It’s a balmy afternoon in Bentonville, Arkansas, and I’m headed to the second annual Format Festival. This year, they’ve moved the venue from an airfield to The Momentary, the museum of modern art that is an extension of the magnificent Crystal Bridges Museum founded by Alice Walton, daughter of Sam Walton, founder of Walmart. So yeah, there’s a lot of fantastic art and constant cultural curation in this little hamlet.
The lineup to this year’s festival is stellar, and I’m here early to check in with Poolside, aka Jeffrey Paradise, for a quick chat and to talk about the stellar new album before it’s dropped. And now it’s finally out, and you should definitely get the vinyl because it’s that kind of record.
Before there was Poolside, there was Jeffrey Paradise, and before Jeffrey Paradise, there was a kid from San Diego who loved punk and indie rock. For those of you old enough to remember, San Diego had a musical moment in the mid-nineties after Seattle’s scene began to wane. The sound from Southern California in the mid to late 90s was a punchier post-grunge sound, part punk with a dash of hard rock and a pinch of experimentation. Bands like Rocket From the Crypt, aMinature, No Knife, Fluf, and Three Mile Pilot started to catch the attention of the A&R types at the major labels looking for their next Nirvana. Paradise was there, soaking it up and identifying as a hardcore indie rocker.
Years later, he would find himself living in San Franciso, or San Frandisco, as it was affectionately known by the nightclubbers and DJs crafting the scene at the time. The City by the Bay was a musical experiment of disco, house music, indie, acid jazz, and rare groove, globally impacting the underground music scene. Here, Jeffrey Paradise stepped into the limelight and began cultivating a scene that was a precursor to the hipster explosion of the late ’00s. He was learning the art of djing, working at a record store, playing in a band, and later throwing some of the best parties of the era. The parties were so good that he started a residency in Los Angeles and DJing the country’s hottest parties. Wherever there were skinny jeans, cigarettes, and asymmetrical haircuts, he was there, dropping eclectic mixes. The rave scene had cooled off, and the sound of 4/4 DJ sets was being replaced by an amalgamation of disco and indie rock, with a heavy dose of synths to round it out. No one really knew what “indie dance” was, but it was a thing, and Paradise was in the middle of it.
Bands like The Rapture, LCD Soundsystem, Passion Pit, and others started popping up with this infectious new sound that would rule the festival and nightlife scene for the next five years before the explosion of commercial dance music and dubstep. It was a short, magical time where Coachella was the lighthouse, and everything shimmered a golden Indio, California glow.
Cruising somewhere between modern-day yacht rock and classic daytime disco land Poolside, the recording project of producer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Jeffrey Paradise. The sound was perfect, timeless in many ways, and took off like Rodney Dangerfield in his double outboard yacht in Caddyshack. Here we are, three albums later, and Paradise has split with his previous recording partner and has a new one in the hopper.
On October 20, Paradise released the fourth Poolside studio album, Blame It All On Love, on Ninja Tune imprint Counter Records.
Poolside’s latest effort showcases his creative voice with 11 tunes that perfectly blend his take on soulful, laidback, slightly 80s funk and lots of little things in between that make you go, “Oh, I know that….” The hooks are just delicate enough that they don’t sound trite or overly poppy, which is part of the record’s genius. Poolside is an amalgamation of contributors all glued together and whipped up with Paradise’s cosmic gelatin. You can’t help but fall into its gentle, sometimes nostalgic vibes that create that vibe of the golden era of hipster culture. It is the perfect blend of so many things that feel like a California sunset in the late summer.
The collaborators he chose really deliver and there isn’t one song on the album that feels phoned in or filler; these are all gems. The musical guests include Vansire, Ben Browning, Panama, Ora The Molecule, Life On Planets, Slenderbodies, Munya, and Mazy. This album is a 5/5 and a must for lovers of soft rock, yacht rock, “cool” disco, and grooves you can play repeatedly without getting sick of them. Paradise and Co will be going out on tour next year to support the album; dates are coming soon.
Who knows, maybe we will catch him and the band at Format Festival next year; I sure hope so, as the show was one of the fest’s highlights this year, as was his DJ Set.
More On Format Festival HERE.
Track Listing | Listen HERE
1. Ride With You (ft Ben Browning)
2. Float Away (ft Vansire)
3. Back To Life (with Panama)
4. Moonlight
5. Where Is The Thunder? (ft. Ora The Molecule)
6. Each Night (with Mazy)
7. We Could Be Falling In Love
8. Ventura Highway Blues (ft Life On Planets)
9. Hold Onto You (ft Slenderbodies)
10. Sea Of Dreams (ft Ben Browning)
11. Lonely Night (with Munya)
Poolside Bio:
Poolside is the recording project of producer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Jeffrey Paradise. In 2011, Poolside set out to produce appropriately chill music for summer soirees, a light but danceable kind of music with sunny vibes and liquid rhythm that he dubbed “Daytime Disco.” Since then, Poolside has released three acclaimed albums – Pacific Standard Time (2012), Heat (2017), and Low Season (2020) – remixed countless high-profile acts such as Billy Idol, Jack Johnson & Milky Chance, DRAMA, Miami Horror, L’impératrice, Purple Disco Machine, Big Wild and more. Poolside has also recently collaborated with Todd Edwards, Neil Frances, Brijean, and Buscabulla. Poolside’s seven-piece live band has supported Kacey Musgraves, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Tycho, along with performing at major music festivals, including Coachella, Primavera, Outside Lands, and Corona Capital. Poolside’s cover of Neil Young’s classic “Harvest Moon” – which they made a one-of-a-kind 12-inch just for James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem) and halted the pressing of the album to include in on their debut album Pacific Standard Time – has been streamed over 100M times.
