Patience pays off for Parks, Moreno
Gaby Moreno & Van Dyke Parks “¡Spangled!” (Nonesuch)
With so much music washing through culture at any given moment, the tossed-off and the carefully nurtured are too often treated equally in the marketplace. An album a decade in the making — such as this collaboration between the L.A. songwriter, session man, producer and arranger Parks and the Guatemalan-born, Los Angeles-based singer, guitarist and songwriter Moreno — gets equal billing on a release date alongside a batch of disposal ditties built by producers in an afternoon. That’s not right. “¡Spangled!” came out in early October and sounds built to endure. Parks, of course, is best known for his work on the Beach Boys’ “Smile” and possesses enough backstage L.A. stories to fill volumes. Moreno met him a decade ago at a European music festival, and they were so musically taken with each other that they quickly started discussing a longer collaboration.
After gathering momentum over the past few years, the project bore “¡Spangled!” and offers repeated lessons in the importance of patience. A song cycle spinning with Spanglish, border-bending strings, brass and that uniquely Van Dyke-ian timpani, the 10 tight songs are centered around the promises, hopes and challenges facing both border communities and the American experiment at large. As such, it feels of the moment.
Mikal Cronin “Seeker” (Merge Records)
The new guitar-rock album from the SoCal native was born in solitude after a series of busted-up relationships and a creeping sense that, in his words, “I needed to clean up, to stop leaning on external crutches to get through the anxiety. I needed to grow the ... up.”
As with Cronin’s first three albums, it draws from electric guitar-driven music from across subgenres: psychedelia, country rock, slowed-down garage rock and the Beatles after they discovered acid (but before they went overboard with it). Cronin, who is also bassist for former high school classmate Ty Segall’s stellar Freedom Band, has gathered that same posse in service of “Seeker.” As with Segall, he’s got little time for pretension. His songs are built with an eye for detail, with touches of piano, oddly alluring chord changes and moan-along choruses.