Sounds Like: The soundtrack to a Hatch chile and tequila-fueled therapy session in the snow-capped wilderness
For Fans of: Delta Spirit, Middle Brother, campfire demos
Why You Should Pay Attention: Born from a series of overlapping friendships, Glorietta is a songwriting project spearheaded by Delta Spirit’s Matthew Logan Vasquez. Looking to recreate the one-off energy of Middle Brother, his 2013 collaboration with John McCauley and Taylor Goldsmith, Vasquez invited six friends — David Ramirez, Jason Robert Blum, Noah Gundersen, Kelsey Wilson, Adrian Quesada, and Nathaniel Rateliff — to a week of on-the-fly recordings in the mountain town of Glorietta, New Mexico, outside Santa Fe. Nourished by good food, good booze and a Jacuzzi, the round-the-clock sessions capture a meeting of the minds focused on first impressions. Loose, lo-fi and off-the-cuff, the self-titled record – due August 24th on Nine Mile Records – jumps from ragged rockers to ballads so whisper-quiet you can hear doors opening in the background. Glorietta play Newport Folk Fest next month, with their one-and-only tour slated for the fall.
They Say: “There’s something really, really neat, or special, or holy even, about the sound of somebody discovering the sound of a melody right there on the spot,” says Vasquez. “And if you have good enough players, somebody in tune enough to listen with each other, that really makes you have to listen to everybody. You’re playing in the unit and trying to not suck, because if you [do] suck you have seven people looking at you. Everybody wants to come with it in the best way. It’s a beautiful thing that we could have this amount of people in a room work this collaboratively. It’s trying to capture that lightning in a bottle. That’s probably why there will never be another Middle Brother record: It was so special for us, and people related to it in a special way. But how are you going to copy or even get close to that?”
Hear for Yourself: “Heatstroke,” a slice-of-the-party mountain jam, is a crunchy, 8-bit vamp that doesn’t even pretend to take itself seriously. J.G.