Citay

You have never heard anything like Citay. Not that it is so weird or crazy or out there -- in fact it is quite familiar -- but you just haven't ever heard anything quite like it before. Imagine the acoustic guitars, mandolins, and cathedral organs of Led Zeppelin joining forces with huge Thin Lizzy dual leads. Imagine the baroque intros to early Metallica songs (before the metal takes over) giving way to the massed vocals and blissed-out harmonies of The Byrds and The Beach Boys. Acoustic influences of John Fahey and Roy Harper, the 60s psychedelia of The Pretty Things and, more recently, the Japanese band Ghost can be heard as well. This is a new sound, unique in its blend, and unnamable in genre. Call it chamber metal. Or post-psych-pop. Or whatever you like. Citay is elegiac, bombastic, powerful, and, most of all, original.

Citay is a project out of San Francisco. It is a collaboration between Ezra Feinberg (formerly of London Space-rockers Piano Magic) and Tim Green (The Fucking Champs, Nation of Ulysses). Surrounded in his apartment by 6- and 12-string acoustic guitars, a couple of casios, a Gibson SG electric, and a play-pen's worth of percussion toys and noisemakers, and a mandolin, Ezra worked out the songs using a simple multi-track program on his laptop. When the skeletons of the songs were worked out Ezra took his instruments down a very steep San Francisco hill to Tim Green's Louder Studios. There Tim infused everything with his own melodic and textural genius, and he and Ezra recorded all the songs from scratch on to analog tape. Tim has produced records at Louder for luminaries such as The Melvins, Sleater-Kinney, Comets On Fire, and Trans Am.