The Molochs | America’s Velvet Glory
Singer and songwriter Lucas Fitzsimons came to his calling in an
appropriately mythic way, born in a historic city not far from Buenos
Aires and raised in L.A.’s South Bay—just outside of
Inglewood—where he was immersed in the hip-hop hits on local
radio. (Westside Connection!) The summer before he started middle
school, a close friend got an electric guitar, and Fitzsimons felt an
irresistible inexplicable power. When he was 12, his parents took him
back to Argentina, and on the first night, he discovered a
long-forgotten almost-broken classical guitar in the basement of his
ancestral home: “It sounds made-up, but it’s true,” he says. “I didn't
put the guitar down once that whole trip—took it with me
everywhere and played and played. When I got back to L.A., I bought
my first guitar practically as the plane was landing.” This started a
long line of bands and a long experience of learning to perform in
public, as Fitzsimons honed intentions and ideas and tried to figure
out why that guitar seemed so important. After a trip to India in
2012, he returned renewed and ready to start again, scrapping his
band to lead something new and uncompromising. This was the true
start of the Molochs.
The first album Forgetter Blues was released with Fitzsimons’
guitarist/organist and longtime bandmate Ryan Foster in early 2013
on his own label—named after a slightly infamous intersection in
their then-home of Long Beach—and was twelve songs of anxious
garage-y proto-punk-y folk-y rock, Modern Lovers demos and Velvet
Underground arcana as fuel and foundation both. It deserved to go
farther than it did, which sadly wasn’t very far. But it sharpened
Fitzsimons and his songwriting, and after three pent-up years of
creativity, he was ready to burst. So he decided to record a new
album in the spirit of the first, and in the spirit of everything that the
Molochs made so far.
The result is America’s Velvet Glory, recorded with engineer Jonny
Bell at effortless (says Fitzsimons) sessions at Long Beach’s JazzCats
studio. (Also incubator for Molochs’ new labelmates Wall of Death
and Hanni El Khatib.) It starts with an anxious electric minor-key
melody and ends on a last lonesome unresolved organ riff, and in
between comes beauty, doubt, loss, hate and even a moments or two
of peace. There are flashes of 60s garage rock—like the Sunset Strip
’66 stormer “No More Cryin’” or the “Little Black Egg”-style
heartwarmer-slash-breaker “The One I Love”—but like one of Foster’s
and Fitzsimons’ favorites the Jacobites, the Molochs are taking the
past apart, not trying to recreate it.
"...60s garage as reinterpreted on those first Modern
Lovers demos—with all the tinny guitar and righteous
outsider alienation that demands—plus Peter Perrett/Only
Ones-style vocals and the bedroom-dude version of the
Loaded-era subway-sound guitar..." - L.A. Record