A Million Blessed Buddhas to You

Launder, JJUUJJUU, and friends abolish shoegaze and swap consciousnesses in Echo Park, as A. J. Urquidi reports.

By A. J. UrquidiDecember 27, 2024

JJUUJJUU with DAIISTAR/LAUNDER/AL LOVER, The Echo, Los Angeles, December 13, 2024.

“Shoegaze!” one dude bellowed in the murmur between songs, labeling the music we’d been watching this Friday the 13th at the Echo on Sunset Boulevard. “No: shoegaze is no more,” Launder’s John Cudlip winkingly quieted him, speaking decisively into the mic while tuning his guitar. “Now is the time … for psychedelic rock.”

Cudlip’s facetious banter was somewhat apt. Maybe the scene is overdue for a change: it’s been flooded with revivalists and reunited first-wavers for a decade-plus now, torch-bearers invigorating alternative rock with swirling distortion oceans garnishing looped beats and muttery, dreamlike vocals. The sonic formulas perfected by key progenitors (My Bloody Valentine, JMC, Ride, et al.) have been reiterated and revamped by 2010s artists like Nothing, Day Wave, and Beach House; now the youngest internet generations are amplifying homemade alt-rock to soundtrack their TikToks. Even spacious dream-poppers DIIV, previously adamant about only “having a couple different melodies layered on top of each other and seeing how they interact” rather than writing songs using chords, eventually loaded their rig with heavier pedals and pivoted toward wobbly chord washes to buttress their experiments in harmony and dissonance.

Likewise, Launder’s Moroccan Lounge show a few years ago confirmed my suspicions: the massive sound of Cudlip’s project deserved the title of SoCal’s Next Big Shoegaze. The sacred aquifer supplying the beauty, softness, and measured repetition of anthems like “When You Sleep” had been tapped once more, this time by a relatable Orange County guy. And Launder’s extracurricular camaraderie with DIIV and Day Wave is just the cherry on top. In Echo Park this past Friday, Launder assembled a full crowd that demonstrated their rapidly inflating reputation as local legends. They presented the middle stretch of their 2022 debut Happening: the motorik ooziness of “Beggar,” the drooling rhapsody of “Rust,” and the seething creep of “Withdraw,” along with the quasi-DIIVy jaunt of “Chipper.” There were moments mid-song when Cudlip realized his tuning was off, but it was impressive watching him retune and improvise while never abandoning the playthrough, never losing vocal momentum above the temporary chaos. He and his compadres ultimately came off as endearing everyman Angelenos who play together out of a shared love for shoegaze, that simple. But they were only the opening band, and now was the time for psychedelic rock.

That included DAIISTAR (pronounced “day,” not “die”), a noise-pop group from Austin, Texas, whose music and stage presence reminded me of signifiers as diverse as Blur’s first album, bucket hats at Madchester raves, and the bands feuding in Dig! (2004). “Tracemaker,” “Star Starter,” and “Say It to Me,” among other songs, utilized ramped-up distortion moments that evoked the ignition of jet engines; once they ascended to cavernous, floating verses, they dropped back into the grinding pull of gravity again. Astoundingly, the live band managed to accurately recreate their polished studio sound onstage—the subsequent line at the merch table was evidence that they had earned several new fans.

Between sets, DJ Al Lover mashed up tribal house beats with Middle Eastern vocal samples, all dripping with the crackling haze of trip-hop decay. His eclectic curation provided a calming counterpoint to the high-energy guitar splurges marking the other performances. A strain of 1960s-descended lysergic psychedelia mixes electronically manipulated vocals with surrealistic lyrics, catchy chord progressions laying foundations for solos, and extended trippy instrumental passages; Lover’s self-described “Neu!-Age Spiritualized Repetition” straddled these parameters in a way that made total sense alongside the other performers.

Headliner JJUUJJUU brought a psilocybic mountain-man aura, courtesy of their My Morning Jacketness, their flair for the cosmically epic. Front man Phil Pirrone bellowed into a contraption that rendered his words unintelligibly spacey, bouncing around the ceiling with omnipotence over the krautrock drums of “Zionic Mud.” These songs sounded tailor-made for driving around the Mojave—it’s no surprise, then, that Pirrone is Desert Daze music festival’s founder, and that JJUUJJUU closed with back-to-back covers of deep cuts from Palm Desert icons Queens of the Stone Age. One concertgoer took the psych-rock prescription to heart and was thriving near the ayahuasca end of the hallucinogen spectrum: this kid spent the whole night with his arms in the sky, thrusting his entire torso into dance gyrations as he ran laps around the front rows of hardly nodding hipsters; he joyously exclaimed over most of Launder and DAIISTAR’s sets and sent the latter a wish, “a million blessed Buddhas to you!” Pirrone was the first performer to personally acknowledge him, kneeling down from the stage to fuse their foreheads and swap consciousnesses. It was enough to leave Tripping Boy in awed silence until the finale, with the most authentic smile I’ve seen on a human face—good juju.

The resounding uncontrollable happiness made me realize this was a night of echoes, the repetitive record of things lingering a little longer than anyone expected: superficially, the I-I in DAIISTAR, the double-JJUU, the echo of Echo Park in the Echo/Echoplex complex’s name. On a deeper plane, the reverberation of the earlier Launder show coloring my enjoyment of this one; the echo of shoegaze in its revival, the echo of psychedelic rock in shoegaze itself, the love of music over a lifetime echoing in my appreciation for the onstage magic I witnessed today. Now is the time … now is the time …

¤

Photo of Launder by A. J. Urquidi.

LARB Short Takes live event reviews are published in partnership with the nonprofit Online Journalism Project and the Independent Review Crew.