Death Valley Girls - Islands In The Sky - Grimace Purple W/silver - VINYL LP

Reger / Ysaye / Bentsson - Bentsson Plays Reger & Ysaye [COMPACT DISCS] date 01/13/2006

The road to Death Valley Girls' Welcome to Earth begins in the ashes of California's Eaton Fire. After losing her home in Altadena and soon after her beloved dog Tommy, lead singer and songwriter Bonnie Bloomgarden confronted questions that resisted easy answers What survives catastrophe? What remains after loss? How do you rebuild a life when the things that once defined it are gone? The album that emerged from those questions is among the most intimate and searching works Death Valley Girls have ever made.Throughout the band's body of work, they have treated music as both celebration and search party. Albums like Glow in the Dark, Darkness Rains, Under the Spell of Joy, and Islands in the Sky transformed their space rock sound into a vehicle for spiritual inquiry, finding flashes of transcendence amid everyday chaos. But Welcome to Earth feels distinct from it's predecessors. It focuses less on escaping the world and more on understanding how to remain connected after devastation.What emerged was not a psych-punk record about loss, exactly, but about connection the invisible threads linking people, animals, memories, landscapes, and lives across time. The album's title functions as both a greeting and a reminder, a welcome from the natural world to a species that has largely forgotten it's place within it. Again and again, the songs return to the possibility that separation may be humanity's most persistent illusion.That idea of connection extends beyond the songs themselves. After the fire, Bloomgarden found herself held aloft by the musicians who now make up Death Valley Girls drummer Bailey Chapman, guitarist Laena Myers, bassist Alana Amram, saxophonist Sarah Safaie, and keyboardist Gregg Foreman - who devastatingly passed away not long after. They carried her through grief, through the band's first tour after the loss, and a year for her to be ready to write

While studies have been conducted aiming to understand the science behind music, our inexplicable ability to tap into the emotions of another human being by way of arrangements of sonic frequencies still seems a bit like magic. LA's Death Valley Girls have always sought to wield that magic like ancient mystics, creating psychic bonds with willing ears through the medium of their fiery rock n' roll. On the surface, previous albums like Glow in the Dark and Darkness Rains were rowdy mash-ups of early American punk, sun-baked psych rock, and proto-metal fire-and-brimstone guitar worship, yet there was always an undercurrent of some kind of strange, celebratory communal ritual in their music. With their latest album Under the Spell of Joy, the band dives even deeper into that magical cosmic energy.