{"id":711,"date":"2014-02-25T20:35:00","date_gmt":"2014-02-25T20:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/?p=711"},"modified":"2026-06-23T20:37:07","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T20:37:07","slug":"review-its-alive-la-luz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/?p=711","title":{"rendered":"Review: It\u2019s Alive, La Luz"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Musical styles can migrate, like birds. It doesn\u2019t happen all at once, a song here, a band there, but given some time to marinate, what was the groove in one place (if it\u2019s any good) will find a foothold somewhere else.

We all know about grunge and Seattle, it\u2019s a story well told, but in the last 20 years there\u2019s been a movement away from the muddy guitars for a cleaner sound, moving from the dark into the brightness.

Leave it to La Luz to shine the way.

A four-woman group, La Luz mixes the Southern California surf sound of Dick Dale with recent bands Dum Dum Girls and Best Coast for music more attuned to flat boards than flannel. In its debut LP album It\u2019s Alive<\/i>, La Luz manages to navigate the musical genre without sounding too pedestrian, propelled by the sharp drumming of Marian Li-Pino and the throaty voice of Shana Cleveland, who embraces the \u201960s-inspired sound like she\u2019s hearing it for the first time.

The drums introduce the album, Li-Pino\u2019s on point attack in \u201cSure As Spring\u201d gets the groove going while Cleveland, sounding much like Debbie Harry, roams through the lyrics casually. Midway through enters an Alice Sandahl keyboard jam right up Ray Manzarek\u2019s alley. It\u2019s a song a little under two-and-a-half minutes but packs a lasting punch.

For the first full minute \u201cMorning High\u201d is a subtle yet concise instrumental, and it was probably best if it stayed that way. Once the lyrics enter, the track moves from intriguing to ordinary. The band adds an instrumental two songs later in \u201cSunstroke,\u201d which proves a nice little gem. You have to appreciate a band for adding an instrumental on an album, it\u2019s an underused practice that can give any LP a good palate cleansing.

And it does impart a shift here, as the band experiments a bit more in the album\u2019s second half. \u201cCall Me in the Day,\u201d It\u2019s Alive\u2019s<\/i> best track, is elegiac despite Abbey Blackwell\u2019s bouncy bass beat, a song where Cleveland\u2019s voice shines with understated tones. The darkness of Seattle’s rain clouds embellish the California sunshine beat \u2014 if La Luz does an album of songs such as this, it has a game-changer in its hands.

\u201cPhantom Feelings\u201d is another fine instrumental which leads into \u201cYou Can Never Know,\u201d a rote song which ends It\u2019s Alive<\/i> on a dead note \u2014 it  sounds like one song too many.

But it\u2019s not enough to take the shimmer off La Luz, which proves a sunshine surf beat can survive in the Pacific Northwest. It’s worth seeing where the foursome takes their sound from here.<\/p>\n

 <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Musical styles can migrate, like birds. It doesn\u2019t happen all at once, a song here, a band there, but given some time to marinate, what was the groove in one place (if it\u2019s any good) will find a foothold somewhere else. We all know about grunge and Seattle, it\u2019s a story well told, but in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":712,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[48],"class_list":["post-711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-la-luz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=711"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":713,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711\/revisions\/713"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}