On my first listen to Death Valley Girls’ album Welcome to Earth. I was drawn in by the instruments rather than the vocals, because they have the vibe of 70’s/80’s children’s cartoon theme songs to them. Which, I’m sure, sounds like the most backhanded of compliments. It isn’t, backhanded I mean. It is a compliment. It made me feel nostalgic for something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I can’t imagine that DVG found themselves inspired by something they watched on the BBC at 4pm 40 years ago, because they hail from California, and I’m very sure weren’t even born then. So, we’ll have to assume that it’s something I’m projecting onto it. It’s up beat music, that feels like it’s moving you forward into an adventure. It also reminded me a little of the Beatles. This is something I am 100% sure I’m not imagining, their album cover is a homage to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) but with animals surrounding the band instead of people. I wouldn’t say the influence is overwhelming but every now and then you get a flavour of the fab 4 coming through. I imagine it’s the perfect music to listen to if you were cruising down a highway with the air con on on a bright summer’s day.
My favourite song is ‘Fire and Brimstone’, the vocals made me think that this is what it would sound like if PJ Harvey’s ‘Down by the Water’ was sung by up beat evangelicals, it’s one of the few songs where the vocals dominate the music. It’s one of the songs where I can sense the Beatles influence, like towards the end of ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, where they start to almost sound like they’ve run out of breath, they have been singing so hard and the vocals begin to fade a little. ‘Life So Far’ follows on from ‘Fire and Brimstone’ and keeps the chanting repetitive vocals they just established going. You just get into the hip swinging rhythm and then it ends, stops cold, no more, I was holding my breath because I thought it was a pause and I wanted to chant the refrain “life so far” , a brilliant reminder that you rarely expect it when life ends.
The band identifies as psych-punk, and far be it from me to contradict that, but I’d say it is heavy on the psychedelic, light on the punk, sprinkled with jazz. Is there a way to describe the sound of “if the 70’s happened now?” This album has a sad symmetry about it. DVG formed around the tragedy of lead vocalist, Bonnie Bloomgarden, lost her home and her dog in one of the wild fires that are becoming all too common in California. She found support in her community of musicians and thus DVG coalesced. Sadly, their keyboardist Gregg Foreman passed away recently and this album is their last collaboration. Loss, growth and loss again, this album refuses to separate the cosmic with the personal and that is where its beauty lies.
Death Valley Girls are touring the UK in October (dates here). Make the trip, pun intended, to go and see them, their music has that kind of personal magic that can only be improved by seeing it performed live.
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Review by Lauren Powell
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