LA's Mild High Club Build Jazz Castles in the Beijing Sky
While Mild High Club, the Los Angeles psychedelic pop group helmed by Alex Brettin, certainly pays tribute to some of the bands who rummaged about LA in the early 1970s, such as Steely Dan and Supertramp, the band’s standout 2016 sophomore release Skiptracing owes a lot more to the onslaught of scrappy neo-noir stories that came out around that – most notably Robert Altman’s The Last Goodbye – an inversion of the detective noir that finds Philip Marlowe lost in the haze of the city in 1973. Nevertheless, Alex Brettin's music seems to stem not so much from a certain era, but from a certain mindset that has been slowly fading away for decades now – an appreciation and curiosity of pop, jazz, and psychedelic music and the limitless possibilities posed by those genres. The band will be exploring such at their performance at Omni Space this Friday, Sep 14.
Based around the idea of a private investigator who’s on a mission to retrace the “steps of the sound and the spirit of American music,” Retracing, which was released on Stone Throws Records is a insanely catchy, feather-lite yet meticulously detailed summer time album that hooks you on the laid-back melodic charm that such artists like Mac Demarco (whom Brettin has previously played with as a part of Demarco's touring band) have perfected over the last decade before leading you in a world that’s more complex, uneasy, and fascinating.
On tracks like "Head Out", Brettin flexes his jazz muscles, soaking up the dream-like state of the protagonist around vocals tracks that drift into the ether and transfixing jazz chords that puts the listener in a trance. On the accompanying track "Kokopelli" led by the brooding piano chord, I’m reminded again of the work of renowned composer and revivalist Jon Brion (who provided soundtracks to everyone from Paul Thomas Anderson to David O. Russel). The breezy synth lines, shuffling percussion patterns, and airy vocals are really just breadcrumbs to the world-building Alex Brettin has mastered here.
While Alex Brettin has been keeping busy, playing sold out shows in Seoul, Tokyo, and Taipei last year and most recently collaborating with King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard on madcap (and ridiculously entertaining) Sketches of Brunswick East, it’s clear he’s chasing an even bigger sound and it’ll be interesting to see how far he can push the boundaries of neo-psychedelia in the coming years. And I can say is Mild High Club are a surreal head trip worth taking.
Catch Mild High Club at Omni Space, Sep 14. Support comes from Sleeping Dogs.