The Key Studio Sessions: Laser Background

When we last heard from them, Philly’s Laser Background was feeling a lot more confrontational. The project of songwriter-composer Andy Molholt led its psychedelic pop tunes down dark and abrasive corners, exploring harsh realities of life in a candy-coated sheen that was equal parts hooky and demented.

In our interview from 2013, Molholt talked about that process of drawing his listeners in, pushing them over the edge and then pulling them back from the abyss. A few years time has passed, and on the new LP Correct – out on May 13th via La Société Expéditionnaire & Endless Daze – Molholt feels less angry and more focused. The project is still unconventional, to be sure. It might still pose a challenge to listeners who, when they think psychedelic, they think The Monkees.

But it also finds Molholt keeping his pop craft front and center as it assembles lucid lyrical puzzles evoking the clash between nostalgic memory and alternate reality. It’s an idea straight out of David Lynch’s Lost Highway: “I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.”

Joined by Andy Black on bass and Mac Kennedy on drums, his Key Studio session hits the variety of the album. “Slip and Slide” skips along to a flanged-up electric guitar waltz; “Jawbreaker” sets an ominous tone with spacey synthesizer gloss. There’s the oddly catchy “Sleep Myth,” where breezy guitars romp hand in hand with robotic vocal processing, balanced by the measured krautrock of vibes of “Midnight Domestic.”

The session’s pinnacle of weird is also one of its most memorable moments; the montage of “Looking Glass” and “Tropic of Cancer” where a tiny sliver of singing slips into a drone loop for a few seconds, breathlessly releasing the Space Age Bachelor Pad tones of the former into the pensive Yellow Submarine meditation of the latter.

Says Molholt of his current creative headspace: “I want to continue to play with the listener’s sense of expectation. I either want to fulfill that expectation, or subvert it, and that push/pull across the line of normalcy is what keeps me excited as an artist.”

Stream the session below, grab a free download at our Soundcloud page and mark your calendars for Friday, May 13th – Laser Background will celebrate the release of Correct at Ortlieb’s in Northern Liberties. Tickets and more information on the show can be found at the XPN Concert Calendar.