Downpilot
Radio Ghost
When recording for this album began, Downpilot's Paul Hiraga found himself inspired by a drawing his father had made for him from memory, of the same mountain that he had drawn many times as a child while living in a Japanese-American internment camp in the California/Nevada desert during the war. The result was the song Day of the Long Sun, which became a touchstone for the album. This mood inspired him, to go back in time to the small town in California where his father was born and imagine life on the West coast in another era. As in the songs Rosaline as well as My Paper Sons (a term to describe Chinese immigrant labourers who forged documents to become citizens after the great earthquake and fire of 1906 in San Francisco), a tone for the album was set, creating a swirling, hot and dusty backdrop. With tinges of psychedelia, and Hiraga's dominant melodic sense guiding the trip, the album travels through shadowy and haunting places, and emerges with hopeful vision and a hard-won freedom. Recorded on vintage analogue gear and presented in two sides in the tradition of the best classic vinyl, Side One leads off with the title track Radio Ghost, with its lively syncopated beat and Farfisa organ lending a mysterious and somewhat middle eastern tonality, moving through the slightly sinister Reno, to the soulful and cathartic side closer Hallowed Ground. Side Two ventures into more trippy and cinematic landscapes, culminating in the slow burn and build of epic album closer Suzanne. Much like artists such as Tame Impala's Kevin Parker and Kurt Vile, Hiraga records nearly all the instruments himself from real vintage drums and slide guitars to analogue keys and delivers an album in tradition of Jeff Buckley, Big Star's Alex Chilton and Gene Clark.