01 Sunny Daze by Easy Sound Recording Co.

The Donkeys - Bio
Ride the Black Wave
California places a distinct sonic stamp upon the m
usic born with in its boundaries.
Owens had his Bakersfield, Parsons his Joshua Tree,
and Malkmus his Stockton, and
in their tunes you can hear dust, desert highways,
and skateboards gliding over
suburbia. The Donkeys have San Diego, and from tha
t environment have woven a
fundamental ease in their music - a rock, a roll, a
sway, a slide - you could even call it
a breeze. On
Ride the Black Wave
The Donkeys continue their easy rolling, classic
vibrations
,
but add a mystery and tension that make this recor
d their most lyrically
and instrumentally compelling.
Ride the Black Wave
embodies what Jack Kerouac described of California
’s coast as
having an “end of the land sadness.” The Donkeys st
are out at the ocean in a
“fantastic drowse” - a kind of pensiveness towards
their environs that summons the
elements of sound and style that belong only to the
m. In “Blues In The Afternoon”,
a collective mantra, the band runs out of land and
asks of the ocean to offer
suggestions about their fate. It is songs like the
se that prove the Donkeys are a band
in the true sense of the word, sharing each other’s
worry and wonder. With
RTBW,
The Donkeys have further caged their craft and have
accomplished the delicate and
artful challenge of taming the captured, while also
letting it be wild.
Recorded at San Diego’s Singing Serpent and mixed b
y LA’s Thom Monahan, the
Telecasters have a golden shimmer, the drums seem t
o echo with a regional
reverberation. The notes coming off the Rhodes flo
at on like beer-buzzed
afternoons, but just when you get lost in the hypno
tic swirl of “Sunny Daze” the
churning guitars begin to circle like sharks, remin
ding us of the realities beneath all
beautiful surfaces. Ten tracks deep, Adrianne Verh
oeven of San Francisco’s Extra
Classic appears like the mythic Calafia herself, de
livering a vocal that would bring
Cortez to his knees.
So, it is with
Ride the Black Wave
that The Donkeys add their own stratum to
California’s ever expanding musical frontier, while
maintaining their golden “shine”
as well as interjecting a tension with the sun and
beauty. The record hypnotizes as
much as it awakens; it poetically puts us at ease w
hile we sit in traffic, peck at our
keyboards in cubicles, or conversely, it accompanie
s us as we ride along desert
highways, or sway with our lovers. It is about hom
e; it is about waves, and
surrendering to their movements, trusting that they
will take us to where we truly
belong.