“Passed out in a graveyard / warm liquor and cool rain in the afternoon / Laid back on piles of dead flowers / murdering hours, telling the truth.” So go the first words of Shasta, the new album from Oakland-based songwriter Levi Thomas on The Long Road Society. The scene is a fitting opening for \ narrative concerned with impending doom, ‘Doomsday Freeway’ casting Thomas as a lone figure existing in the space between a confirmed fate and the actual dropping of the lights. Mourning those gone before him, attempting to communicate via “fireside prostrations, secret transmissions, American sounds.” For “only you could be my nightmare,” as he says. “Fallen angel in gold hair / ’til death do us part.”
Described as an “experiment in limitations and creative self-control,” Shasta was recorded around a wood stove in a hillside studio in Big Sur, using solar energy to power a Tascam 388, with Thomas refusing to go beyond the eight available tracks. The process goes some way to explaining the record’s intimate tones, though instrumental opener ‘Ascension’ dispels any notion the self-imposed constraints might impact the sound’s richness. The opposite turns out to be true, as though in turning to simplicity Levi Thomas taps into some organic energy, an amalgamation of heat and shadow as drawn from sunlight, wood smoke, the rising warmth of the Californian night.
‘Sun God’ invokes these forces directly, a prayer to “rain and rock and sea,” to “feather, fur and gnashing teeth,” before ‘Wrecked’ offers the full vivid texture of cosmic country. The album sees Dominic Aiello (drums), Darwin Siegaldoud (bass, prepared organ, wurlitzer), C.H. McCoy (piano, organ, wurlitzer), Nicholas Merz (pedal steel, backup vocals) and Kit Center (drum machine, percussion, backup vocals) lend their talents, and its the slow tracks like ‘Wrecked’ where this depth is most apparent. Thomas’s vocals drifting above the aching music like some spirit ascending above his body and looking down upon the sad view.
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Elsewhere the sound changes energy, from the upbeat rhythm of ‘Concrete Buddha’ and its desperate memories to the taut simmer of ‘Trinity’ and its foreboding nighttime edge. ‘Dog Star’ draws upon elements of prog and psych rock in its slow build, playing out as something between Pink Floyd and Magnolia Electric Co., complete with Molina-esque lyrics of ritual release.
So take me back to Shady Grove
Sing me something sweet and slow
Cover me in Dogwood flowers and float me down the Finley
As above we‘ll be so low
Fire light descending
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The track embodies the subtle change across the record, an instance where Levi Thomas starts to feel the reward for his prior rituals and embrace the situation’s sacred weight. A narrative thread which culminates in the closing title track. “A song seized by the sublime scale of the American West,” was how we described it in a preview. A “revelatory experience […] captured with a decidedly seventies style, equal parts classic country and cosmic psych which invites the listener into the moment, never losing control of its relaxed rhythms despite everything.” For though the doom-laden tone is never quite transcended, the conclusion finds Thomas in a more peaceful state, as though having come to relax into the end which is descending.
My mind left my body north on the five
And I feel like the last man aliveWe could make the perfect sound
Fall like fire to the ground
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Shasta is out now via The Long Road Society and available from the Levi Thomas Bandcamp page.