![]() ![]() Sid Bass – Music From Another World (VIK LX-1053) 1956 ![]() Forbidden Planet (MGM / Small Planet PR 001) 1955 The Ames Brothers – Destination Moon (RCA Victor LPM-1680) 1958 Sheldon Allman – Folk Songs For The 21st Century (Hifi R-415) 1960 Everything was possible from that moment on. A strange outer space cocktail party for modern humans and what to think of a man in a cozy suit on a scooter or even Johan Sebastian Bach who was shot into space with a spacesuit and a synthesizer. The Les Baxter album Space Escapades became the prototype space sleeve. Sheldon Allman was into outer space on his album Folk Songs For The 21st Century with a kind of sputnik, The Ames Brothers found themselves back on of the set of the movie The Forbidden Planet, as was the girl on the Esquivel album Other Worlds, Other Sounds. Many albums between 19 had a space theme on the sleeve as a novelty thing. The search for strange and unusual sounds was the new hype. ![]() The future was bright, science fiction novels became very popular at that time and hi-fi stereo was the new standard. When the Russian Sputnik 2 went off with on board Laika, a stray dog from the streets of Moscow, the Americans were already planning their Apollo program to get the first man on the moon. After the second world war, the race to space had begun. We speak about the 1950’s of the past century, when the year 2000 was still a magical number. You can picture 2003 Viggo Mortenson playing Zita’s character – piloting his bathroom spaceship through pixelated starscapes.Welcome to the space age, the age of reliability … strange planets, rockets, robots and martians. The 5 o’clock shadow, whiskey-grizzle in his vocal tambor supports the song’s sense of cinematic gravitas. Zita’s vocals themselves – the bathroom-core (if I might coin a new genre) heart of the song – have some Alex Turner laid-back charisma, which helps him hold his own against the track’s dramatic swells. Zita sings of “drifting to unknown places,” and “passing by stars.” He’s on a kind of journey, searching for the wild, galaxies-away love of “Cosmica.” I imagine “Cosmica” as the EP’s cover art – a beautiful primordial character living in some 80’s synth-wave recess of hyperspace – and Zita as a lost traveler on a long and lonely search for her love. This works really well within the song’s lyrical content. I realize I’m overusing the outer space analogy, but all together, the song really sounds like different worlds passing by outside a spaceship window. “Cosmica” achieves this same impressive effect. I’ve always been flummoxed by how Ariel Pink manages to effectively collage such disparate sounds. They play at the unmoored spaciness of dream pop, or the fuzzy crunch of jangle-gaze, but really the song lives in a retro, psych pop lane of its own. All these different textures fit together surprisingly well. The track also features some Mac Demarco-ish dry, compressed drums, and there’s some OK Computer in the cinematic drama of its orchestral string and pad swells. ![]() Cosmica’s cover art looks like the protagonist of an anime space opera, and you can definitely hear this Juno playing her theme song. The title track off Zita’s new EP Cosmica has some of this special reverb – in the vocals especially – but through some really interesting textural layering, it seems to transport Zita’s bathroom into outer space, or maybe uploads it into the loading screen of some cult-classic, vintage arcade game.Ĭrucial to this effect is a sparkly, retro-Juno lead that dances around the outer edges of the stereo, like a shooting star orbiting the song’s instrumental core. Anyone who’s done any home recording knows the sweet, special reverb of a bathroom – it’s an echoey, harmonic-dense, pillow fluff sound that software can never quite replicate. These are lovely for several reasons – Zita’s wide, full vocals, emotional alt-rock strumming, and, most significantly for me, the bathroom itself. Stevie Zita’s Instagram features a “bathroom series” – acoustic covers of iconic indie pop and rock tunes recorded in his bathroom. ![]()
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