Dark girl pop meets doowop meets surf rock with a gritty garage edge. It can be, and it certainly does with La Luz, the Seattle women's combo. The front woman is singer and guitarist Shana Cleveland who previously made her debut with the modest singer / songwriter album Oh Man, Cover The Ground (2015). With La Luz she sets the reverb of her amplifier to 11 and conjures up one exciting surf riff
… after another from her guitar. Yet La Luz is not a party or dance band. Cleveland has a somewhat thin, fragile voice and the lyrics of Weirdo Shrine are based on the graphic novel Black Hole by Charles Burns, about a group of teenagers mutating to freaks. Angelic, oooooh and aaaah choirs sound flawless and support Cleveland accurately, partly due to a dark edge and the honest production of garage rock specialist Ty Segall. Weirdo Shrine transcends, cut across the ditch, the hipster-esque irony that lurk in their mix of obligatory music styles. (MR)more