The Living Pins представили новый альбом Roxy Unicorn, объединяющий эстетику 70-х и современный психоделик

The Living Pins’ story stretches back to the mid-’90s, when Pam Peltz and Carrie Clark first crossed paths while slinging produce and working the registers at Austin’s Wheatsville Food Co-op. In the decades since, the two have followed their own crooked path through Austin’s underground, eventually coming together to make colorful, left-of-center rock and roll steeped in the city’s long psychedelic tradition. After a string of EPs and singles, The Living Pins are now readying their first full-length album, Roxy Unicorn (due out November 13th via Flak Records – PRE-ORDER), a lush collision of Austin psych, glammy art-pop, and the polished glow of ’70s FM radio. There’s a vintage shimmer to the record, but little interest in straightforward revivalism. Instead, Clark and Peltz treat rock history like a box of strange ingredients, pulling familiar sounds apart and rearranging them into something playful, melodic, and wonderfully peculiar. Both musicians bring plenty of Austin history to the project. Clark fronted beloved ’90s shoegaze outfit Sixteen Deluxe, whose records for Trance Syndicate and Warner Bros. made the band a fixture of the era’s Texas alternative scene and eventually helped land Clark in the Austin Music Hall of Fame. Peltz led the ’90s Austin alt-rock trio Ursa Major and has her own connection to the city’s musical mythology, having produced early Daniel Johnston recordings that appeared on Continued Stories. Fittingly, another longtime Austin figure helped bring Roxy Unicorn into focus. Sixteen Deluxe guitarist and singer Chris “Frenchie” Smith produced the album at his famed Bubble Studios, helping Peltz and Clark give its psychedelic edges an appropriately colorful studio sheen. With Roxy Unicorn, The Living Pins aren’t simply revisiting the sounds that surrounded them during Austin’s ’90s alternative heyday. They’re digging further back, mixing decades of psychedelic and pop history into a record guided by curiosity rather than nostalgia. Austin’s Flak Records, whose motto remains the admirably straightforward “Because music should be physical,” will release the album on limited-edition vinyl. Today, Glide is excited to premiere the album’s title track, which offers a fitting introduction. The band describes “Roxy Unicorn” as a “baroque frolic inside an imaginary CBGB pop-up at Versailles,” which gets remarkably close to capturing its particular brand of weirdness. After its off-kilter opening, the song locks into a galloping groove, wrapping psychedelic flourishes and pop instincts around a phrase—”secondary radiant joy”—that feels tailor-made for a hazy summer afternoon. Whether you’re a fan of these musicians and the projects they have been involved in over the years or you are discovering them for the first time, “Roxy Unicorn” is a nostalgia-yet-fresh earworm. Listen to the tune along with a couple of other Living Pins tunes…