[Repost from The Tucson Sentinel; by Julie Jennings Patterson, February 4, 2021]
Once upon a time, your favorite music writer was but a lowly high school rock fan, scribbling goth adjacent poetry and political opinions in notebooks and thinking up terrible headline puns for her high school newspaper along the lines of “tennis team swings into action.” But, then, senior year rolled around and your humble teenage scribe fell into a funk, afflicted by writer’s block, feeling like it was all just an exercise in futility.
Once upon a time, your favorite music writer was but a lowly high school rock fan, scribbling goth adjacent poetry and political opinions in notebooks and thinking up terrible headline puns for her high school newspaper along the lines of “tennis team swings into action.” But, then, senior year rolled around and your humble teenage scribe fell into a funk, afflicted by writer’s block, feeling like it was all just an exercise in futility.
Luckily, once upon that time, I also had some good friends, one of whom was a classmate who played guitar and wrote and sang and seemingly knew every underground British / Australian / New Zealand pop band worth knowing and had introduced us all to groups like XTC and the Church. And that friend happened to be part of a school sponsored writer’s group that met at lunch once a week, and insisted, repeatedly that I HAD to join it. So I did. And things got a little bit better. And at the end of the year, when we were all penning pseudo profound things in each other’s yearbooks, that friend signed mine with a plea for me to not stop writing.
Mind you, I’ve struggled with writer’s block for most of my adult life, so that advice was hard to stick to over the years. Years later, the same friend sold me my first bass guitar, one of a few instances of kismet that helped put me on the path toward writing about music. So, I guess I kind of owe a debt of thanks to that dude.
“That dude” happens to be one Andrew Gardner, frontman and architect of Tucson based psych/indie pop band La Cerca. The bands’ latest release, “A Nice Sweet Getaway” should have been the centerpiece of a cross-country tour last year, but the best laid plans of mice and men are quite undone by a global pandemic and the record didn’t get the usual extra dose of word of mouth traction that a tour usually provides.
But while the band didn’t get a chance to hit the road this year, they did make a record that’s well suited for one’s own socially distanced road trip.
Released on Fort Lowell Records, which also put out La Cerca’s 2014 effort “Sunrise For Everyone,” the new release sees Gardner and company moving beyond the confines of their jangly indie pop past into slightly more ambient and experimental territory. What on past releases might have served as delay heavy guitar solos or bridges or trippy musical interludes within the standard verse-chorus-verse format serve as the main fare here, with instrumental flights of fancy leading the way and traditional song structure sticking its head out the window and enjoying the sunset for a change.
