Globelamp tour dates:
March 3 - The Irenic - San Diego, CA *
March 6 - Subrosa - Santa Cruz, CA
March 9 - The Sanctuary - Arcata, CA *
March 10 - The Boreal - Eugene, OR
March 11 - The Old Church - Portland, OR *
March 12 - The Bartlett - Spokane, WA *
March 13 - Vera Project - Seattle, WA *
March 17 - Obsolete Industries - SXSW - Austin, TX
* - w/ Waxahatchee
Last year, in The FADER's 100th issue, we looked back at some of the microgenres that felt important in the time since the magazine's first issue. The end result was fun but non-exhaustive, and there were a few musical movements that we wanted to include but for some reason didn't, including but not limited to "freak-folk," or as David Keenan coined in a 2003 issue of The Wire, "New Weird America."
For those who don't remember, the term was used to describe a particular style of avant-garde rock music that had one foot in the psychedelic and one in the pastoral. It would come to be associated with out-there storytellers like Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart, and the dudes in Animal Collective. Elizabeth Le Fey, who used to play in Foxygen but now writes alone as Globelamp, makes very pretty folk songs that are idiosyncratic but also formal, and they sound like they might have been beamed in from this strange corner of the early aughts.
"Washington Moon," the opening song on her new Wichita Records long player, has the sparse melancholy that made The Milk-Eyed Mender so bewitching, plus the haunted schoolyard vibe of outsider family band The Shaggs. It's all carried along by La Fey's multi-tracked voice, which drifts between eccentric and classic-sounding with every tempo shift and melodic flourish. The video, debuting above, is a fade-heavy Hollywood daydream—all blue oceans, ice cream trucks, and vintage cars. The Orange Glow is out June 10; check out her tour dates, some with Waxahatchee, below.