Loma Prieta
Self Portrait

There’s this shot by Margaret Bourke-White titled “Hats in the Garment District” that reminds me of Loma Prieta’s music for several reasons. The association may be completely coincidental, but by staring at this glimpse of suburban life where an indefinite mass, reduced to uniform dots, tries to move and untangle itself amidst the irregularity of the metropolis, I manage to see references to the San Francisco group. The sensations that have arisen from listening to the Californians since their beginnings in the early 2000s have always been rather viscerally connected to metaphors of the ordinary chaos that each of us can experience every day. It is no coincidence that in the extreme compression of feelings, emotions, and thoughts, Loma Prieta has often regurgitated very harsh tracks, as if they had come into contact with something extremely repellent. Just take, for example, their latest work “I.V.” which, in their own words, was born out of a rather dark period in the lives of each band member. A feeling that turned into a musical nihilism made of desperate rhythms saturated unbelievably in being sharp and fierce, with very few reassuring glimpses. Going back to the photograph I mentioned at the beginning, I've always seemed to see maddened atoms that, ostentatiously displaying a molecular movement, are searching for a direction, a precise path. All so close, yet so distant, with a thousand shades and facets, mostly impenetrable, with appearances that seem anonymous. Bonds that form and unravel. Encounters and new perspectives that mix with old habits. In Bourke-White's photo, it's possible to imagine anything at one's pleasure. To model and remodel the city flow. Here comes “Self Portrait”, given that these last words I used to describe “Hats in the Garment District” are fitting for what the new full-length coming out on Deathwish represents. Loma Prieta is redefining themselves. It’s time to look in the mirror, let every scraping layer fall, re-explore themselves, while retrieving the airy openings of “Last City”, but at the same time being attentive to forge a new identity with which to present themselves to the world. This is “Self Portrait”.

The keystone is trying to escape definitions. It has always been and always will be. Loma Prieta plays with blurring the contours of their proposal, allowing the genres they belong to be deliberately blurred and vaguely undefined. This is the strength of “Self Portrait”: on one hand, it dusts off the screamo roots, but on the other, it mixes them with disarming simplicity with other realms that our guys have claimed as their own. Every single composition pulses and breathes its own soul, thereby removing reference points on what you are listening to. The only operation you have to do is to let yourself be enveloped by the kaleidoscopic world that Loma Prieta has produced because for the first time there is a complex mosaic of sonic intertwining. A feat made possible thanks to a powerful production from Jack Shirley that highlights our performance like never before. “Self Portrait” captures the essence of Loma Prieta in which the creative lifeblood rarely runs out, thus giving a chaotic polyhedral nature in which to lose oneself. Indeed, rest assured, the Californians have not lost intensity, quite the opposite, but this has sometimes been calibrated in a more reflective and methodical way, just consider tracks like “More Perfect”, “Nostalgia” and “Satellite” that go well beyond four minutes. It is post-hardcore realized at its best. The flow of melodies can be gentle and compelling in the blink of an eye. The changing structure makes “Self Portrait” a complete experience to get closer to Loma Prieta.

Suffered reverberations get confused and deflagrate under the emotional weight of Sean Leary’s usual hallucinated and deafening scratched vocals. This time, however, there is also room for a melancholic clean voice or distant choirs that get submerged by the convulsions that Val Saucedo provokes on the drums. A voice that even abandons standard tracks and is filtered as if it were an additional, surreal, and disturbing instrument. The sound prism reflects an unstable soul, which dives beyond the clichés of the genre and Brian Kanagaki on guitar, duetting with Sean, is an almost endless waterfall of schizophrenic noise twists rather than dilated ambient fragments where for a moment peace can be found. Immediately, however, one dives back into the vortex fed by irrational impulses dictated by an inner apathy that does not want to be. “Self Portrait” indeed brightens the typically caustic horizon of Loma Prieta and although disillusion reigns supreme, there is space to find those shards of hope that can ward off alarming scenarios. If this concept is developed lyrically, it is evident how the same declinations are nourished in the duality of distortions that are both claustrophobic and liberating (if not dreamy). By playing and smoothing their angles, the impact remains shattering, thanks in part to James Siboni who, with a tormented bass, greatly increases the thickness of the wall of sound. Brick by brick, the tunnel takes shape where Loma Prieta paints its own escalations, dizzying stop’n’go, and implosions full of passion.

If you have the desire and time to recover what I wrote at the conclusion of my review on “I.V.”, you would find the right frame in which to immortalize “Self Portrait”. Since even I wouldn't be interested in tracking down the exact quote, suffice to know that it seemed logical to think that for the Californians the step for a possible next chapter after “I.V.” was to reverse the trend that had seen them as protagonists of a very dark crescendo in terms of sound (see split with Raein). And so it was. It took three years, but the refinement of the work is crystalline and finally that thick fog over the hills of San Francisco is clearing, ready to take off into a brighter dawn that reveals Loma Prieta at the height of their potential.