(((folkYEAH!))) presents:
Color Green
For the California-based quartet Color Green, playing music together is all about stepping into the unknown. “When we play live, I don’t really know what’s going to happen,” says Noah Kohll, one of the band’s two guitarists and four vocalists. “You really have no idea what you’re going to get with this band, which keeps things fresh for us and maybe makes the live experience special.” In a very short time, they have developed a word-of-mouth reputation as a dynamic and unpredictable live act, grounding their cosmic jams in earthy melodies and drawing from ‘60s SoCal folk-r0ck, ‘70s classic rock, ‘80s underground rock, ‘90s psychedelic dance-rock, and any other sound that catches their ears.
Adaptable onstage and off, Color Green has shared stages with a range of groups that reflect both the sophistication and the wild malleability of their sound, including Fuzz, Kikagaku Moyo, Circles Around the Sun, Hiss Golden Messenger, and the Brian Jonestown Massacre. Yet, because they see boundless possibilities from one note to the next, they anchor their music in the urgent present rather than the distant past. Color Green can be a million different bands without losing their essential hue.
They capture that wild, mercurial quality on Fool’s Parade, a meditation on loss, grief, confusion, frustration, and the clarity to which they all lead. The album has the dynamic of a tight live set, full of ebbs and flows, highs and lows, quiet moments like the devastating “5:08” and reckless jams like the epic “Kick the Bucket.” “Four Leaf Clover” bustles and shimmies like the kaleidoscopic dance rock of the Stone Roses, while closer “Hazel Eyes” recalls the elaborate orchestrations of Brian Wilson and the whimsical melodies of Buddy Holly. “We shaped it to showcase our range,” says guitarist Corey Madden. “All the songs were written together as a band. It’s the four of us in a room, and it features all of our voices. It’s one step toward what this band truly is. We spent a lot of time getting our shit together as a band, and now it’s set in stone for me.”
Color Green started out as a very different, much more limited kind of group. “Me and Corey worked together in New York scooping coffee beans for a living and putting them into bags,” says Kohll. “I was living in a basement sublet, and he would come over to write and jam and record.” From those casual sessions came a self-titled EP in 2021, full of spectral jams and offerings up to Jerry Garcia, their spiritual guide. The next year they followed it up with a self-titled full-length via Aquarium Drunkard, with various friends helping to round out the songs. “These things happen in an interesting way,” says Kohll. “There’s been a lot of weird synchronization with this band. It’s all very organic. After we put out our first album, we thought, Oh, this needs to be a live band, too.”
After running through a few different rhythm sections, they met drummer Corey Rose and bassist Kyla Perlmutter, who not only are kickass players but opened up all new possibilities within Color Green. “Our first practice together, everyone was like, This is so loud,” says Rose. “That became a really important part of the band, and we try to capture that dynamic when we record.” Perlmutter adds, “We all really value each other’s input. It doesn’t feel like there’s an unfair hierarchy in this band. We respect each other’s tastes and recognize that we’re all very, very much in love with music in our own ways.”
After sharpening their attack on the road—playing DIY shows in small towns while opening for some of their heroes—the expanded Color Green began writing songs for what they considered a debut album. “One of us will come in with a riff or an idea, and the others will take it up and let it morph into something completely different,” says Perlmutter. “What we come up with together, I don’t think any of us could do by ourselves. The music we make is always surprising me.” The album’s title track, with its snaking guitar lines and parallax instrumental interplay, started out as an eastern jam when Rose came in with a very loose idea: “I wanted to write something in 6/8 time,” she says. “It was super awkward at first, but 40 minutes later, it sounded like Fairport Convention. It took everybody to get there.”
Says Madden, “I like when stuff happens and it opens up the door to something else in my brain. We might spend a lot of time working on something and get nothing out of it, but then in the back of my head I’m thinking, if you take this and add it to that… Sometimes it takes hours to figure out two seconds of a song, but it’s always worth it.”
The aching heart of Fool’s Parade is “5:08,” a moving expression of grief—not moving through it, necessarily, but simply living with it, moment to moment. “What’s it like, on the other side?” they all sing together, as though consoling one another. “Oh, the longing for the space to peer thru.” Inspired by the death of Madden’s father, it is rooted in a Spiritualized show. “I was going through some gnarly personal stuff,” says Madden, “and it was all hitting me at once, all these emotions. I talked my way through some crazy shit, and by the end of the show I had ‘508’ hashed out in my brain. It’s about losing people very close to you and wanting to communicate with them and not really knowing how.”
“It’s the quietest song on the record,” says Rose, “but it’s also the heaviest. We all cried while recording it. Everybody’s singing on it, and everybody’s crying on it. Sometimes we’re like, Let’s not play that song tonight. It all depends on how we’re feeling.”
Healing Potpourri
Healing Potpourri specialize in effervescent chamber pop that’s all but guaranteed to leave the listener in a better mood. But on their new LP, Paradise, the San Francisco-based band led by vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Simi Sohota offers more than just sonic escapism. The album, written and recorded over the past two tumultuous years, finds Sohota processing the often overwhelming deluge of stress, frustration, and despair that’s become a part of modern life. But rather than being completely deflated, he pushed Healing Potpourri’s sound in new directions, blending warm electronics and elements of vibrant psychedelia into something that’s as eclectic as it is instantly enjoyable. The result is 11 songs that seek to imagine a better world and strive to make it a reality, while also still taking the time to appreciate the moments of brightness that can shine through in hard times.
Healing Potpourri’s previous album–and Run For Cover Records debut–Blanket of Calm was released in the spring of 2020 to a very different world than the one it was written in. “When Covid hit, like a lot of people, I got depressed and scared,” Sohota explains. “Our record had just come out but we couldn’t do anything. We weren’t able to get together or play shows. So many people were talking about suddenly having free time to work on things and be creative, but I just wasn’t playing music at all.” After a few months, he decided to combat his creative rut by booking studio time with producer/engineer and longtime friend Jason Kick (Mild High Club, Marinero, Sonny & The Sunsets). “I was just trying to force myself out of it so I started going to the studio with Jason once a week. And it worked! I would bring in fragments that I’d be working on at home and then we would start arranging in the studio. We couldn’t get the whole band together so a lot of it was smaller by necessity.”
That purposely tighter circle did have room for one more: producer Sean O’Hagan. Known for his work in Stereolab and The High Llamas, the London-based musician would soon become a key collaborator on Paradise over Zoom. “I’m a huge fan of The High Llamas and I’d reached out to Sean back when we were working on Blanket of Calm,” Sohota says. “We weren’t able to make it happen then, but I got in touch again for this record and he ended up helping tremendously. Jason and I would work on a song and send it to him, he’d add something to it and then we’d get inspired by that. It became this back and forth process. I’ve been so obsessed with his music so it really was working with a hero of mine, but he helped coach me to make a record that sounded like me.”
DOORS at 7:00PM | MUSIC at 8:00 PM