On Thursday, May 30th @ 4pm, Massari sits down with two legendary UK drummers of the post-punk era, The Cure’s Lol Tolhurst, and Budgie from Siouxsie & The Banshees and The Creatures. Lol Tolhurst x Budgie play the Great American Music Hall on June 1st with Miki Berenyi Trio.
Along with stellar producer and multi-instrumentalist Garret ‘Jacknife’ Lee, this unlikely alt-supergroup have spent the last four years spiriting up one of the most extraordinary albums to appear in 2023.
Perusing the tracklist, with its guest credits for, amongst others, LCD Soundsystem‘s James Murphy, Bobby Gillespie, Civil Rights avant-gardist Lonnie Holley, Starcrawler wildchild Arrow de Wilde and The Edge from U2, you may rightly wonder just what the 13-track long-player holds in store.
The answer: a hard-hitting and compulsively exploratory 55-minute electronic mindbender, founded on unrivalled rhythmic expertise, fleshed out with an armoury of synths, guitars (Jacknife’s forté) and supplementary percussion (think: wooden teeth!), often overlaid with elite-class strings and brass, then universally twisted, manipulated and quite masterfully sculpted by Lee, with his super-producer’s hat on.
As per the title, Los Angeles is a journey into the dark heart of contemporary LaLaLand, the city of its birth, a place of limitless possibility, yet also a diseased and consumptive hell-on-earth which, to quote Murphy’s lyric on the title track, “eats its children,” where pipe dreams shatter, racial inequality prevails and homelessness spirals.
Photo Credit: Louis Rodiger
