Pearl & The Oysters guide us through their new album track-by-track
Coast 2 Coast, track-by-track
Pearl & The Oysters used to be described as “Florida’s best kept secret,” despite the fact that Juliette Pearl Davis and Joachim Polack actually met in high school in Paris, bonding over a mutal love of Burt Bacharach and the Pixies.
But with the arrival of their new album Coast 2 Coast, their fourth in total but the first for Stones Throw – and their first since moving again, this time to California – they’re surely becoming better and better known for their unique brand of psychedelic indie. With dreamy vocals, catchy melodies, and experimental instrumentation, not to mention collaborators as illustrious as Lætitia Sadier (Stereolab), Riley Geare (Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Caroline Rose, La Luz), Alan Palomo (Neon Indian), Dent May, and Mild High Club’s Alex Brettin, it’s no wonder really.
So naturally we were bowled over when the pair offered to guide us through the contents of the LP…
Intro (…on the Sea-Forest)
Our humble attempt at recreating the iconic Cochin Moon bug symphony intro with a single synthesizer (Roland Juno 6). Since the album’s title largely alludes to our own journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific Coast, we thought it fit to start the voyage in the critter-filled soundscape of Gainesville, FL, where about half of the album was conceived and recorded.
Fireflies
The first song we wrote specifically for Coast 2 Coast right after we’d finished mixing Flowerland. A mid-fi take on AOR, and one of the few tracks in this album to retain the old p&to bedroom approach, it’s also notable for its intertextual intro featuring a nod to Hosono as well as a radiophonic sound collage courtesy of Shags Chamberlain. Fun nerd fact: our friend Dave Levesque recorded the drums with only two mics (the same formula we’d used for “Bit Valley” and much of the drums on Canned Music). Lyrically, this song set the tone for the rest of the album, which explores the dream state and insomnia-induced visions.
Konami
An exercise in chorus-less songwriting, and one of the rare p&to tracks that started on drums. We’d just gotten a small kit and Joachim was playing every day, practicing the fundamentals. When this beat came up, we recorded a quick demo after which the melody and chords soon followed. The lyrical idea of the white noise machine ‘surf’ setting morphing into actual ocean waves was also inspired by Juliette’s own grappling with insomnia. Upon meeting production wiz Alan Palomo (aka Neon Indian) in LA and nerding out about gear for hours, we ended up asking him to help us re-amp the guitar tracks by running them through some of his amazing collection of analog effects, which he very graciously agreed to try. Dialing in the tones with Alan and feeling the song come alive was such a magical moment!
Pacific Ave
In January 2020, we settled in LA full of hope for the future of the band, not imagining that we were weeks away from the beginning of a global pandemic. Lyrically, this song was a cryptic attempt to allude to our first steps in this new environment being a little alienating, as we were discovering a megalopolis turned ghost town. The production was heavily inspired by AOR and jazz-pop records of the late 1970s, particularly the music of Bobby Caldwell (RIP) and Donald Fagen. Although the drums were originally programmed on a Roland TR-707 with a pattern based on a sample-famous moment of the Isley Brothers discography, our friend Riley Geare re-recorded it on his kit along with Erica Shafer on bass and they both absolutely crushed it! Special thanks to Alex Brettin (aka mild high club) for the meanest guitar solo in the outro.
Timetron
This noise interlude serves as another circuitous homage to YMO, more specifically to the computer game music from their self-titled debut. Besides the tabla drum machine, most of these wacky sounds were recorded and sequenced together at the Vintage Synthesizer Museum (actually a studio) when it was still located in Oakland, CA. We’ve been lucky enough to meet and befriend Lance Hill in 2019 right before moving to LA, which is funny because Lance followed us a few months later and now operates VSM out of Highland Park, so we’re basically neighbors. We even helped him move in! It still feels so surreal whenever we get to record and hang there, it’s the kind of magical place we could only dream of as teenagers getting into analog synths.
Loading Screen
A salvaged organ/bass loop tracked in the living room of a tiny Gainesville house in 2017 somehow got repurposed into a ditty about screen addiction and over-stimulation in the www age. Interestingly, the verse and chorus parts were composed and recorded about 3 years apart so we like to think of this song as a little tropicalist collage. Key influences include early-70s home studio champions Sly Stone and Shuggie Otis, who more or less invented the funk box + live drums combo, as well as yacht rock harmonic cliches for the chorus chord progression. Shout out to our dear friend Simon Hanes (of Tredici Bacci, John Zorn, and Gary Wilson fame) who played tasty coral sitar licks and doubled the vocals on the choruses!
