Electric Balloon
The Brooklyn quintet Ava Luna are like a troupe of high-flying acrobats, with their feats of musical derring-do keeping you on the edge of your seat. In creating their sophomore album, the band members retreated to a cabin in upstate New York. There they recorded a set of songs full of more influences than most ice cream shops have flavors: \'60s soul, avant-jazz, no-wave art rock, strutting disco, and good ol\'-fashioned experimental noise. What sounds like a cacophony is actually the opposite: a mesmerizingly orchestrated set of songs where anything can happen. On \"Sear Robuck M&Ms,\" a deep funk beat lays the foundation for Becca Kauffman (one of three vocalists) to screech scraps of hepcat lingo—it\'s The JB\'s reimagined as arthouse music. \"Aquarium\" has a mind-bending flamenco lilt to it, while \"Plain Speech\" is a heady slab of early-\'80s downtown-NYC art rock. Don\'t mistake *Electric Balloon* for a cerebral art project, though: from the neo-soul of \"Hold U\" to the sharply funky \"Daydream,\" this record is full of visceral thrills.
To purchase the LP or CD version, please visit the Western Vinyl shop: westernvinyl.com/shop/wv116
The 11 irresistibly fun songs on Brooklyn indie rockers Ava Luna's new Electric Balloon are as eccentric as anything the band has ever done, but they stick in your head in a way their earlier material didn't.
For their second album, Ava Luna flirts teasingly with ideas of structure and pacing, drawing lines in the sand only to kick them out with the sort of no wave-inspired, funk-blues fusion that's rapidly become their signature.
On their 2012 debut, Ice Level, Brooklyn-based Ava Luna's songs often suffocated under the weight of their own composition.
Day Dream is the brash, unapproachable gatekeeper to Ava Luna’s third LP Electric Balloon. With Carlos Hernandez’s coos and yelps returning to the fore, this New York quintet’s record is a jumbled, musty garage of songs, angular and cobwebbed and impossible to second-guess.