'South of Reality', the sophomore album from CLD, out now!
South Of Reality, The Claypool Lennon Delirium’s epic sophomore album, might be just the antidote this sick world needs. Music so potent it could repel an asteroid impact from space, these seasoned warriors of psychedelia have crafted timeless songs that may as well be chiseled in stone. It’s the record Dr. Seuss would have made if Harry Potter and Nietzshe were his drinking buddies, and it’d be produced by Dr. Teeth.
Lennon describes the collaboration: ‘Les and I have been cooking up some wizard juice to take the edge off as we sit back and watch reality unravel. This album is the soundtrack to the demise of the world as we knew it.’
Known independently for their accomplished music careers, Sean Lennon and Les Claypool first envisioned melding their powers back in 2015, when Sean’s band The G.O.A.S.T.T. was opening for Primus on a summer tour. After setting the intergalactic scene ablaze with their first record, The Monolith of Phobos, they’ve joined mustaches once more to wrap listeners up in a mind-bending sonic cyclone. This is the album you'll want to blare while riding with your mutant pals in souped-up junkyard trucks through the yellow smog of a post-apocalyptic desert. The twosome have created an album of towering sagas depicting the misadventures and indulgences of misfit characters from the wrong side of the cosmic train tracks. Gather ‘round to hear tales that celebrate the most unusual and sublime trivia known to humankind!
Claypool brings his skilled combo of rubber and grit, which is infused with Lennon's melodic, spacey style. Together, they tightrope-walk the line between highbrow-clever and lowbrow-brilliant. The explosive result is like pink-flavored Starburst candy followed by a shot of moonshine for your eardrums; a twisted, auditory voyage that will have you singing and hallucinating along to every lyric. South of Reality was produced by the monolithic duo themselves, and engineered and mixed by Les Claypool at his own Rancho Relaxo studio in Sonoma County, California.
South of Reality is an expression of our upside-down times, offering listeners both an escape from modern chaos and a filter through to which to embrace it. This album will suck you off into surreal narratives and audacious, inter-dimensional themes. “Little Fishes” is a bittersweet lament to a purer time, pre-technology, pre-pollution—an ever-changing anthem that shifts time signatures and keys, calling back to the free-form rock of the 1960s as well as mirroring the way restless generations shift through profiles and apps. “Blood and Rockets,” “Borishka,” and “Amethyst Realm” immortalize oddball geniuses on the fringe of history who challenge the natural order of things. Lyrics like, “You better be careful boys you just might, set the world on fire” could apply to anyone currently in the political spotlight. With the titular track, “South of Reality,” the listener is invited to consider the warped goggles through which we’re looking at the world—the fractured and manufactured intimacy that defines our everyday existence.
Grab your goggles and a month's supply of Kool-Aid because The Claypool Lennon Delirium is about to take you for a ride on a rock 'n' roll rocket ship, and frankly you may never come back!