Space Coast
Another song inspired by our time spent lazing about in the enchanting waters of the Florida springs and rivers—a national treasure sadly threatened by capitalist exploitation. The wall-of-sound type production was intended to mirror the lushness of Central Florida’s natural spectacles, which tend to invite idle contemplation. Because of the rocket launch allusion, and because we’re big fans, there’s also a gratuitous reference to a specific Cardigans’ album in the chorus lyrics. Robert Edmondson was such an important collaborator throughout much of Flowerland, and here again his contribution cannot be overstated. Rob played all kinds of percussion, slide guitar and even harmonized with Dent May (and himself) on the outro. Of course, the influence of Brian Wilson is omnipresent throughout the song, although the more electronic textures were intended to conjure the sound of his most fervent—and most talented—90s disciples, aka the High Llamas. Again, shout out to Alex Brettin who sprinkled in some real magic with that lovely faux-Hawaiian guitar solo.
Moon Canyon Park
One of the first places we immediately fell in love with after moving to LA, Moon Canyon Park offers a panoramic view of Eagle Rock and Highland Park, and can be truly breathtaking at the right time of year when all the wildflowers are in bloom. It’s the kind of wondrous place that elicits reveries, and the song lyrics were inspired by our imagining the Canyon before the interference of human civilization. We even did some night field recording there! At the time we were listening to a lot of Broadcast and reading about the concept of hauntology as it applies to music, so that was a big influence on the composition. The main production trick was the use of a Vox reverse sawtooth tremolo unit from the 60s, once favored by Spacemen 3. Special thanks to our Floridian friend Seth Lynn and Juliette’s dad Jean-Michel for their amazing contributions, respectively on harp and vibes.
D’Ya Hear Me!
Our cover of the haunting Brenda Ray lo-fi classic, this particular version was based on the perhaps slightly lesser known acoustic demo. We remember early on wanting to put a strat-driven spin on it and basically rehearsed the whole thing only a couple times before tracking it live at Pulp Arts in Gainesville with Ryan O’Malley on drums, who brought a really unique Television flavor to it. Special thanks to Flore Benguigui for the wordless vocals on the bridge.
Paraiso
A song pondering on our own eco-anxiety by skeptically conjuring paradisiacal images as presented in classic California tourism ads of the last century (“another day in paradise”), when the idea of the Endless Summer felt more like a luxury commodity and less like a looming menace. One of our personal favorites on the album from a lyrical point of a view. We also had a lot of fun stepping out of our maximalist comfort zone and experimenting with a more sparse and intimate (for us, that is) arrangement approach on this track. We particularly loved using our Juno 6 to craft the interlocking synth parts in the chorus as well as the synth pad sound that ended up traversing the whole song.
Read the Room
It’s always been a dream of ours to feature Laetitia Sadier as a guest vocalist in p&to. Both her work with Stereolab and her trajectory as a French expatriate artist have been so profoundly influential and inspiring to our own development as a band. We still feel so lucky that she was on board with this fairly bizarre song! Because we’d decided that we wanted a heavier guitar track on the album, we let ourselves go full faux-baroque glam on the chorus. Looking back, recording these outrageously loud guitars in our tiny Highland Park 1-bedroom during peak covid panic was both an absurd and exhilarating experience.
Vicarious Voyage
An homage to 70s Beach Boys by-way-of R. Stevie Moore and Mort Garson. If you choose to view this record as a vaguely conceptual album about a person trying to fall asleep—which you certainly can—this track would mark the moment when our insomniac protagonist is finally rewarded with the temporary relief of deep slumber. The tragedy of it all being that even this rest is short-lived and as she eventually wakes up, ‘dreams wash away like footprints in the sand.’ The clock metaphor was also intended as a commentary on the monotony of quotidian life mirroring the larger cycles of nature.
Joyful Science
For this one, we wanted the trance-like energy of the four-on-the-floor beat to meet the ecstatic vitality of experimental cosmic jazz, à la Pharoah Sanders (RIP). Special shout out to Scott Gilmore, whose vocoder helped give life to Nietzsche’s hottest take: “What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘this life as you now live and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again […] The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again.’” Here, the concept of eternal return was illustrated by the two-chord oscillation and the metronomic regularity of the fuzz guitar pedal tone, again thanks to that a repeat-percussion-like reverse sawtooth tremolo effect. Last but not least, we also had the immense pleasure of featuring the incredible Henry Solomon (Louis Cole Big Band, Thumpasaurus, HAIM) on saxophone!
Buy Coast 2 Coast on vinyl here