If one is the loneliest number than LA is the loneliest city, a metropolis founded on the selfish water grabs, fame vision quests, and solitary odysseys. You can go weeks without communicating with a single soul and many of us want it that way. Of course, should you go to a Dodger game, you’ll be surrounded by 50,000 yawping yokels ready to cut off your nipple if you root for the Giants. Maybe this is what Jerome LOL and Samo Sound Boy intended when they appropriated the name DJ Dodger Stadium.
“Love Songs,” the single from their debut collaborative LP, Friend of Mine (due out July 8), balances this sense of ruminative isolation with communal reverie. The video, beautifully shot with drones,starts out at the intersection of Alvarado and MacArthur Park, famous in personal lore for being the place where I got my first horrifically bad fake ID. From there, there are overhead shots of MacArthur Park (since cleaned up from the days when Aunt Vivian refused to let Carlton go there at night) and the Westlake neighborhood in LA. Simultaneously, the techno track clip-clops with a propulsive beat and hi-hats that skitter like a baseball card getting caught in bike spokes. A voice coos, “lately, I’ve been singing love songs by myself.” That’s probably not the ideal way to sing love songs, but when you’re in LA, do as the trolley dodgers do. If this doesn’t end up as the walk-up music for one of the boys in blue, someone has made an error. We know that Andre Ethier has to have an emo streak, right?
