June 26, 2018

Two New Albums Worth Your While: La Luz and Locate S,1

These young veteran acts may just cast a spell over you.

Album Reviews

La Luz
Floating Features
Hardly Art

Locate S,1
Healing Contest
Sybaritic Peer/Nicey Music

Sometimes, the pure, visceral sound of music is so transporting that it’s easy to just switch off the brain and surrender to the mood. Witness, for example, La Luz and Christina Schneider, young veterans who might have plenty to say, but know how to cast a spell, too.

On their third alluring LP, the crafty quartet La Luz revisits the strategy of its previous work to mesmerizing effect. Singer Shana Cleveland strikes an intriguing balance between cool reserve and creeping anxiety and plays spiky, surf-tinged guitar, while Alice Sandahl explores the catalogue of cheesy-hip organ riffs favored by so many sneering garage punks back in the ’60s. In other hands, Floating Features would be a tame nostalgia exercise, but La Luz infuses this vintage style with modern urgency.

Having recorded under a variety of guises (Japeto Solutions, C.E. Schneider Topical, et al.), the inventive Christina Schneider’s latest project is the curiously titled Locate S,1. Produced by Of Montreal leader Kevin Barnes, the terrific Healing Contest offers dreamy pop of the highest order, featuring exotic chord changes, airy synths, twinkling guitars and Schneider’s floating, overdubbed voices. The end result is a lighter-than-air delight that has the effect of a beautiful hallucination, one that could turn into a nightmare in an instant, but never does.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate