This coming February, Los Angeles-based songwriter James Aranda is releasing the EP Ultraviolet via Anxiety Blanket Records under the moniker Jac Aranda. Having played in a number of bands including Media Jeweler (Fire Talk Records), Aranda enlisted the talents of old bandmates to bring the sound to life, with Sam Farzin (Media Jeweler, Windy, Moon Pearl) and Paul Tran-Hoang (Moon Pearl) joining the recording session and Tara Milch (Pastel Felt) and Matt Maruskin (Gigi) adding overdubbed vocals and violin respectively.
To whet appetites for the record, Jac Aranda has unveiled two singles. The title track is a buoyant, slacker rock-inflected indie pop song that explores the possibility that we have powers beyond our five senses. “Some would chalk it up to confirmation bias, but I think we don’t give ourselves enough credit in terms of extrasensory perception, we underestimate our psychic prowess,” Aranda describes of those strange moments of seemingly clairvoyant insight. “What happens when we embrace phenomena and look deeper, past a world taken at face-value?”
The second single is ‘Nobody Knows’ deals with themes altogether more worldly, suffused with a deep frustration and weariness with the hollow nature of much of modern society. “‘Nobody Knows’ is this sort of third-person story about a man who is experiencing existential dread,” Aranda continues. “Realizing the futility of individualism and capitalism, and questioning his place in the world, what the world he participates in is founded on, and what it could be instead.”
How did it all come to be
Devoid of meaning,
All this stupidity?
Ultraviolet will be released on cassette via Anxiety Blanket Records on 7th February. Pre-order it now from their webstore.