The Faraway Places

"With gentle psychedelia, skuzzy guitar, and a sweetly-stoned surfer attitude, they serve up summery tunes by the VW camperload." - NME

The songs of Faraway Places have been bouncing around for a few years now, rabidly traded by fans of smart experimental pop who have been fortunate enough to get a hold of various demo CDs or bootlegged tapes. Initially, these demos were attributed to The Solar Saturday, a band from Boston; the group then relocated to Los Angeles, where they became The Faraway Places that you hear today. Unfocus On It is the band's debut album.

The long-awaited changes of coats, monikers and band members, The Faraway Places' constants have remained keyboardist and singer Donna Coppola (who is also a performance artist - everybody needs a day job) and Chris Colthart, the young man who writes and produces the songs. If you haven't already guessed, he also plays guitar, sings, and maintains well-groomed hair. Their current line-up includes drummer Chris Phillips (formerly of the Squirrel Nut Zippers) and bassist Scott Barber - who met the pair when he moved into the house next door to Colthart and soon encountered the singer's head poking above his fence, Ned Flanders-style gazing at his swimming pool with avaricious eyes.

Before leaving Boston for the land of swimming pools and smiles, Colthart and Coppola both joined Papas Fritas for the group's final tours of the States and Europe, and Unfocus On It is full of the artful, self-made 60's pop for which that band was celebrated. Just check out the lush jangles of opening track "Marvelous Error" or the Faraway Places' orch-pop mini-masterpiece, "Summertime." But there's much more to The Faraway Places than the ostensibly sunny pop that initially grabs your ear. Partially recorded in a remote New Hampshire cabin, Unfocus On It juxtaposes its chipper Californian tendencies with a loose, rural strangeness manifested in the spacey freak-out "Come Apart" or chugging groove of "I Want More."

Colthart, who's influenced as much by Can as he is by The Byrds, calls his band's jumbled sound "California Krautrock." The geographically fantastic tag fits: The Faraway Places manage to balance both the natural slackness of their adopted home state with an edgy Germanic experimentalism. "I guess you could say I'm a perfectionist about recording, but I think things are too perfect in music today - the rough edges are where the magic lives," says Colthart. Indeed, Unfocus On It manages to sound at once soulful and spacey; personal and collaborative; precise, yet rounded with rough magical edges.