Review: C. Moody Crews – LA, 2000

Los Angeles is many different things to many different people. For those of us who have never been, it’s a place that holds a sort of mystique, a fictional world that we know from the many movies and TV shows contained within its streets and buildings, a place we have a fondness of, a nostalgia for the version of it we believe to exist. To the director it represents a blank canvas, a stage to be decorated and lit as the story requires.
The LA that unfolds in front of us over the course of the nine tracks that comprise C. Moody Crews’ latest release LA, 2000 feels like a dusty industrial metropolis, not one brooding and looming in the night, but rather basking in the orange glow of a desert sunset. Warm drones swirl around, underpinning metallic transients and bursts of static that puncture the air.
In the midst of this dry desert sits Pyramid Lake, a refreshing, cool oasis, the sounds sustaining the life around it as night falls and the city rises into view again, leaving us alone in the dark. The sun rises once more, as it always does, the people return to the city, and the coast comes into view.
This is a soundtrack to a city that has so many different yet equally valid faces, masterfully realized by C. Moody Crews, allowing the listener to be enveloped by the drones and travel through his vision.