FIRST WATCH/LISTEN> David Strange "Cocaine" Video and self-titled debut EP STREAM

How could I not like this? Have you been paying attention? David Strange was a session musician who was privately writing music until Charlotte Kemp Muhl heard his delightfully bent, psychedelic songs and asked to become his producer. Charlotte also sings back-up vocals and plays drums on the recordings, and directed four of the five videos that accompany the EP. Before he was writing songs with Charlotte and recording his debut EP at Yoko Ono’s home studio, David spent time as a sideman playing in Courtney Love's band.

David Strange teams up with Entertainment Weekly for the release of the his new video "Cocaine" - taken from his self-titled debut EP - available today via iTunes or Amazon. The cinematic clip for David Strange's stripped-down electric guitar ballad, was directed by Charlotte Kemp Muhl from The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger. David also shared the "Cocaine" (SoundCloud) single today, a track that WILD described as, "…a sharp, striking example of Strange’s musical prowess that shows why he’s about to be in demand in his own right."

In a world of his own creation, David Strange is all of his lives at once: an electric guitar champion dancing alone in his first Motel 6; a kid building fires bare-handed at midnight with his brothers in the woods upstate; a guitarist on tour with Courtney Love; a kid swapping opera on cassette tape for church-sale vinyl and The Lonely Bull. David Strange thinks reality is inherently psychedelic; David Strange knows that when the future is unclear, the only way forward is inside you, through your own sacrificial wilderness.

After he played a few for Charlotte Kemp Muhl, he found himself at Yoko Ono’s home studio, in a haven that Charlotte and Sean Lennon had built themselves, slowly, like a secret bird’s nest hidden deep in the woods. It was something crazy to have 24-hour access to. He and Charlotte started stretching their sessions past 30 hours straight. They played all the instruments themselves; she arranged and produced everything, singing radiant vocals in the back. David will tell anyone he owes the making of this record to Charlotte. He calls it something out of nothing and explains the record’s production like this: he’d go out at dawn into a dark forest and come back with a wild boar over his shoulder, and it was Charlotte, always, who carved it and made it a feast.

"The David Strange EP is an acid lullaby, jukebox music from the future underground. Each track has a strong sense of itself; a thick narrative rope of surreal American fable and admonition runs through the center of every miniature world, surrounded by an ecosystem that’s alternately electric and dissonant, manic and devoted.
The songs crackle with life and immediacy; the lyrics suffuse the body before clicking into shape in the mind, and they linger. In one track the heady chorus materializes a series of archetypal images: “Dance with me and feed me cake / Tonight there won’t be no mistakes / Bring me on a downtown train / Call me by my Christian name” — and then David and Charlotte pause on the landing of the melody’s staircase, then jump off towards the song’s title — “Cocaine.” That one’s a low, narcotic well — hips swinging, neon blues, an electric guitar wailing synesthetic existence in the dark. “Mean World,” which starts the EP, rolls along like Cream: it’s a trucker in the early morning, a crowd of thousands swaying under a dusty summer sky. “Vitamin Pills” jangles in technicolor, the Doors-iest of the bunch, a series of instinctive hooks addled by an Alice in Wonderland dementia. “Aztec Corn” is a deliciously straightforward, riff-flooded psych-rock jam whose bottom drops out unexpectedly, turning the song into a slow-motion daydream. And at the end of the EP is “Lion Tattoo,” a folksy, haunting Neutral Milk Hotel lullaby in three-four. Play this EP so David Strange can be in a million places at once. Play it tomorrow so it can live in the future, full of ahistorical desire. The psychic texture of these tracks in combination — a deep, jagged, enchanted sense of potentiality — is catching; let it catch you. The David Strange EP is an acid lullaby, jukebox music from the future underground. Each track has a strong sense of itself; a thick narrative rope of surreal American fable and admonition runs through the center of every miniature world, surrounded by an ecosystem that’s alternately electric and dissonant, manic and devoted. The songs crackle with life and immediacy; the lyrics suffuse the body before clicking into shape in the mind, and they linger. In one track the heady chorus materializes a series of archetypal images: “Dance with me and feed me cake / Tonight there won’t be no mistakes / Bring me on a downtown train / Call me by my Christian name” — and then David and Charlotte pause on the landing of the melody’s staircase, then jump off towards the song’s title — “Cocaine.”

That one’s a low, narcotic well — hips swinging, neon blues, an electric guitar wailing synesthetic existence in the dark. “Mean World,” which starts the EP, rolls along like Cream: it’s a trucker in the early morning, a crowd of thousands swaying under a dusty summer sky. “Vitamin Pills” jangles in technicolor, the Doors-iest of the bunch, a series of instinctive hooks addled by an Alice in Wonderland dementia. “Aztec Corn” is a deliciously straightforward, riff-flooded psych-rock jam whose bottom drops out unexpectedly, turning the song into a slow-motion daydream. And at the end of the EP is “Lion Tattoo,” a folksy, haunting Neutral Milk Hotel lullaby in three-four."

Play this EP so David Strange can be in a million places at once. Play it tomorrow so it can live in the future, full of ahistorical desire. The psychic texture of these tracks in combination — a deep, jagged, enchanted sense of potentiality — is catching; let it catch you.

TRACKLIST
Mean World
Vitamin Pills
Aztec Corn
Cocaine
Lion Tattoo