Signs of creative restlessness for Los Angeles quartet
Allah-Las
started to show as early as their third album, 2016's
Calico Review
. It was there that the band started to shift away from their reverb-ensconced indie surf template toward moodier, janglier garage rock sounds, changing their sound noticeably, if ever so slightly. 2019's
LAHS
took things further out, incorporating hints of world music influence and some
Dead
-informed jamming. Their fifth album
Zuma 85
arrived after the band took a brief break from activities to reformat their creative process, and the results are excitingly different from anything they've ever made before. The grimy post-
Velvets
glam of opening track "The Stuff" is almost unrecognizable from the laid-back faux surf instrumentals
were making a decade earlier, with deadpan vocals reminiscent of
John Cale
competing with computer-like vocoded hooks and a web of laser-beam guitar leads. It's loose, weird, dirty rock & roll, and it's a refreshingly strange direction for the band. This wild experimentation also shines on the abstract, blown-out pop of "Right On Time" and the teeth-gnashing hard rock riffs of "Smog Cutter." Throughout there are some of the same nods to early
Roxy Music
, woozy Krautrock, and
Eno
-istic ambient sounds that guitarist
Pedrum Siadatian
got into with his solo project
PAINT
(on a mostly instrumental 2023 album,
Loss for Words
). This likeness is especially clear on the
Fripp & Eno
-indebted instrumental "Hadal Zone," which finds harmonizing guitar tones riding the waves of steady, otherworldly percussion. The band sounds like they're truly experimenting on
, taking a slightly different route with almost every song. There's some of the same
Grateful Dead
guitar noodling from
on the lazy country bop of "Pattern," only combined with a fuzzy
Yo La Tengo
-styled playing and vocal delivery. "Fontaine" takes pages straight from the
Kevin Ayers
/
Soft Machine
school of psychedelia, while "GB BB" goes off the rails in a fashion similar to the unhinged euphoria of
Neu! 4
. There are really only traces left over from
' beachy past on
, with the band mostly abandoning the hazy pleasantness of their early work in favor of untamed sounds and unstable experiments. Fans looking for a reworking of previous material might be alienated by
's adventurous oddity, but anyone open to sweeping change will be thrilled by how much of it
discover here. ~ Fred Thomas