Zuma 85

Signs of creative restlessness for Los Angeles quartet Allah-Las started to show as early as their third album, 2016s Calico Review. It was there that the band started to shift away from their reverb-ensconced indie surf template toward moodier, janglier garage rock sounds, changing their sound noticeably, if ever so slightly. 2019s LAHS took things further out, incorporating hints of world music influence and some Dead-informed jamming. Their fifth album Zuma 85 arrived after the band took a brief break from activities to reformat their creative process, and the results are excitingly different from anything theyve ever made before. The grimy post-Velvets glam of opening track "The Stuff" is almost unrecognizable from the laid-back faux surf instrumentals Allah-Las were making a decade earlier, with deadpan vocals reminiscent of John Cale competing with computer-like vocoded hooks and a web of laser-beam guitar leads. Its loose, weird, dirty rock & roll, and its a refreshingly strange direction for the band. This wild experimentation also shines on the abstract, blown-out pop of "Right On Time" and the teeth-gnashing hard rock riffs of "Smog Cutter." Throughout there are some of the same nods to early Roxy Music, woozy Krautrock, and Eno-istic ambient sounds that guitarist Pedrum Siadatian got into with his solo project PAINT (on a mostly instrumental 2023 album, Loss for Words). This likeness is especially clear on the Fripp & Eno-indebted instrumental "Hadal Zone," which finds harmonizing guitar tones riding the waves of steady, otherworldly percussion. The band sounds like theyre truly experimenting on Zuma 85, taking a slightly different route with almost every song. Theres some of the same Grateful Dead guitar noodling from LAHS on the lazy country bop of "Pattern," only combined with a fuzzy Yo La Tengo-styled playing and vocal delivery. "Fontaine" takes pages straight from the Kevin Ayers/Soft Machine school of psychedelia, while "GB BB" goes off the rails in a fashion similar to the unhinged euphoria of Neu! 4. There are really only traces left over from Allah-Las beachy past on Zuma 85, with the band mostly abandoning the hazy pleasantness of their early work in favor of untamed sounds and unstable experiments. Fans looking for a reworking of previous material might be alienated by Zuma 85s adventurous oddity, but anyone open to sweeping change will be thrilled by how much of it Allah-Las discover here. ~ Fred Thomas