Olas: Cada Nueva Ola

Sam

The invincible Olas

A surprisingly pop Cada Nueva Ola

Olas will tell you they’re more family than band, but maybe that’s not so uncommon. Actually realizing the nature of the relationship? That’s rarely talked about, the intimacy and intensity of the experience of playing music with someone else. Maybe it’s those bands who accept that reality and explore the inner reaches of each others’ souls that produce the truly transcendent works. Maybe that’s as silly as arguing that “chemistry” helps win baseball games.

Regardless, the band have newly created Cada Nueva Ola, as rollicking as any family dinner table. The latest five songs from Portland’s premiere flamenco outfit offer a wild emotional ride, from life-affirming highs to soul-searching lows, explosively crafted from acoustic guitars, an oud, and the various percussive sounds created with hands on hands and body and shoes on floor. This is music for hair-wrenching and wild abandon, impulsive shouts, whoops, and hollers.

Alongside the new EP, being released on vinyl, the band will also issue videos for the first three songs, directed and edited by Ali Mann, with help from David Meiklejohn and Nick Poulin. Watch them first. They lend a great appreciation for the work Olas do, for the performative construction of the songs, and for just how serious this business is for the band.

Ushered in by an upbeat strum build from Chriss Sutherland and Leif Sherman Curtis on guitars, and the cycling riffage of Tom Kovacevic on the oud, it’s hard not to be impressed by the gravity of Lindsey Bourassa and Megan Keogh’s movements in “Mis Amores Han Desparacido.” Their shoes echo precisely off the floor, invited by a storm of claps from Molly Angie and Anna Giamaiou, who also provide ooo-ooo backing vocals.

Sutherland, too, sounds particularly insistent and impassioned, but the translation of their Spanish lyrics reveals a more contemplative message: “A great wind came through my life/ Carried and scattered my friends around the world / A test perhaps? / I don’t know.”

The sheer athleticism on display by Bourassa in “Baya Song” is impressive in its own right, as she rips 32nd notes with her feet while muscling her way around the floor (perhaps the earlier baseball metaphor was inspired the fact that she has the quick feet of an elite second baseman). Again, though, they belie their seriousness by opening up into a power-pop chorus (in relative terms), repeatedly belting out “soy invincible,” their insistence that they are invincible incredibly compelling.

I wanted to quit my job and write a novel, right away. Listen to this with a buzz on and you might find yourself halfway to airport with nothing but a passport and an extra change of underwear.

The look on Bourassa’s face is incredibly determined. It’s life and death. This is the mantra of people who need to tell themselves they’re invincible just to get by, the oratory of the underdog, those people who have nothing else. The song is the same kind of subversive pop that KGFREEZE worked with “Better Falsetto,” when it comes down to it.

Olas don’t take the easy way out, and they aren’t some kind of sunshine-all-day bullshit artists, but they are fiercely into what they want to do and offer a version of the world that’s hard not to fall in love with. I wish I spoke Spanish so I could better appreciate the biting realism of the “Phar Lap” verse, “Beating dead horses / You know how they say / You won’t want me tomorrow / But you love me today,” in their most Flamenco song on the album.

They’re gorgeous without trying to convince you they’re pretty. On the closing two traditional numbers, “Volare” and “La Llorona,” Olas alternately bring the former into the present, by taking something from Domenico Modugno (think Dean Martin) and making it sound like a present-day stringband tune, and then absolutely crushing your hopes and dreams with the dark and brooding story of the mythical weeping woman, shoes on the floor sounding like echoes of gunfire in the distance. Sutherland nails the desperation of a woman who drowned her children for a man, only to have him reject her.

That’s the kind of bad decision family sometimes forces you into, shattering hearts and tearing at souls. Family, too, is a bedrock on which you can build toward the highest heights and Olas have, again, truly created a monument here.

Zach Jones: Love What You Love

Sam

Everything’s fine, Zach’s here

The clear-headed advice of Love What You Love

In person, Zach Jones has this calming presence. The world moves just a little bit slower around him. He is always polished, well outfitted, comfortable in a ruffled shirt front. Pulls off a fedora, no sweat.

In a progression of four records, he seemed to get ever-more polished, with his latest, The Days, like velvet made audible.

The jist of it, too, often rode that nostalgia bent that has fueled minor-key songs since the beginning of time. Kodaline recently distilled for me this very sentiment in “Way Back When,” with a semi-falsetto: “Those will be the days that I’ll be missing, when I’m old and when I’m gray and when I stop working.”

On Jones’ newest, Love What You Love, there’s certainly plenty of falsetto, semi- and otherwise, but everything is much more in-the-moment: “Today she’s got nothing to do, but to rest all the time / With a song, in the sunshine.” As the title would suggest, Jones has here decided to embrace the silver lining, while moving away from the polish and revisiting some of his power-pop work with Spencer Albee and As Fast As – along with the singer-songwriter style that will inevitably visit someone writing mostly by themselves.

That’s “Song in the Sunshine,” with a light acoustic guitar, actual birds tweeting, and straight falsetto croon until Jones dips down to finish the song’s final embrace of “wasting our time.”

But it’s also the truly superb “Little Light,” like Gordon Lightfoot and Bill Withers, with a country bass walk and a touch of woodblock from drummer Chris Sweet, the only other musician on the album (other than the string section on “Nothing’s Changed”). This is going to be a lot of people’s favorite song for a little while, thanks to Jones’ pairing of purring verses that mix in quick, staccato delivery: “providing me with shelter from the storm … a little bit of light is all I need.”

With “Out on the Town,” a song begging to be in this year’s big rom-com, they make a trio that could slip effortlessly onto the last Ray LaMontagne album. Really, I’d love to hear what Dan Auerbach could do with them. As it is, Jones basically engineered the album himself, in his apartment, with some help from Steve Drown at the studio, tracking Sweet. Jones wasn’t even in attendance. Just sent over click-tracked files.

Who ever heard of the drums coming last?

And it raises the question: Does the blues-rock of “In Love” and the disco-rock of “Lucky One” sound antiseptic because of the click track and the way they were manufactured, or does knowing the way they were manufactured introduce doubt?

Either way, they’re nice genre pieces, not unlike the more deep-throated stuff he did on early works Broken Record and Fading Flowers. Jones is breathy in “In Love,” and just may be playing the role of the creeper, over the top in his affection. And in “Lucky One” he breaks out his first ripping guitar solo in years, with a growl that pulls the song out of being too syrupy and continues through the “looks can be deceiving” reprise.

In fact, there are a number of phrases that Jones revisits on the album that work as mantras, though it’s hard not to wonder if many of them aren’t “serenity now” in disguise. In the opening cut, it’s “Everything’s Fine,” as though reverbed piano and a bit of mildly distorted guitar could solve all of our problems. Or at least put them in perspective.

By the finish, the song becomes an interesting mix of some of Jones’ R&B/smooth operator persona and the aggressiveness of As Fast As (the bouncy chords on the keyboards are Spencer’s stock in trade). “Everything’s fine” yet again, but this time it’s yelled in the background. Is he trying to convince himself, you, some third party?

“Hate What You Hate,” an obvious single, is very much didactic, opening with White Album-era Beatles and then mixing in some oompa-oompa Dixie. Stomping piano chords introduce an irresistible chorus: “You’ve got to hate what you hate / So you can love what you love.” Eventually, a western flavor shines through, like sarsaparilla shots with a player piano in the background and cowboys sitting around betting on cards and munching on cheroots.

It’s an all-inclusive kind of album from a man who knows how to make records and likes for them to have a theme to rally around. Stop thinking so much, people. Just enjoy the ride.