Locobeach - Close To Me 2x7" black vinyl
Peace & Rhythm is excited to announce Close To Me, the new double 7-inch vinyl EP of four fun fan favorites from Locobeach. The tracks are all danceable cumbias familiar to the band’s followers as they are previously released on digital and have all been staples of their live sets over the years. This mini-box set of two hot dancefloor donuts will be great for DJ spins as well as aficionados and collectors, and comes with beautiful artwork courtesy of Selina Josephs.
The backstory to the EP is an interesting one, and emblematic of our times. Just before the COVID-19 Pandemic in March of 2020, New York’s tropical party band Locobeach began to record a follow up to their freshman LP from 2019, Psychedelic Disco Cumbia. Four songs from the sessions at Manhattan’s Cutuprá Studios were almost complete when the world ground to a standstill in March of 2020. When things began to open up a little the following year, the band put the finishing touches on the songs and released the first digital single, the humorous “Isabella,” composed and sung by José Luis “Cheo” Pardo (guitar, vocals, production, engineering). The three other tracks needed tweaking, and by early 2024 were ready for digital release as singles, kicking off with a brilliant reinterpretation of The Cure’s “Close To Me,” sung and arranged by Joshua Douglas Camp (guitar, keyboards, accordion, engineering). Next up was Camp’s urgent-sounding tropical film noire instrumental “Idea Desesperada” (Desperate Idea), propelled in part by some hot percussion from Neil “Cutuprá” Ochoa. This was followed by the playful “U.S. Marshall,” a sound library theme in search of a cartoon soundtrack, with the title being a play on band bassist Edward Marshall’s last name.
Close To Me is a snapshot in time; since the four tracks were recorded, original member Fernando Valladares (timbales, drums) left the band to return home to Venezuela, and it was decided to release the quartet of songs together as a vinyl EP instead of making them part of a future full-length album. Peace & Rhythm have been with Locobeach from its origins in 2015 as a live backing group for Joshua Camp’s solo studio project, C.A.M.P.O.S., through its ascendence as a self-sustaining party band with its own repertoire and debut album, to the present day. Now Peace & Rhythm are honored to preserve for posterity this transitional suite of cumbia bangers in physical form four years after the world stood still and being "close to me” was just a memory.
