Promised Land Sound
For Use and Delight

As the years go by, it happens less and less often, but when it does, it carries the genuine taste of a musical epiphany. What? That sudden joy and that tingling at the back of the auditory canal that makes you realize, after just a couple of tracks, that an album has hit the bullseye immediately. And the joy is even greater the less one knows about the band, as is the case with these Promised Land Sound.

Originating from Nashville, Promised Land Sound are among the most current incarnations of a sound, or rather a feeling, of absolutely retro cosmic country. It may be the fact that the average age is around 22 years, but their authority in handling almost 50 years of "American" rock is impressive. They play very little straightforward country, but they perfectly embody that rustic atmosphere supported by good doses of good vibrations between hay bales and marijuana bales.

Starting from the Byrdsian dream that dissolves into a soft rhythmically psychedelic embrace of "Push And Pull (All The Time)" it's almost an annoying unfolding of tracks with perfect and never trivial interweavings, instant classic in an alternative reality stuck in 1971. Furthermore, the alternation of the two Scala brothers on vocals provokes different reactions, especially due to the markedly Dylan-esque timbre of one of them. Which, if I must be honest, is the fundamental distinguishing factor that may lead you to label the album as purely derivative or having its own intrinsic value. I imagine that after the first 10 seconds of "Otherwordly Pleasures" you'll want to grab your copy of Highway 61 thinking it's an outtake. The more mellow tracks, like "Through The Seasons", pure California '68, or "Canfield Drive", a West Coast piece that Jonathan Wilson could have written, are beautiful and full of polychrome nuances (therefore never banal).

Maybe Wilson, the one from the first and fabulous album, is the most fitting comparison among contemporaries (a bit of an oxymoron, since Wilson is another musician dedicated to the rehashing of retro music). It's hard to skip any track, all have within them different facets that complete each other perfectly. From the folk with fingerpicking of "Dialogue", to the electric Quicksilver-style of "Better Company", to the country-transfigured Space Oddity of "She Takes Me There", up to the almost hard psych sound of "Golden Child", which sounds like a piece by White Denim.

Along with Ryley Walker, among my personal albums of last year.