Garage rock, even at its rowdiest, is inherently lonely music. It exists outside of time, allergic to trends and suspicious of new technologies, which makes it ideal for loners who feel alienated from culture. Garage rock also sounds solitary. If it is recorded correctly-- which is to say, if it feels like the audio was captured haphazardly by an amateur engineer in 1966-- this music will be alive and sloppy but also a little removed, particularly the vocals. You know a garage-rock band has done its homework if the lead singer can affect a Jagger-esque whine that comes off somewhat anesthetized, like he can't quite bring himself to commit fully to the song or life in general.
You can't accuse Los Angeles quartet Allah-Las of not doing its homework. Three of the four members met while working at one of the country's great record stores, Amoeba on Sunset Boulevard, where they spent countless hours studying up on the vintage sounds that compose their affectingly melancholy self-titled debut. The band formed in 2008, and worked for several years painstakingly assembling the songs on Allah-Las, first releasing the vinyl single, "Catamaran"/"Long Journey", in 2011 and following up with two singles in 2012. All of these songs, plus the eight other tracks that make up Allah-Las, were produced by Nick Waterhouse, a fine L.A. singer-songwriter whose 2012 LP Time's All Gone is a spirited and record-geek friendly collection of raucous 50s-style R&B thrashers.
Waterhouse's production aesthetic involves a lot of tubes and analog equipment and "natural" sounds. The idea is to give the appearance of a band bashing out a record in a matter of minutes, but the reality of the process is far more deliberate and meticulous. "The whole lo-fi, DIY has its own appeal, and there are lots of bands we like that can make that work for them," Allah-Las bassist Spencer Dunham told the L.A. Weekly in 2011. "But for us to make the sound that we really want, we work a lot better in a studio setting with $3,000 microphones from 1953."
This means Allah-Las are even lonelier than the average garage-rock band, obsessively constructing jangly, seemingly simple mid-tempo pop songs in the studio like they're building grand pocket symphonies. The success of Allah-Las is that it doesn't seem like it was strained over; instead, it sounds like an effortlessly wistful batch of starry-eyed, minor-key beauties that gently ruminate on the usual young-guy subjects: sex, freedom, the ways the former can interfere with the latter and vice versa. The album's prettiest song, the Felt-like "Vis-à-Vis", looks back on a failed relationship with a mix of regret and fatalistic acceptance: "Some things can't be undone/ but that doesn't mean it was all just a waste of time," bassist Spencer Dunham says, sounding unknowingly innocent.
The darker vibes lurking inside "Sandy", with its "too close to the sun" imagery, finally curdle on the album-closing "Long Journey", Allah-Las' most aggressive track with its tough guitar jabs and springy bassline. After stating his intention "to find a love that'll stay," drummer Matt Correia fantasizes about "heading down by the river to kill your daddy tonight/ and by the break of day, you know that we’ll be out of sight." It sounds like a line borrowed from an old blues tune, though much of the yearning for escape on Allah-Las is derived from the beach. (Most of the guys in this band surf.) The seductive groove of "Catamaran" has a strong pull, but the instrumental "Sacred Sands" shows where the band's heart really is. Like so many garage-rock questers before them, Allah-Las are ultimately preoccupied with sound above all else. So long as there are 12-string guitars, four-piece drumkits, and lots and lots of reverb, the rest of the world can go away.
