Indie-pop band Dollshot is Rosie and Noah K, husband and wife, a beguiling voice and a killer sax. Rosalie, from small-town Virginia, and Noah, from Topanga Canyon, meet at New England Conservatory, move to Brooklyn, and write songs that twist the threads of their outsider influences - chanson of nineteenth-century Paris, unfamiliar harmony from schismatic microtonalists, free jazz from the wildcats of the off-the-grid sixties.
Dollshot's new album is Lalande. The title, from Clarice Lispector's Near to the Wild Heart, is, like the band, just beyond reach, a here meets a not-yet-here: "It's like angel's tears.... Lalande is also the night sea, when no one has set eyes on the beach yet, when the sun hasn't risen."? Begun while Noah and Rosie were assisting Hampton Fancher as he wrote the screenplay for Blade Runner 2049, the album was completed over three years of writing and recording between Topanga and Brooklyn. Evoking the afterimage of west coast wilderness fading against the brick and bent steel of industrial New York, Lalande is an avant-noir fantasy of future and memory, and Rosie sings like a girl with a secret.
The title track single, "Lalande" is an unhinged torch song about obsessive romance, a graphic synthesis of ethereal vocals and avant-noir jazz. The music video is directed by legendary filmmaker and photographer Matt Mahurin (Tom Waits, U2) and was recently premiered on WNYC's Soundcheck. Mahurin brings his eye for mystifying, powerful imagery to Dollshot's dark and electrifying romanticism. Filmed on Topanga Beach in Los Angeles, Mahurin directed "Lalande" as a psychological portrait of a haunted girl lost in an unmoored state of nostalgia.
Co-produced by Lawson White at Studio G in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the Lalande album features lyrics by Rosie Kaplan, Hampton Fancher, and Chaucer; Mike Pride on drums; Wes Matthews on keys; Peter Bitenc on bass; Kevin McFarland (JACK Quartet) on tuned and detuned cello.
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