After establishing himself in such revered acts as VHS, SMOKER DAD and THE RARE FORMS, singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Chris Costalupes has distilled his storied musical visions into a solo endeavor. Costalupes charts the rough waters of love, heartache, and darkness, speaking with a fluent grasp of the language of rock music. Glassy steel guitars bleed over country-inflected ballads that can emerge only from a place of pure feeling. His songs are born from experience, from regret, and from the unnamable passion that rare talents such as Costalupes embody and exude. The astute listener will pick up on this immediately, but his music has the power to move even the most jaded set of ears in the bar. There are enough moments of gritty transcendence in his discography to situate Costalupes as the worthy heir to the effortless cool of J. Mascis, or to the gothic-tinged death country balladeering of the late and unspeakably great Jeffrey Lee Pierce. Really.
At the heart of it all lies a deep truth: the best music can’t be explained. It can’t be deduced from some rote logical exercise, nor can it be collated from an algorithm. It has to be felt, and realized physically. That Costalupes is able to achieve this alchemy should be enough to give all of us rockers hope in an increasingly artificial world.