Los Angeles – After three years, two albums and one EP under their belts, La Luz has spent plenty of time on the road. Pounding out a combination of blistering surf rock and hazy, haunting doo-wop, the band has built a reputation as one of rock music’s must-see live bands, touring constantly and building a dedicated audience. Ironically, it was being out on tour in 2013 that nearly put an end to their promising career.
While the band headed to their homes in Seattle after a show in Idaho supporting Of Montreal, their van hit an invisible patch of black ice and crashed into the median. Though the van was totaled, everyone was fine. 20 minutes later, before emergency vehicles could reach their remote location, a semi-truck slipped on the same patch of ice and careened into the back of their 15 person van. The cargo bay of the van acted as an enormous bumper and absorbed the majority of the damage. The band members escaped with only a few broken bones and some deep bruises. After a huge outpouring from the local music scene, the band continued on with admirable resiliency.
It was fitting for La Luz to perform in the open warehouse-like space that is the Echoplex because Weirdo Shrine was recorded in a similar setting, a surfboard manufacturing warehouse in the Los Angeles suburb of Arcadia. In front of the massive crowd that squeezed as close to the stage as possible, the ladies performed in a shroud of fog. The band managed to fit nearly all of their tracks into the approximately hour long set, touching on highlights from both of their full length releases. While their music may fall onto the dark side of the surf rock spectrum, the band members themselves are very lighthearted on stage, dancing around during breakdowns, stage-diving into the crowd, and never afraid to crack a joke between songs.
Shana Cleveland (guitar/vocals), Alice Sandahl (keyboards), Marian Li Pino (drums) and Lena Simon (bass) immediately launched into one their new record’s best tracks, “You Disappear”. With a bi-polar song structure, “You Disappear” was immediately satisfying, kicking off with a romping surf riff from Cleveland before transitioning into hauntingly harmonious vocal melodies from all four members during the verses and chorus. After the first song wrapped up and the band was retuning, Li Pino took a moment to stroke the Angelenos’ egos (something we love), telling the audience Los Angeles was her favorite city.
Something that has started to become a bit of a tradition during La Luz’s live set is the “Soul Train” segment of their show. In an impressive feat of crowd coordination, Cleveland instructed the audience at The Echoplex to pull part like the Red Sea – and they did! As the band launched into an instrumental surf rock number, audience members strutted and strolled their way down the Soul Train runway towards the front of the stage. That lasted for all of about one minute; just like the biblical Red Sea, the two halves of the audience quickly came crashing back together in the form of an exuberant circle pit. While the crowd may not have followed the Soul Train rules, you have got to applaud the effort and intensity.
Every moment of La Luz’s set was captivating, making it pretty difficult to pick out any single high point. If pressed, “Black Hole, Weirdo Shrine”, “With Davey”, and “I Want To Be Alone” from Weirdo Shrine and “Pink Slime” and “Big Big Blood” from It’s Alive were the songs that got the audience movin’and groovin’ the most. While “Call Me in the Day” is one of the band’s slower songs, the single from It’s Alive received the most powerfully positive audience reaction. From the moment Cleveland hit the first guitar chord, the audience went nuts, singing along with every line and applauding like madmen when it was over.
Another staple of the La Luz’s live show is the blink-and-you-miss-it song “Big Woman”. The song essentially consisted of howling and instrumental pummeling, lasting somewhere in the 20-30 second range. After the song was over and the ladies were tuning their instruments, Cleveland and Sandahl told of its origins. Many, many nights ago, perhaps at one of their shows opening for The Intelligence, someone in the crowd continually shouted for “Big Woman” – a song nobody in La Luz had ever heard of. Instead of ignoring the man, they yielded his to his demands, making up a song on the spot: “It was always in our hearts” they concluded.
It’s that kind of “anything goes” attitude La Luz has that makes the quartet so outrageously enjoyable. Not only is the Seattle band cranking out some of the most serious, technical, and aesthetically on-point surf rock tunes in the underground scene, they do so with a lightheartedness and dedication to fun that is infectious.
Be sure to check out Weirdo Shrine or catch them on one of their many United States tour dates in August and September. European fans can catch them in mid-September for a full tour of the continent. Click here or here for more information on those shows.
Photo by Matt Matasci
Matt Matasci
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