LA Band Red Cortez: Iconic Magic

2009-06-19T19:52:40Z

A week ago, I fell in love with new music for the first time since I stole my brother’s worn copy of Led Zeppelin’s Song Remains the Same album. I was fourteen and was smitten. Recently, a friend who road manages (I love his life), texted me, said he’d be in town with a new project at Marilyn’s on K Street, said he’d put me on the list—Tracy plus one. Normally, I avoid club bands I’ve never heard of, because they’re a dime a dozen and the best you can hope for is good in a sea of mediocre. But my LA pal is cool and has good taste, so I said why not. I wasn’t there five minutes, settling into a cush-backed chair, sipping refreshing water with bubbles, when they began to wail, and I felt that in-your-gut recognition of being in the presence of iconic brilliance. I know this makes me sound like a Fangirl, but I don’t care.

Red Cortez, formally The Weather Underground, not to be confused with the radical group from the 1970’s who started street riots, escalating to bombing federal targets as a means of confronting their failing U.S. government—although one can’t help but wonder at the intellectual, aesthetic choice of the former band name—stole my rock and roll heart. They opened my eyes to the fact: there is indeed life beyond big hair and lighter ballads. You just have to be willing to let go.

They blew my mind with their wholly inventive and totally unique, urban, melodic folk-like lyrics and generation-marking mix of beats and composition infused with Latin, alt rock, punk, blues, country, Mariachi, jazz, and R&B sounds. At once, Red Cortez is hard to define, impossible to peg them into any particular musical corner. But they’re also achingly familiar. I was poignantly attracted to their, melodic storytelling lyrics and their cosmically spiritual, sometimes whimsical arrangements. It’s something when you can forget you’re in space and time and music lifts you into its power and flow, the way history-making bands always do. This is Red Cortez.

I could go on about Diego Guerrero’s percussion, a skin hitter who seems to understand rhythm as if it were in his DNA, or Harley Prechtel – Cortez, whose voice, keyboard fingers, and lips around the harmonica are pure sex and every girl’s night in shining armor without alienating his male fans because he sings like his testicles are titanium. I could wax forever about Ryan Kirkpatrick’ bass lines, that seem betrothed to the cores of his brother’s souls, and I could ramble ions over Calvin J. Love’s guitar, which reminded me of The Edge in U2 who has a unique guitar delay which Love seems to channel, but whose virtuoso, commanding control of tempo and emotion oozes from his strings in a way that he can call his own. I could go on, but I won’t.

I’ll just predict these guys will become a Grammy-winning, iconic cornerstone of this generation’s musical lore, if they don’t screw it up. Mark my words: Red Cortez will make their nut in the emotional angst of this generation’s raw truth, and they will continue to ingratiate young and oldish alike to their stylings every time they grace us with their presence. You watch. They will.

It’s good to be in love again.

Music

LA Band Red Cortez: Iconic Magic