowy Beach House and the mutable glam-pop of Lana Del Rey. It’s a lovely, intoxicating record, but the group’s sound has also evolved. “It’s so far, far away,” Sandoval sings in “California,” a largely acoustic song with an echo of Led Zeppelin’s Joni Mitchell mash note “Going to California.” The line could reference a place, but Sandoval could also be addressing the pop-music profile she’d left behind.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sandoval’s singing has become much more interesting since those early days — her phrasing more nuanced, less somnambulant, no longer so smothered in reverb. David Roback, Mazzy Star’s other central figure, is playing more acoustic guitar alongside his signature summer-of-love electric, and there’s a strong English folk and blues flavor on Seasons that recalls albums by Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions, the singer’s project of the past decade. But Roback brings a stronger pop sensibility than you could hear on those recordings.
Read more and listen to the new CD at NPR.org….
- MORE HOPE SANDOVAL: Hope Sandoval/Mazzy Star live on Conan: ‘Fade Into You’ (video)