Ethan Bassford, the fatefully named bassist of Brooklyn art-rock oddballs Ava Luna, got into a few arguments with singer/guitarist Carlos Hernandez while they were writing their 2012 debut album, Ice Level. Couldn't they at least try to write a song with a chorus?, Bassford wondered. As the freewheeling, compositionally adventurous Ice Level attests—the answer was a resounding no. But Bassford persisted. "I was like, 'Carlos, don't worry,'" he recalled in a recent interview. "'It's still gonna be weird. Having a chorus doesn't make it not weird.'"
After hearing Ava Luna's taut and irresistibly fun new album Electric Balloon, it's hard to disagree. Its 11 songs are as eccentric as anything this band of merry weirdos has ever done, but they stick in your head in a way their earlier material did not. Ava Luna are a kitchen-sink band, whose richly cluttered songs pull from a variety of influences: dance-punk, funk, doo-wop, and R&B. (They've summed it up in a perfectly succinct Bandcamp tag: "nervous soul.") They're one of very few current indie bands (in New York or anywhere else) reaching back to the lineage of no-wave; Hernandez often sings in a trembling falsetto but his acrobatic yelps sounds like nobody so much as James Chance. Because of their punchy and tightly arranged female backing vocals, Ava Luna often get compared to Dirty Projectors, but that parallel is more appropriate for the figures at the center of those bands. Like Dave Longstreth, Hernandez is an intelligent, almost-too-ambitious maestro who over time has learned how to embrace playfulness and shine a spotlight around his equally talented ensemble.
Ava Luna wrote and recorded Electric Balloon over two different two-week-long working vacations sequestered in a house in upstate New York; every evening, they'd cook, crack jokes, and then channel their energy into nightly after-dinner jam sessions. The result of this process—"more like culling than just writing," as Bassford says—is a much looser album than Ice Level, which was carefully arranged to the point of sometimes feeling stiff or aloof. But there's an inclusive, kinetic vibe to the best songs on Electric Balloon (which was produced by Hernandez and drummer Julian Fader), like the spunky shout-along "Sears Roebuck M&Ms", or "Plain Speech", which morphs halfway through from jittery funk to dazzling AM radio gold. Ava Luna are an exhilarating live band, and Electric Balloon is the first thing they've done that comes close to bottling that energy.
Since Ice Level, Ava Luna have shrunk from a seven-piece to a five-piece, and this streamlining has cleared out some (though not all) of the clutter in their sound and benefited the band dynamic. Felicia Douglass (vocals/keyboards) and Becca Kauffman (vocals/guitar) are both more active presences on Electric Balloon—and this is a very good thing. Ava Luna are now a band with not one but three distinct lead singers, each with unique but complementary personalities. Hernandez's songs, like the opener "Daydream", are often driven by a frayed, manic intensity. (The "nervous soul" tag is definitely most apt when he's at the helm.) It's an enjoyably wild ride, but it might be too much to take were it not balanced out by quieter moments like the ballad "PRPL", Douglass's stunning and velvety lead vocal turn.
But, as long as you like your choruses weird, the breakout star of Electric Balloon is Kauffman. She vamps and woooops! through "Sears Roebuck M&Ms" like a kid riding a sugar high, and spews mesmerizing gibberish throughout the title track, which channels the brief moment when the B-52s were too strange for the radio. That last song was written most spontaneously of all, when Kauffman stepped up to the mic and started riffing on a vocal idea she had during one of the after-dinner jam sessions. The rest of the band tried to join in but they weren't quite sure what she was saying: "Shock me with electrical uhh?" "Shopping with electric balloon?" None of the guesses amount to much sense—but damn if that mysterious hook isn't stuck in your head for days. Ava Luna are still speaking in tongues, as they always have been, but this time they're inviting you to sing along.
