“I was in a dream, but now I can see that change is the only law.”
With a credo adapted from science fiction author Octavia E. Butler, an album title from a collection of metaphysical poetry, and an expansion in consciousness brought on by personal crisis, guitarist and songwriter Shana Cleveland learns to embrace a changing world with unconditional love on News of the Universe, the new full-length from California rock band La Luz.
News of the Universe is a record born of calamity, a work of dark, beautiful psychedelia reflecting Cleveland’s experience of having her world blown apart by a breast cancer diagnosis just two years after the birth of her son. It’s also a portrait of a band in flux, marking the first appearance for drummer Audrey Johnson and the final ones from longtime members bassist Lena Simon and keyboardist Alice Sandahl, whose contributions add a bittersweet edge to a record that is both elegy for an old world and cosmic road map to a strange new one.
But is there any band in the world more suited to capturing the chaos of change in all its messy beauty than La Luz? Formed by Cleveland in 2012, La Luz is beloved for their ability to balance bedlam and bliss, each new record another fine-tuning of the band’s mix of swaggering riffs with angelic vocals borrowed from doo-wop and folk; a band so reliably great that it makes the huge step forward in confidence and sheer musicality that is News of the Universe all the more formidable. Cleveland, also a writer and painter, has developed into a truly original songwriter with her own canon of haunted psychedelia that, in recent years, has drawn upon the changing landscape around her rural California home for inspiration, notably on last year’s critically acclaimed solo release, Manzanita, a magical realist documentation of her pregnancy and early motherhood that appeared on many year-end lists.
Yet if Cleveland has spent years writing songs about ghosts, what lurks in the shadows of News of the Universe is nothing less than death itself. “There are moments on this album that sound to me like the last frantic confession before an asteroid destroys the earth,” says Cleveland.
Sonically, the record is all urgency. Songs trip over themselves as if trying to outrun the apocalypse: the breathless pitter-pattering of toms on “Strange World,” the title track’s finger-tangling opening riff drenched in murky distortion. An atmosphere of doom hovers hazily over the Sgt. Pepper-esque baroque pop song “Poppies,” on which Cleveland sings of a wavering orange idyll about to be set ablaze by the late summer sun. On the similarly kaleidoscopic “Dandelions,” she figures the yellow flowers for unsuspecting “little suns” soon to be “turning into moons” as the season marches on. The synthesized sounds used on the band’s last record, 2021’s La Luz, to mimic the languid buzz and crackle of a summer’s day in the countryside have been cut adrift in space—now they are silvery comet tails, dapplings of space dust, showers of stars.
These earthy observations are inspired by Cleveland's walks around her home in the shell-shocked days post-diagnosis when she found she had to be very intentional about what she consumed. “Seeing the cycle of life, seeing things grow out of decay, the decay of other living things—was super comforting to me. I had to get to a place where I felt more comfortable with the idea of death,” she says.
But for every moment of fear, there is one of pure ecstasy. Shimmery chamber pop song “Blue Moth Cloud Shadow” puddles into a twinkly organ-driven reverie; “I’ll Go With You” starts out with the record’s sludgiest riff before turning into its prettiest song. “Always in Love” is a real power-of-love ballad that serves as the record’s centerpiece and is capped off by a fiery and jubilant guitar solo, Cleveland’s own “November Rain” moment.
The powerful sense of openness that permeates News of the Universe is at least partially due to the fact that it is a record made entirely by women—from the performing, writing, and producing all the way through to the recording, engineering, and mastering. “There is something inherently and simultaneously sweet and brutal about womanhood,” says Cleveland. “That is something I hear on this record.”
Working with producer Maryam Qudos (Spacemoth), the all-female environment allowed Cleveland to feel safe tapping into difficult places and expressing hard emotions women are socialized to suppress. “Having that kind of connection and that comfort straightaway let us push it further,” she says. “We didn't spend the first half of the session being careful not to offend someone’s ego.”
Qudos also helped shape the songs, bringing ideas to the table “that to me felt like choices that I would not normally make, but I was really stoked about,” says Cleveland, pointing out that the dubbed-out effects on “Moon in Reverse” were all Qudos. “Sometimes she would have ideas about the structure of the songs, which a producer often doesn't really mess with. But as a songwriter herself, I think she felt really comfortable with us.” Their working relationship was so organic that Qudos has since joined La Luz full-time on keyboards to replace the departing Sandahl.
Unashamedly vulnerable, unabashedly feminine, and undeniably triumphant, News of the Universe is another knockout record from a band so reliably great that it has perhaps led people to overlook how pioneering La Luz really are: women of color in indie music forging their own path by following their own artistic star into galaxies beyond current musical trends, always led by an earnest belief in the cosmic power of love and a great riff. Never is that more true than on News of the Universe, which might be La Luz’s most brutal record to date but also their most blissful. After everything, how could it not?
