Description

Pedro the Lion – Havasu – Transparent Peach Vinyl Record

Havasu returns David Bazan to a short but formative period in his childhood. The 2022 Pedro the Lion album follows Phoenix in a sequence of records shaped by places he lived, this time focusing on a year spent in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, around the beginning of adolescence. The setting provides more than local color. Moving, learning to play music, becoming conscious of other people and struggling to understand one’s own reactions all become material for songs that are specific without requiring the listener to know Bazan’s personal history in advance.

“Don’t Wanna Move” establishes the resistance and uncertainty surrounding a change of home. From there, the record follows small experiences whose significance becomes clearer in retrospect. “First Drum Set” is especially direct in connecting musical discovery with a new way of understanding oneself. The arrangement gives that discovery physical form, making the drums part of the emotional event rather than merely an accompaniment to its description. “Teenage Sequencer” approaches adolescence from another angle, allowing the instability of that age to shape both the lyric and the movement of the instruments.

Bazan wrote and performed most of the material, working with co-producer and engineer Andy D. Park. Although the songs passed through electronic and acoustic approaches during their development, the finished record often returns to the substantial guitar, bass and drums associated with Pedro the Lion. That configuration suits the writing’s mixture of plain speech and complicated feeling. The performances leave room for a memorable melody without polishing away the tension beneath it. Small keyboard and percussion details enrich the arrangements, supplying contrast within what initially sounds like a relatively straightforward rock band setting.

“Own Valentine” and “Making the Most of It” show how carefully the album handles the distance between an outward response and an inward feeling. Bazan looks back with a degree of patience that gives the younger versions of the people in these songs room to be confused. “Old Wisdom,” “Stranger,” “Good Feeling” and “Lost Myself” carry that attention through the later sequence. The record does not turn childhood into a simple store of pleasant memories. It takes the embarrassment, longing and private excitement of that period seriously, while allowing the music to contain more warmth than a summary of the situations might suggest.

The transparent peach vinyl edition presents the complete ten-song Havasu album. Its strongest connection to earlier Pedro the Lion records is the care with which an ordinary situation can reveal a larger emotional problem, though the perspective here is unusually compassionate toward the younger self. The detail of the place and period keeps the songs from becoming general reflections on growing up. Havasu is an absorbing chapter in Bazan’s continuing work because its autobiographical framework leads to clear musical decisions, with the arrangements carrying as much of the story as the words.

Brand new, never played and still sealed in the factory plastic