Toward the end of 2009, in a bedroom in Stockton, CA, a 21-year-old Justin Vallesteros began layering simple synth and guitar lines to create the sound that would become Craft Spells. What began as an experiment soon became a vibrant world of elegant guitar chords laced over looped rhythms, heavenly synth melodies, and pulsating bass. When Vallesteros recorded his first track “Party Talk,” an outpouring of online enthusiasm led him to move to Seattle and flesh out a full band for the debut LP Idle Labor, released on Captured Tracks in Spring 2011. If you love Felt, The Smiths, Echo & The Bunnymen, and the beautiful monotone drone of Ian Curtis, Craft Spells might soon be your favorite nuevo-new romantics.
After a dormant period following the release of the Gallery EP in 2012, Craft Spells’ Justin Vallesteros is back with the gorgeously ambitious Nausea. It’s Craft Spells’ second proper full length LP, and first since 2010′s critically acclaimed Idle Labor.
Since last on the radar, Justin moved to San Francisco to find a niche in the Bay Area music scene. This proved difficult within the regarded garage rock scene and insular DJ night crowds currently dominating the area’s music community. Here, Justin fell into a slump, creatively. With a severe bout of writer’s block he retreated to his parent’s house in Lathrop, CA. Away from the city, he put down his guitar for a full year in favor of properly training himself on piano, the instrument from which all the tracks for Nausea were written.
Being in limbo between the city and the suburbs, Justin felt actual nausea, added to by his admitted semi-addiction to social media and quickly found himself disillusioned. Vallesteros unplugged from that world as much as possible and completely immersed himself in the music (Emmit Rhodes and the solo works of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Haroumi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi) and writing (the works of Mishima, for one) that would come to form the LP.
The demos came together in early 2014 and Vallesteros flew to Seattle to produce the record with engineer Dylan Wall. Teaming up on the recording with Craft Spells stalwarts Javier Suarez and Andy Lum, the band went into the studio and recorded a whole and complete work, full of ideas and a new found maturity in both songwriting and recording sophistication.