Rahill Jamalifard is a multidisciplinary artist and musician hailing from Lansing, Michigan and presently based in upstate New York’s idyllic Hudson Valley. As a founding member of Brooklyn garage-rock mainstays, Habibi, Rahill garnered a reputation for alchemizing an eclectic range of influences, distilling them into captivating and heavy pop songs that gestured towards the modes and melodies of the Iranian/American household in which she was raised—a heritage she has continued to nurture via successive trips to Iran. This affinity for Iranian culture and music is increasingly present in her emergent solo output. Indeed, maps of her familial home cities, Shiraz and Isfahan, grace the insert of her upcoming debut solo LP, Flowers At Your Feet. The record arrives fresh off the heels of 2022’s Sun Songs, a collection of covers (more-so reinterpretations, really) of standards from an eclectic and personal pantheon of cherished songwriters. Sun Songs plays something like a statement of intent—documenting a diverse range of influences, some of which date back to Rahill’s years-long stint working at Academy Records in Brooklyn; Flowers At Your Feet, out 12th May on Big Dada. documents Rahill’s complete efflorescence as a singer/songwriter, while retaining the maturity, humility, and intimacy that suffused Sun Songs.
The album’s title intimates the deeply personal and often contemplative mode that these songs inhabit. Far from recounting the sturm und drang of heartsickness or frenzied new love (your standard singer/songwriter fare), Flowers At Your Feet finds Rahill tending, almost diaristically, to memory — reflecting on childhood and family, sifting through time, ultimately arriving at a state of quiet grace and self love.
Peppered throughout Flowers At Your Feet are artifacts lovingly culled from Rahill’s private cosmogony: field recordings, audio from home movies, references to film and poetry, allusions to sports legends. Lead single, “I Smile for E,” a paean to family and memory, features a recording of a beloved late aunt singing “In honor of you” in Farsi. Presented without overt explanation, these sonic novelties are nevertheless intuitively, universally familiar, prompting the listener to construct their very own memory palace.
This philosophy, this care for the past, for family and heritage, is distilled in the record’s art: a hazy photograph of an infant Rahill, damp hair precociously done-up in a wrapped towel, wearing a gold necklace. Regarding this necklace’s significance, Rahill states: “Passed down charms have such powerful meaning and sentimentality. Preserving stories and embodying generations of love. My grandma gifted me that necklace on my first trip to Iran when I was a year old. She’s someone who’s been ever present in life, and since her passing last year the value and appreciation of the charms have only deepened.”
Recorded in phases during the Covid pandemic, Flowers At Your Feet constitutes a close collaboration between Rahill and producer, Alex Epton (FKA Twigs, Arca). Two kindred and eclectic spirits, Rahill and Epton bonded over a shared appreciation for the likes of Stereolab, Curtis Mayfield, and Kool Keith. Epton, for his part, immediately identified the strength and potential of Rahill’s pre-existing solo compositions, some of which (including the lilting standout “From a Sandbox”) she’d written years prior. Still other songs were conceived spontaneously during the recording— “Bended Light,” a woozy cascade of rhyme and flow coiled around Jasper Marsalis’s (Slauson Malone) jazz chords, began as a vocal melody Rahill sent to Eptonvia voice note during a brief sojourn in Michigan. But regardless of their origin, these songs clearly live together: born of this present season in which Rahill has found herself.
This season might best be summarized as one of self-acceptance. Laid back and dubby, Flowers’ third track, “Tell Me,” includes a plain-spoken declaration of contentment, flipping the melancholy of Nico’s famous “These Days” rendition on its head, landing somewhere surprisingly triumphant: “I stay / keep it in my zone these days / sun coming out sometime / but I’d rather be alone these days / And though / no one’s trying to bother me / I keep a ball around /and I watch some mob movies.” Likewise, “Note to Self,” nodding infectiously to 90’s big beat EDM, documents Rahill’s lived experiences in her years pursuing romance and art, synthesizing that wisdom and pushing forward.
Among the extensive list of talented players who have contributed their time and talent to Flowers At Your Feet, “Fables,” features vocals and production credits from no less than art-pop revolutionary, Beck. Their friendship and creative collaboration—the consequence of a chance meeting at a mutual friend’s show (“kismet” in Rahill’s own words) and an extended period of correspondence—should, alone, intrigue the uninitiated. And “Fables” itself, complete with an ebullient, elastic bassline, functions as a pure marriage of sensibilities, an aesthetic alliance that proves Rahill is as versatile and ambitious as the company she keeps.
For Rahill initiates, as well as fans from the Habibi days, there is a vast world of multi-disciplinary art and ephemera here to explore. Ever the autodidact, Rahill works across mediums with singular ease and earnestness. Her visual art (including a recent collection of so-called “primitive” crayon portraits, I’m This I’m That I’m in the World) has been exhibited internationally. Her keen aesthetic eye has led her to collaborations in the world of fashion, most notably a live performance of songs from Flowers At Your Feet and “Haenim” (a track from SunSongs) in Maryam Nassir Zadeh’s SS23 New York Fashion Week show. All of which is merely to say, Rahill has been toiling ceaselessly, not in pursuit of fame, but authentic self-expression and community. With Flowers At Your Feet, she is prepared to share the fruits of her labor.