Photo credit: Pat Martin / Press shot HERE / Album artwork HERE
Lol Tolhurst x Budgie x Jacknife Lee have announced a run of U.S. dates in support of their critically acclaimed debut album, Los Angeles which is out now via Play It Again Sam. The live project, made up of Lol and Budgie on percussion, will be opening for Miki Berenyi Trio on their U.S. tour, as well as performing a debut headline performance at The Casbah in San Diego, and at this year’s Cruel World Festival (featuring special guests).
The album’s 13 tracks dive into freedom and slavery, beauty and decay, hope and despair, and feature an astonishing list of guest vocalists and musicians – The Edge (U2), Civil Rights avant-garde artist Lonnie Holley, Mary Lattimore, and more. The group and album have been featured with the likes of Pitchfork, SPIN, BrooklynVegan, Consequence, FLOOD Magazine, Modern Drummer, Salon, Stereogum, Surface Magazine, Yahoo! Entertainment, Under the Radar Magazine and much more.
Listen to Los Angeles HERE
The trio have released a run of poignant videos for the campaign; “Los Angeles” featuring LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, “Ghosted At Home” featuring Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie, and “We Got To Move” featuring Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock with comedian / actor / musician Fred Armisen making a cameo in the video. Most recently, they released the Michael Frost-directed video for album highlight “Uh Oh” featuring guest vocals from Starcrawler’s Arrow de Wilde and guitar from IDLES’ Mark Bowen.
The three-way Los Angeles collaborative long-player was born out of a curiosity which just wouldn’t die. Made up of two of the most illustrious and inventive drummers of the post-punk era, The Cure’s Lol Tolhurst, and Budgie from Siouxsie & The Banshees and The Creatures, along with stellar producer and multi-instrumentalist Garret ‘Jacknife’ Lee, this unlikely alt-supergroup have spent the last four years spiriting up one of the most extraordinary albums to appear in recent times.
Perusing the tracklist, with its guest credits for, amongst others, James Murphy, Bobby Gillespie, The Edge, Civil Rights avant-gardist Lonnie Holley, Mary Lattimore, Starcrawler wildchild Arrow de Wilde and Mark Bowen from IDLES, you may rightly wonder just what the 13-track long-player holds in store.
The answer: a hard-hitting and compulsively exploratory 55-minute electronic headfuck, founded on unrivaled rhythmic expertise, fleshed out with an armory of synths, guitars (Jacknife’s forté) and supplementary percussion, often overlaid with elite-class strings and brass, then universally twisted, manipulated and quite masterfully sculpted by Lee, with his super-producer’s hat on.
As per the title, Los Angeles is a journey into the dark heart of contemporary LaLaLand, the city of its birth, a place of limitless possibility, yet also a diseased and consumptive hell-on-earth which, to quote Murphy’s lyric on the title track, “eats its children,” where pipe dreams shatter, racial inequality prevails and homelessness spirals. Throw in the terrifying uncertainty occasioned by the global pandemic, which both interrupted and ultimately aided its genesis, and the ‘new Cold War’ terror that has ensued, and you get a record fueled by fear and tension, but whose propulsive beats, mind-warpingly mangled instrumentation and exceptional vocal contributions provide release through the palpable joy of their creation.
LOS ANGELES TRACK LISTING & COVER ART 1. This Is What It Is (To Be Free) [with Bobby Gillespie] 2. Los Angeles [with James Murphy] 3. Uh Oh [with Arrow de Wilde and Mark Bowen (IDLES)] 4. Ghosted At Home [with Bobby Gillespie] 5. Train With No Station [with The Edge] 6. Bodies [with Lonnie Holley and Mary Lattimore] 7. Everything And Nothing 8. Travel Channel [with Pan Amsterdam] 9. Country of the Blind [with Bobby Gillespie] 10. The Past (Being Eaten) 11. We Got To Move [with Isaac Brock] 12. Noche Oscura [with The Edge] 13. Skins [with James Murphy] | 
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