Spring Music Preview: 3 New Albums You MUST Have

Spring means a lotta things: the runways are aflutter with new collections and we can finally stow our dowdy winter gear in the closet and start rocking fresher duds, just in time for the requisite mid-year debauchery of Spring Break.

By CC Staff

Flowers are in bloom, the sun is peeping, and love is hanging in the air with the sly promise of an unfinished flirt session. We’re all ready to turn new leaves with the season, and if we’re going to do it in style, we’re going to need a really good soundtrack.

With the music-festival craziness of SXSW coming up in a few weeks, there’s a bonanza of new spring albums to choose from. Here are three cherry picks from three phenomenally talented women, just in time to usher in a truly dreamy springtime.

Valet: Naked Acid

Valet is Honey Owens, a California transplant who’s been a legendary figure in the Portland, Oregon experimental music scene for almost a decade now. She’s lent her blonde elegance and burnout guitar riffs to projects like the legendary drone outfit Jackie-O Motherfucker — not to mention World, Nudge, Dark Yoga (yes, that’s a real band), and the newly-formed Atlas Sound. Not only that, but she’s got amazing style and co-owns one of Portland’s most unique boutiques of vintage gear, Rad Summer.

The amazingly-titled Naked Acid will totally save you the trouble of ever dabbling in the titular drug: it will blow your mind with its snakelike guitar work, the seemingly endless layers of delay-laced chanting, and the semi-conscious, gauzy tones of Owens’ whispery voice.

Beach House: Devotion

Beach House blasted into the music world in 2006 with a self-titled album full of classically virtuosic piano arrangements and lovelorn, if slightly damaged, melodies. Their follow-up, Devotion, is much surer of itself; a lovelorn pop gem full of somber waltzes and ghost stories full of love, loss, and desire. Perfect for those morning cold snaps, or if your Spring Break date turns out to be a jerk.

El Perro Del Mar: From the Valley to the Stars

Believe it or not, El Perro Del Mar isn’t the name of a Spanish holiday town. Nope, it’s what Swedish chanteuse, Sarah Assbring, likes to call her lovely, hopeful musical output. From The Valley to the Stars is rich with springtime fervor, bells, woodwinds, and floaty lyrics, especially the song “Inner Island,” which urges its listeners to channel onto the place inside where we’d escape as kids — something we might need to do if the grey skies haven’t lifted just yet.

These are just a FEW new albums to help usher in the crisp, clean spring season. Got any other ones you’re looking forward to that we should know about??