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Following on from last year’s collaborative Opal Eskar project, Karl Blau has just unveiled his upcoming solo album, “Vultures of Love,” which will be released on October 18th through Otherly Love. The album’s lead single, “Pasadena,” draws inspiration from a friend’s breakup and the subsequent longing for reconnection. The accompanying homespun video features a lot of cats—and that’s not beatnik-speak.
Blau: “The song “Pasadena” was complete happenstance, we had some time and I was out of the ideas I had brought for Dave Flaherty who was playing drums with me as I played bass to lay the bare bones of the tracks which would become the album. I decided to switch it up and grabbed a guitar. On the fly grabbed this chord progression from thin air which doesn’t change through the entire song. It’s a reel of G Em (D) A C (F). Chords that back 100 years ago were considered demonic when strung together, now create a twisted pop motif. The backing tracks brought out a sadness that I channeled into lyrics about a personal experience with a friend. I wonder if “Pasadena” would bring the listener a sense of longing and connect with a desire for change. To me it has a very NW feeling, harkening to my roots of K bands, early Beck, Bret Lunsford-ian chord progression. Yet singing about a place in “California” and written in Philadelphia.”
The press highlights how Blau’s own catalog has forever been that of a polyglot, bending funk and folk and pop and punk into experimental forms with total glee. It adds: To call Vultures of Love the culmination of all that is to imply some stopping point, as if this is some destination Blau has now reached. But he moved to Philadelphia in part because he likes to be part of music that is going somewhere, that is seeking some frontier. This is just a particularly compelling step on the path of an under-heralded adventurer, still finding new ways to locate the space between the expected and unexpected.
Pre-Order Vultures of Love: https://klaps.bandcamp.com/album/vultures-of-love
