The Smoking Trees - The Archer and The Bull - Cassette
The Smoking Trees take inspiration from the trippy psychedelic sounds of the '60s, adding lush baroque pop melodies and dubby studio effects to their feather-light songs. Based in Los Angeles, the founding members of the band, Martin Nunez (aka Sir Psych) and Al Rivera (aka L.A. AL), kicked the idea around for years before getting serious and releasing their first album, Acetate, in 2013. After another album, 2015's TST, L.A. AL left the band, but Sir Psych kept making sunshine-bright psych-pop albums, like 2018's The Adventure Continues.
Formed in 2001 when they were both working at Tower Records, Nunez (a prolific hip-hop producer, multi-instrumentalist, and record collector) and Rivera (a key architect of the East L.A. underground punk scene) spent the early 2000s recording at home on a four-track and honing their sound. As jobs and families began to demand more time, the duo drifted apart, but in 2011 they reconvened and focused their attention on the project, issuing their full-length debut, Acetate, via Burger Records two years later. The band's second studio long-player, TST, arrived in the summer of 2015 to the delight of fans of spaced-out, summer-soft psych-pop everywhere. Their next record was made during the sessions for TST, but after L.A. AL left again, Sir Psych worked alone to finish it, adding overdubs and mastering the recordings. The resulting album, The Archer and the Bull, was issued by Burger Records in May of 2016. Sir Psych kept working solo, and in 2018 the third Smoking Trees album, The Adventure Continues, was released.