Oliver Future

Oliver Future's sophomore album, Pax Futura, is really a love story – one of a Los Angeles via Austin band in crisis in their adopted city, and the newly relocated Brooklyn producer, Adam Lasus (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Yo La Tengo, Clem Snide) with something to prove in his new hometown.

Epic but not pretentious, political but not self-righteous, the album is a bizarre sound journey with interweaving plots and surprises along the way. Indeed, Pax Futura is a love story of L.A. outcasts united, even if it is comprised of songs about the apocalypse and Hurricane Katrina.

"This was going to be our 'L.A. record,'" explains frontman Noah Lit, "but by the time we got around to recording it, we had gone from new transplants to L.A. to feeling like we had written a record stemming from our experiences and frustrations as we made our transition here."

But the result of this angst was their musical breakthrough. After shrugging off all the people who wanted a say in their career, Oliver Future finally got to make their dream record with a kindred soul who immediately understood that he had something special on his hands. Lasus, the producer behind 2005's breakout success, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's independently released self-titled debut, discovered the band via KCRW DJ Tricia Halloran and once he pressed the record button, never looked back.

"I've never had a record where the flow and creativity and energy was so good, constantly," exclaims Lasus. "It was mind blowing. I've never made a record like that. It was perfect."

Lasus recorded the band live (except for one song) to capture the spark and energy found at their shows. Together, they labored for months on end to create a sonic wall of textures, tones and melodies to give the recording its distinct sound. Almost the entire second half of the album was written in the studio.

True believers in the fading art of the album, the band created Pax Futura to consist of mini-suites, with songs bleeding into each other as part of a larger story. While each song stands on its own, it's best listened to from start to finish. However, the overall sound was defined, fittingly enough, by a revelation while driving on the 101 Freeway.

"Jordan (Richardson, drummer) and I were driving to the studio and we heard 'Twist and Shout' by The Beatles followed by 'Easy Like Sunday Morning' by The Commodores and we had a vision that somewhere between those two songs is everything we are trying to do," reveals Noah.

"We wanted to combine the dirty neon energy of Hamburg in '62 with the cool laid back confidence of the motor city circa '72."

The band knew from the start what the second song on their album would be, but it took a resurrected track written years earlier, post-September 11, to provide the sweet and groovy hook to kick everything off. The dreamy "The Many Things I Am Aware Of," launches the album before the heavy, funky, sexy riff that holds down "The Big Sleep" takes over.

On "Signing Off," the first recorded vocal collaboration between singer/guitarist Noah and younger brother keyboardist Josh Lit, the two share singing duties as well as their contrasting outlooks on life. While Josh takes a literal and macabre view on the world and politics, chiding people for not paying attention to the news of the day, Noah has a more figurative and personal view on the end of the world – his apocalypse is sitting across from someone he cares about that he doesn't recognize anymore.

The Motown cool of "Stranger Than the Stranger," comes next, quickly slowing the pace. With its irresistibly catchy chorus, it is one of those rare songs that the band debuted live and has played at every show since.

"We've never had a song like this before where people just instantly got it," explains Noah. "You could see people wanting to sing along even though they had never heard it before."

After the Clash-inspired "What Heart," the album moves into the second chapter (or Side B on vinyl) -- juxtaposed by the tender love ballad "Whispering Wintry Wind" and the hardest, dirtiest rock song on the record, "Horseslayer Technique."

Written exactly one year after Hurricane Katrina, "Drowning Parade," the most outright political song on the album, features another Lit brother, Gabriel, on bass clarinet, as well as other top notch horn players.

With Otis Redding and Led Zeppelin listed equally among their musical influences and samurai films and national tragedies among their muses, Oliver Future has created a sound that is distinctly its own. And in that, they have found solace in Los Angeles.