Whitney - Light Upon The Lake - CASSETTES

A talented R&B singer who dabbled in soul and disco music beginning in the early 1980's, Junior Byron is presented here with his rare 1981 full length album InchSunshine,Inch finally available in the digital domain and newly remastered.

Following their acclaimed sophomore album Forever Turned Around, Whitney have returned with Candid, a 10-song collection boasting covers of artists like Kelela, David Byrne, John Denver, Labi Siffre, and more. Covers have always been an integral part of the band's ethos, with renditions of classics by Allen Toussaint, Dolly Parton, and Neil Young a highlight of their setlists for half of a decade. But for Candid, Whitney decided to challenge themselves finding their favorite songs that also fell outside of musical comfort zone. Marking the first time the full touring band was in a recording studio together, they hashed out these covers after a tour over sessions in Chicago and Portland. InchThis could've been as simple as we really just love these songs and we love our bandmates and making a covers record just felt right but this was a bit of an exercise to see how we can evolve as a band going forward,Inch says drummer and singer Julien Ehrlich. He adds, InchWe didn't want to beat these songwriters at their own game. Instead, we wanted to find songs that were great at their core and could be molded into our own thing.Inch

Julien Ehrlich and Max Kakacek could hear the staggering differences in the songs they were writing for their third album as Whitney, SPARK the buoyant drum loops, the effortless falsetto hooks, the coruscant keyboard lines. They suddenly sounded like a band reimagined, their once-ramshackle folk-pop now brimming with unprecedented gusto and sheen. But could they see it, too? So in the ad hoc studio the Chicago duo built in the living room of their rented Portland bungalow, a shared 2020 escape hatch amid breakups and lockdowns, Julien and Max decided to find out. Somewhere between midnight and dawn every night, their brains refracted by the late hour and light psychedelics, they'd play their latest creations while a hardware store disco ball spun overhead and slowed-down music videos from megastars spooled silently on YouTube. Did their own pop songs-so much more immediate and modern than their hazy origins-fit such big-budget reels? InchWe'd come to the conclusion we weren't going to be filming Super 8 videos to this stuff anymore,Inch Julien remembers with a grin. InchHow about something more hi-fi, cinematic?Inch When the footage and the tunes linked, Julien and Max knew they had done it, that they'd finally found Whitney's sound. SPARK reintroduces Whitney as a contemporary syndicate of classic pop, it's dozen imaginative and endearing tracks wrapping fetching melodies around paisley-print Dilla beats and luxuriant electronics. What's more, Whitney reduces three years of extreme emotional highs and lows into 38 brisk but deep minutes, each of these 12 tracks a singable lesson in what it is they (and, really, we) have all survived. The recalcitrant ennui of opener InchNOTHING REMAINS,Inch the devastating loss of InchTERMINAL,Inch the sun-streaked renewal of InchREAL LOVEInch However surprising it may sound, SPARK is less a radical reinvention for Whitney than an