A look back at L.A. in the early 80s as seen across many years and a wide ocean.

14 MP3 Songs
POP: California Pop, ROCK: Folk Rock



Details:
THE NEW YORK TIMES

"dark, sophisticated pop from one of L.A.'s most accomplished new bands. Think of Brazzaville as vagabond pop for fans of Morphine, Tom Waits, Spain, Leonard Cohen and Tindersticks."

-Neil Strauss,


SAN FRANCISCO WEEKLY

â¦Brown's smooth, unhurried tenor supplying an offhand sort of Parisian cool, Brazzaville is the band you might expect to find at the end of the line in The Night of the Iguana.
⦠one gets the feeling the band would feel just as comfortable moldering in a dark bar where ruined women and remorseful felons shed their names and soak their memories in grain alcohol and tropical rain. The 11 songs found on last year's Rouge on Pockmarked Cheeks are, like the album's title, soft and sad, and tinged with a weary sort of sex appeal.

-Silke Tudor


TIME OUT, New York

The comboâs sound could be described as Tom Waits with all the gravel removed or Prefab Sprout in a deep depression.
â¦itâs ideal environment would be a shabby equatorial seaside bar in the early hours of the morning, sand blowing in the door and the sun rising over the ocean. Itâs music for not just drunks but lonely, traveling drunks- a set the group romanticizes.

-Robin Edgarton



THE NEW YORKER

âenchantingâ


MELODY MAKER

4.5 out of 5 stars








BUST

It turns out they're a Barcelona-based group
with international appeal led by L.A. native David Brown. While critics
have compared them to Tom Waits and Morphine, to me they are most
reminiscent of the "Golden Brown"-era Stranglers. Deliciously melodic
and lushly produced, it's somehow both sad and sexy, and sounds like the
way getting drunk on wine feels.
⦠everyone who hears the record--from Bust's tattooed interns to my mother, asks who it is.

-Debbie Stoller


DECOY MAGAZINE

Rating: 4.5

Brazzaville is surprisingly
minimal. Sounding more akin to dreamy 60s rock and pop than to anything
thatâs been made in the last twenty years, the band somehow remains
shockingly relevant and new-sounding. Vocalist and mastermind David
Brownâs dreamy, wistful voice soaks through your soul like few can.
⦠Enter Brazzaville, my friends. It truly is a wonderous place and you may
never want to leave.

-Ben Rice



CDNOW

"Brazzaville is one of the hippest and most exiting experiments to come down the pike in a long, long time...few are able to articulate the dizzying, dislocating changes of 21st century globalism quite as eloquently as Brown. Brazzaville is an intuitive, impressionistic take on our shrinking world where themes of isolation and loneliness are at odds with the promise and allure of easy international transit."

-Tom Pryor, Senior Editor


CMJ

cinematic mood music with seamless layering - an album of quiet and precise details"

-Steve Klinge


PULSE

"The disc is an absolute delight. Imagine a grainy, low thrum somewhere between the late Morphine and post-Asylum Tom Waits, with an aggressively po-mo dispassion for tossing in various world musics: a little samba here, some Far East exotica, a fado feel- whatever Brown's muse dictates."
-Jackson Griffith, PULSE


GLUE

"The music sounds old, as if it's spitting out of a transistor in an empty third-world airport in 1967."

-Nicole Darling