Audio By Carbonatix
Like baked, cheating poker buddies, California beat rearranger Nobody (Elvin Estela) and Mystic Chords of Memory (Christopher Gunst, Jen Cohen) mesh perfectly on Tree Colored See … in a blend of acid-trip high jinks and astute drum sampling. Though Gunst might be better known for his desert ditties as the frontman in the dormant country-psyche outfit Beachwood Sparks, he along with Aislers Set member Cohen doesn’t fall far from the Buffalo Springfield-reared tree. Actually the sparse, countrified textures that sprung from multiple Boss delay pedals on Beachwood Sparks’s debut album show sometimes on Tree, notably in the shuffling-percussion prairie-bed narrative “Coyote’s Song (When You Hear It Too)” and the brief backward-trekking veldt of “Klaw Prints.” Tree radiates the same collaboration chemistry that surfaced last year on Nobody’s And Everything Else album, when he paired with the same flower children for a Flaming Lips cover. Sneakier card tricks play out in the producer’s strong sense of when to use a scattered spread of subtle beats (“Floating”) or a soulful hip-hop break (“Decisions, Decisions”) for Gunst and Cohen’s sprawling, sunny folk.
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