Allah-Las

Artist: Allah-Las
Title: Allah-Las
Genre: Garage Rock
LP/Album
2012
Favorite track: Catalina
Available as: Download, CD, cassette, vinyl (Innovative Leisure)

I figured it would be a good idea to start off this blog with a personal favorite, so here goes…

I discovered this album through the Cincinnati library's CD of the Month Club, and I can clearly remember the first time I listened to it. It was the spring of 2013. I picked it up, popped it into the CD player in my car, and went for a drive with the windows down in the cool spring air. The opening notes of "Catamaran" intrigued me: they were mysterious and ethereal, yet still catchy. By the end of the second track, "Don't You Forget It," I was hooked.

This album is incredibly atmospheric. It has an almost indescribable air of mystery that, for whatever strange reason, I associate with pictures I've seen of ancient monuments in the Middle East. Don't ask me why, because I can't tell you. But I also strongly associate music with what was happening the first time I heard it. For instance, I closely associate The Killers' album Battle Born with the summer after I got my driver's license and I drove all over town with my friends, blaring it over the car's speakers. Even in the middle of winter, Allah-Las still reminds me of the spring when I first heard it.

An interesting thing about Allah-Las is that they do instrumentals equally as well as they do vocal tracks. Normally, artists tend to do one or the other really well, but not this band. Even though they only have a few instrumental tracks on the album, they're among the most memorable, especially "Sacred Sands," one of the most atmospheric songs on the album. This trend has continued to their most recent releases, one of the best of which is a moody instrumental B-side called "No Werewolf."

The lyrics range from neo-psychedelic weirdness in "Catamaran" to standard, 60s-style love songs in "Vis-A-Vis" and "Don't You Forget It." The songwriting is heavily influenced by 60s garage rock bands, with its simple song structure and reverb-heavy production, but it manages to be more consistently interesting than many of its influences. This is not to say that I don't like 60s garage rock - I do, very much - but I've listened to enough albums to know that the genre, at the time, was oriented mostly towards making hit singles rather than well-constructed albums. Not so with Allah-Las. While they did release several singles, even before they were signed to their current label, they mastered the art of album construction with this LP. There's not a single song out of place and it flows smoothly from beginning to end.

It's a real tragedy that this band doesn't get more attention from the indie music scene. I can only remember meeting two people who know about them, one of whom is the librarian who sent me the CD in the first place, and the other is the record store clerk I bought the album from. I highly recommend that everyone check this album out. It's on iTunes, Spotify, and, for the physically-minded, is available from Innovative Leisure Records on CD, vinyl (a fantastic pressing), and cassette.