4 out of 5

Label: 429 Records

Producer: Jason Carmer, Myles Boisen, Drew Vandenberg, Russell Pilling (all ‘recorded by’)

Like most CVB / Cracker productions, ‘La Costa Perdida’ gives the impression of being underwhelming, Lowery’s laid back croon and the madly skilled musicians stringing together such blissfully smooth love notes to Cali that you can let the 40 minutes slip by without paying it much mind if’n you don’t care to.  …Except that suddenly a song will creep up on you: a haunting, tossed off line about love and loss, a tinkling production note looped in at just the right point… and then you’re listening, and the record simply opens up.  There’s not a single boring or wandering track here, even at mostly 5-minute runtimes.  …Not that the skewed folk / ska / rock of CVB has ever been boring, but they’re certainly given into jams in their early years or some more oblique experiments on ‘New Roman Times’.  ‘La Costa,’ though, by staying central to the travelogue theme and then careening from the standard strum of opener ‘Come Down the Coast’ to the freak-out of ‘You Got to Roll,’ the surprisingly rich ‘Northern California Girls,’ to the winky and catchy title track… the disc just never stalls.   According to wiki, studio drummer Mike Urbano stood in for regular drummer Frank Funaro, which is interesting because the lively drums are a big part of what seals the deal, here, with a bit more of a post-rock influence in their energy and playfulness, making jokey tracks like ‘Too High for the Love-In’ more grounded, even when transitioning to a last sing-songy phrase about making poison sandwiches.  Also: probably the best production on a CVB / Cracker record yet.  In part this is certainly due to our vets knowing their strengths and weaknesses, but there’s also been much work put into balancing the sound so that Lowery never sounds too blase or folksy; so that the strums and plucks veer away from the countrified rock of Cracker and remain true to the mixed bag CVB sound.  It’s a very warm and immediate album, leagues beyond the somewhat cold and wandering ‘Roman Times.’

Put simply: ‘La Costa Perdida’ was an incredibly pleasant surprise.  It’s an incredibly pleasant listen.  And while at time it can be so harmless as to wander into background music (such as the wave-goodbye closer ‘A Love For All Time’), these aspects are few and thoughtfully scattered, and build to a rewarding blast of fresh Camper songs, as filtered through years of learning the game and the role in it they want to play.