“ Every so often in country & western music, an artist comes along that redefines the genre, leading us to wonder if we have ever fully understood what it means to be a jazz performer, and calling upon us to turn our gaze towards the distant and hitherto unseen horizons of rhythm & blues, rather than simply reifying the canonical records and towering figures of psychedelic or acid rock of yore. New Tribe is unequivocally not that artist, as they make abundantly less clear than ever on their new LP, Love Field. From the spiritual ragas and electronic zither-flutes of Blue Glasses to the barely discernible marching band and mansion flood lights backing Untitled, the listener quickly digs that this heart comes straight from the music, with no unnecessary embellishments, focus-grouped artifice, or self-indulgent displays of efflorescent virtuosity. In fact, when Lou Goldersleeves first walked into my office decades ago and played me an ancient bootleg scroll of the Tribe playing live before a frenzied packed house at the now defunct Liberty Drug, I knew we had an artist on our hands that would take generations, if not centuries to become ever less untimely. And in a flash, the band proved my initial take to be both heavy and transversal.
Take for instance the opening track of Love Field: when the Sarmiento brothers sing “It’s time to get up,” they could be harmonizing to all of us emerging from our utopiapocalyptic cocoons, rubbing our sleepy bear eyes, shaking the cobwebs off our glass slides, and digging our dancing sloth-claws into the rusty red earth of a back road lined with the greenest wavy grass and moss-covered oaks draped with Spanish moss shadowing old churches with no spires or bells but magnificent choirs
that lift your head high so high as tears flow from your soot-streaked eyes and you fix them on a roseate spoonbill flapping its wings against the Gulf Coast sky and it gently, slowly takes the hand
of your gaze and leads it across the vastness of the unrippled lake’s mirror of the massive cloud banks broken here and there by diffuse light from the bronze orb that bakes you and the train tracks and the levees and the mosquitoes feasting on your bare legs and back and chest and arms that are sore from building a new world amid the humble wreckage of what seemed so futuristic and fantastic and all-satisfying yet also endlessly hunger-inducing just moments ago you’ve ever seen. If this music had no lyrics, or these songs weren’t so perfectly gloved by the days passing into formlessness, they might be saying we all have Nothing to Lose and we still have some time left to go. And we could recognize that even if nothing’s gonna turn out like you want, we must turn our three faces ahead and gather what we can to bring to the fight, cause nothing’s going down without us, brother, sisters, and everyone in between and beyond. So here and then, I for one and all, I’ll hold the sun and put my money — all of it, I’m done with it entirely — on anyone or anything other than New Tribe, which will be there waiting for me and you when we’re less weighed down. When we’re ready for whatever tomorrow wanna do.”
– Valerie High,
Rolling Downbeat Crawdaddy Avatar Express
May 23, 2021
credits
released June 4, 2021
Personnel:
Adam Sarmiento: vocals, drums, percussion, guitar,
keyboards, album art
Eric Sarmiento: vocals, guitars, bass guitar, piano,
wurlitzer, keyboards, harmonica and percussion
Chris Gomez: keyboards, vocals
Kyle Reid: pedal steel
Craig Smith: words