When: 7pm on Monday 24 September 2018
Where: Soup Kitchen, 31-33 Spear Street, Manchester M1 1DF

PLEASE NOTE: This show has now sold out! Join our mailing list, at the top of the page, for updates about future La Luz shows.

We’re delighted to be promoting La Luz’s biggest Manchester show to date – with guests Peggy Sue!

Los Angeles has often been described as a ‘dream factory’–both a mecca where dreamers converge to pursue long-held aspirations, and a topography of hallucinogenic contradictions: enchanting tangerine sunsets diffused by smog, crystal-clutching spiritualists mingling with deep-pocketed narcissists, rows of scenic palms competing with garish billboards for commuters’ attention.

It was against this backdrop that the four members of La Luz – singer/guitarist Shana Cleveland, drummer Marian Li Pino, keyboardist Alice Sandahl, and bassist Lena Simon – conceived of Floating Features, the band’s third studio album. For this, their most ambitious release yet, La Luz consulted landscapes both physical and psychological.

References to dreams abound on Floating Features. Loose Teeth catalyses nightmare fuel into a propulsive, intentionally disorienting collision of honeyed harmonies and Takeshi Terauchi-esque jetstreams of distorted surf guitar. Mean Dream unsurprisingly mines dreamstate imagery, and the lyrics and melody for Walking Into the Sun actually came to Cleveland during a particularly vivid night of deep sleep. Looming over the album’s coterie of surreal figures (gargantuan cicadas, a monstrous Creature, The Sun King, aliens, the titular Lonely Dozer) is the magnificent Greed Machine, a skulking, insatiable engine of consumption – Nathanael West’s ‘business of dreams’ fearsomely manifested.

To bring these visions to stereophonic life, La Luz pivoted from the DIY trailer-park brio of It’s Alive and the gritted-up urgency of Weirdo Shrine toward lush, hi-fidelity production value. Li Pino’s drums have never sounded more thunderously muscular, Simon’s basslines more robust-yet-agile, Sandahl’s organ melodies more complementary, Cleveland’s layers of guitar more versatile, or the group’s trademark harmonies more bewitching and rapturous. For every one of Floating Features’ seismic crescendos, there are just as many small, evocative details colouring its somnambulist soundscape.

Only La Luz could conjure up Floating Features’ Leone-on-LSD vibes, and the album finds the L.A. band at the height of their powers – golden rebels in a golden dream.

Tour support comes from Peggy Sue. Peggy Sue are London-via-Brighton indie duo Rosa Slade and Katy Young. Founded in 2007, the band have released three albums on Wichita Recordings, culminating in 2014’s critically acclaimed Choir Of Echoes, and toured with the likes of Jack White, Local Natives and First Aid Kit.

Slow Fade is the first single from Peggy Sue’s upcoming fourth album (due 2018) After a three year break – during which Rosa Slade and Katy Young have been performing with all-female singing group Deep Throat Choir – Slow Fade is an apt comeback; a melancholy celebration of patience. It is a dreamy breakup song, one that lets you hang around lazily in the days when you aren’t ok yet. The single – and upcoming album- borrow in equal parts from the perfectly constructed pop songs of the 1960s and the understated, noisy guitar experiments of 90s indie bands such as The Breeders and Blur. The new material sees frontwomen Slade and Young joined by Dan Blackett (Landshapes) on drums and Benjamin Gregory (GRIP TIGHT) on bass who bring an fresh energy and clarity to the band’s enduringly captivating duel vocals.

This show is a co-promotion with Comfortable On A Tightrope.

PLEASE NOTE: This show has now sold out! Join our mailing list, at the top of the page, for updates about future La Luz shows.

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