Healing Potpourri

Healing Potpourri specialize in effervescent chamber pop that’s all but guaranteed to leave the listener in a better mood. But on their new LP, Paradise, the San Francisco-based band led by vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Simi Sohota offers more than just sonic escapism. The album, written and recorded over the past two tumultuous years, finds Sohota processing the often overwhelming deluge of stress, frustration, and despair that’s become a part of modern life. But rather than being completely deflated, he pushed Healing Potpourri’s sound in new directions, blending warm electronics and elements of vibrant psychedelia into something that’s as eclectic as it is instantly enjoyable. The result is 11 songs that seek to imagine a better world and strive to make it a reality, while also still taking the time to appreciate the moments of brightness that can shine through in hard times.

Instagram | Spotify

----------------------------------------

Grave Flowers Bongo Band

Los Angeles’ Grave Flowers Bongo Band’s sophomore LP “Strength of Spring” is an inverted pyramid balanced on the headstock of an acoustic guitar, a rainbow painted in campfire smoke, an endless staircase circling into the clouds. That acoustic guitar, perfectly captured here by Ty Segall’s excellently sere and close mic’d production, plays skeleton to these conjurors woolly grooves, and singer Gabe Flores’ thousand-yard moan keeps us guessing as to exactly where this wildebeest is headed. He pinions these far out tunes, which burst generously with shit-hot guitar leads, Stoogeseque sax squalls, and a gaggle of great eight-armed drum fills, with a flinty wrist-flicking heartbeat as the band turns from whimsy to nimble riffery on a dime, following that pied-piper six string jangling down many lovely rabbit-holes of melody and exploration. It’s obvious these guys play together a lot (the lineup shares two members with acclaimed space rockers Hoover III to boot) and the telepathy on display here is synapse-snappy. Coursing throughout is that note-pad filling, lighter raising, undefinable black magic that feels so rare these days….we dig it mightily and we think you will too, it’s out on Castle Face Records April 30th.

Instagram | Spotify

----------------------------------------

Young Lovers

Instagram | Spotify

DJ Healing Gems

21+

Resident

428 S Hewitt St

Los Angeles, CA