Dan Agosto was at Heart & Soul Studios all last week completing the mixing and mastering for an exceptional debut EP by Black Light Saints, and even though he only delivered the masters on Sunday, there's already a great review on the EP out of the UC Berkeley paper The Daily Californian --- but more on that in a minute. I can't post the link to the review until I explain a couple of things, even though it was pretty amazing. "In Impossible Picks, Black Light Saints know what the electronic genre begs for and deliver it in 27 minutes of hypnotic synths and infectious bass" is the way Daily Californian writer Cynthia Kang closes the first paragraph of her well-written review, and she goes on, even more enthusiastically.

Black Light Saints:
Excerpts from "What Happens Next", "Baby Girl" and "Cattle Skull"
from Impossible Picks

I just can't post the link yet --- not until I explain why I spent about twenty hours last week listening to the Black Light Saints. Dan Agosto has been telling me about producing this new group, formed by DJs Britton Wetherald and Ephraim Cuellar and respected indie rocker Alex Barandi (even more respected since I spent twenty hours listening to his bass playing) for a couple of months, and he had played me some of the roughs. When he suggested mixing the EP at Heart & Soul I jumped at it, and last week we mixed four of the tracks together, and mastered all seven (including three he mixed at Get Small). When we work together, we can cover a wide range of who does what, and in this case the production was so good that he ended up doing most of the heavy lifting in the mixes. That gave me the chance to mostly sit back and listen while he mixed and get more and more impressed with the vocals and lyrics on these tracks.

These aren't lyrics like you'd hear in most of the music that DJs play, but ironically, they're built the way a great DJ builds a set. They take you step by step into more and more complex shades of the story, with a relentless and compelling use of repetition to add shadow to their poetry. Britton Wetherald's vocals cover an astonishing range of understated musical presentation, always giving voice to the emotion built into the EP's powerfully imaginative arrangements. We got Black Light Saints to let us post excerpts from three of the tracks -- What Happens Next, Baby Girl, and Cattle Skull. All we can do for now, but we'll be writing more about this soon. Oh yeah --- here's the link to a great review in The Daily Californian.