Simian Life – Hermetic Tonal Briefing
ATOM Records – CD ATOM5725   
Release Year: 2025 
Format: CD 
CD $9
*Prices do not include shipping &  handling.
 
Track List:
1) We Were All Friends Now
2) Indescribable Dream
3) Wake Up Summer
4) Colour
5) Something Wrong
6) May Grey
7) Colors All Around
8) Wonderman
9) Hermetic Tonal Briefing
10) Up On High
 
Simian Life mastermind Andy Campanella hasn't been waiting in the wings so much as he's been creating in them. As the touring/recording drummer in such Los Angeles indie luminaries as Stevenson Ranch Davidians and, more recently, fellow ATOM Records artist the black watch (among others), Andy has been quietly-steadily charting his own course as a writer and arranger of pretty trippy (and really quite pretty) songs.

And it hasn't hurt him that his big brother Rob both had his own fine LA band (The Quarter After) and was a key player for forever in The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Nor has it been a bad thing for Andy that Rob has a blue chip studio in the Hollywood Hills--at which Rob's produced and engineered records for The Warlocks, Mia Doi Todd, The Tyde, and the aforementioned the black watch.

And speaking of pretty, the songs on Simian Life's debut album may put you in mind of Roy Harper at his most experimental--or even Procol Harum at their most, well, Procol Harumish. Or a sort of amalgamation of Nick Drake, Michael Chapman, The Moody Blues, and even Beck in his prettier moments, for that matter. Or they may not remind you of anything other than Simian Life itself: there's a sort of familiar unfamiliarity here, a psychy state of mind/being that seems at once like a dream and not a dream at all.