Los Colognes Premieres 'Flying Apart' at Stereogum

Nashville based Los Colognes have just announced their third album The Wave, out May 12th via Big Deal Media / Thirty Tigers. Stereogum premiered the first track "Flying Apart," saying "between booming snare and sustained high notes, Los Colognes pack in hazy guitar solos and tropical keyboards that interlock into a tight groove." The band has a run of shows in the US, including opening slots for St. Paul and the Broken Bones and an appearance at Sasquatch Festival.

One of the highest and rarest aspirations in popular music is to reach for the transcendental, to access the spirit. On The Wave, Los Colognes succeeds at this - in breaking through the con?nes of everyday pop song lyricism to tell a holistic story. It's not a concept piece, but it's a brooding and joyful song cycle ?lled with philosophical rumination, effortless hooks, inspiring musicianship, and expansive arrangements. It's an album perfectly suited of the current zeitgeist of unease and hope.

Guitarist/singer Jay Rutherford opines in "Flying Apart" - 'Nobody believed / We're all just hoping / Floating down streams." It's a song that invokes "the wave" metaphor of the album's title, while churning through its own sonic sea of shimmering keyboards and guitars anchored by drummer Aaron Mortenson. The music evokes any of the best moments of late seventies or mid eighties FM radio while never being weighed down by the specter of in?uence. Los Colognes are a young band who have managed to forge their own sound while channeling the best sonic worlds of the decades past.

Unlike the live approach used to record the group's previous records, The Wave was built from the ground up with attention to each part. There is a certain economy of space in the songs that feels deliberate, while never ceasing to be warm and inclusive. Guitar and keyboard lines drift off each other in between lyrical exchanges while Mortenson propels the beat, sometimes meditative, sometimes driving.
The journey to ?nish recording The Wave was its own quest for Rutherford and Mortenson, a more deliberate process of creation and craft that shows a band becoming fully aware of its voice and its vision. Los Colognes have given us a singular collection of quietly anthemic tunes held together by philosophical re?ection and damn one rock and roll chops. The Wave is coming.

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