Indie guitar bands may be dying off, but bedroom rock projects like LA's Lou Breed have picked up the torch lately to surprise us with some pretty excellent music more or less out of nowhere. Project mastermind Jeremy Daly has been making sample-based psychedelic rock on his lonesome for a few years now, but recently brought in a band to bring his misfit, deeply human tunes to life via an 8-track recorder over the course of a long Thanksgiving weekend.
The resulting output, Locus of Control, is Daly's first proper LP as Lou Breed, a lush, ramshackle assemblage of scuzzy guitars and horns anchored by resonant lyrics and storytelling that he aptly describes as "in turns naive, aggressive, spiritual, experimental, stupid and sensitive."
Take, for example, his latest single "Lilly With a Shirt On":
"'Lilly with a Shirt On' is a song about falling in love with someone who will lay you, but doesn't love you," Daly says. "My neighbor says it is a song of radical acceptance and I like that. The truth is, whoever is singing this song knows from the very beginning that the girl Lilly doesn't really care about him ;in that way' but still, he can't get over it. He keeps going back and fixating on this one moment he believed he was loved, when she asked him to come over and hang out. Eventually, after years maybe, he gets it. There's a longer drone jam at the end and I like to think of that of some sort of extension of the story. This song is pretty indicative of the album as it is a character mourning or dealing with their past. These songs have many real and fake things in them. The name of the album, Locus of Control, is a term that comes from personality psychology and refers to the extent to which individuals believe they can control events affecting them."
Check out the premiere of "Lilly with a Shirt On" below and order Lou Breed's Locus of Control via Kickstarter.