Wildflowers & Weeds + Hello Cruel World present a Portland Music Month special, in partnership with XRAY & Music Portland. 

Laith & The Texas Birds

Laith is a Texas songbird. And songbirds don’t fly south for the winter, but they do fly low for the blues. Laith knows that to fly low is to feel high and to feel high is to get struck by lightning. And lightning is the heart of this record. Texas lightning. 

On Laith’s debut record, ‘Lightning’, he carries us across state lines from LA to Arizona, Colorado to Espanola, Houston to New Orleans, Utah on to the Great Northwest, where he currently lays his head, dreaming of running these roads until the wheels don’t touch the ground. And his writing does just that. It burns along the asphalt until there’s none left. And that’s when Laith takes us beyond, on phantom track lines through the abstract geography of his mind. He flows seamlessly between railway signs and lost trains of thought. Like a true American surrealist. 

‘Lightning’ was recorded in two pieces over about 6 months in Portland, Oregon. [sic] The result is a 12-track traveling companion for the wild-eyed western mystic drifting along the winding highway, pulling off for all the old haunts - love, money, and hysteria. It’s outsider country rooted in the Texas songwriting tradition; buzzing with the subtle hum of northwestern psychedelia. And with a voice that literally sounds like smokestacks and lightning, Laith takes the listener from bar room to bedroom and back again, cruising along the vibrant soundscapes of The Texas Birds. It’s a timeless sound laden with thundering pianos and padded with Rhodes and organ; dusty acoustic guitars and ghostly harmonies fade in and out of the ether; the spirited twang of the electric guitar and the raw wah thump of the clavinet squabble in the dark while the pedal steel takes to the sky; all held within the deep pocket of a dynamic rhythm section.

-Taylor Kingman

Silver Triplets of the Rio Hondo 

The trio features the dreamy & toothsome embellishments of Haven Multz Matthews on skins and Christopher Cook wielding guitar leads that alternate between Bakersfield country & avant-noise in quick succession, & the samples dancing in and out of the periphery may leave an audience wondering how a sound at times so massive & strange can still feel somehow intimate. 

(via Giant Rock Meeting Room)