Photo credit: Amy Zippel
Ravi/Lola
Milwaukee’s baroque-psychedelic group Ravi/Lola traces its origins to Brian Jonestown Massacre along two routes. First, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Casey Seymour was taken by the example of BJM’s prolific home recording. “It showed me that it doesn’t take a lot of fancy equipment—it’s something anybody could do, making something good and valuable.”
And then, scrutinizing the BJM website, Seymour came across a long list of influences. Determined to explore them all, he discovered the roster included “tons of ’60s stuff—The Electric Prunes, the 13th Floor Elevators, Scott Walker. I went out and bought a Vox guitar,” he says.
Ravi/Lola began in 2008 as a home-recording project and only recently made the leap to live performances. Along the way, they released five EPs and a pair of full-length sets before unveiling their latest album, Neighborhood Daydream, out on CD and cassette. The song cycle rolls liltingly from track to track, and if the lyrics don’t add up to a story, Neighborhood Daydream’s 13 individual stories link together, often in a child’s-eye perspective of a particular district and the characters dwelling there.
Neighborhood Daydream belongs to a ’60s psychedelic subgenre retrospectively dubbed “Toytown pop.” We’ve all heard at least two of the most famous examples—The Beatles’ “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever”—even if we never knew there was a name for it. Turns out that hundreds (more?) of similar recordings poured out of studios (especially in the U.K.) during that fancifully hopeful year, 1967.
Toytown narratives are as dreamlike as the music, as they imaginatively observe the quotidian details of particular places. Sometimes, they suggest half-forgotten memories of childhood comfort, curled up with Alice in Wonderland (illustrated with Victorian engravings of Humpty Dumpty tottering on his wall). Even if many Toytown artists never swallowed even half a tab, their recordings usually convey the sense that a ray of consciousness-changing sunshine can light the world from unexpected angles.
|
|
Neighborhood Daydream opens with “Mike the Mailman,” happily filling letterboxes on flower-lined paths (and seeming to deliver only good news). “Little Library” conjures up the sort of rounds children once sang in grade school music class. There are shadows sometimes in Toytown, audible on “Bad Parts,” but most of Ravi/Lola’s album rides along at a gentle, reassuring gallop. Calling up the old-time 1920s razzmatazz that found its way into ’60s psych, “Scholar Gurda, John” is a fond tribute to Milwaukee’s benevolent neighborhood champion. When Seymour sings that Gurda “rides his bicycle as much as he can,” in the context of dreamy psychedelia, one can’t help but recall the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann experiencing the world’s first “trip” while cycling home after a day at the Sandoz lab.
“The next album is already written, inspired by the last election,” Seymour says. “It’s not political but is set in a town called Toppington. Someone there has been laid off; someone is on public assistance; someone is going to jail for the rest of their life.” Could Ravi/Lola’s answer to The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society be far behind? “Ray Davies is quintessential,” Seymour says of The Kinks’ leader. “His reflections on the human condition, his playful yet devious voice…”
For Ravi/Lola, Seymour collaborates with Anton Sieger (bass, guitar), Nick Wieczorkowski (drums) and Robert Thomas (keyboards, guitar). They are part of a morphing Milwaukee art-rock underground that also includes bands such as Scrimshaw, Kiss Critique and The Trusty Knife.
Aside from the gorgeous melodiousness of it all, Seymour is drawn to psychedelia for “telling us to slow down and notice things. It can be mental travel—taking you to some place where you’re not.” As he sings in “Grandpa Danger,” “We’ll understand if you never come back” from that “faraway land.”
Ravi/Lola perform at High Dive, 701 E. Center St., on Friday, Sept. 6, at 9 p.m., sharing a bill with Minneapolis mod-pop band Real Numbers and Milwaukee’s Bandoleer Bacall.
