Credit Electric - out of love in the face of a shadow (2022)

“out of love in the face of a shadow” is the new album from Credit Electric. Exploring the human unconscious through impressionistic pop vignettes, the album represents a significant evolution of the band’s sound that originally stemmed from limitations put in place by the global pandemic, before blossoming into something altogether new and unexpected.

Credit Electric was founded in 2017 by songwriter Ryan LoPilato and guitarist
Cameron Iturri-Carpenter. LoPilato had recently made the move out west to Oakland, CA and it wasn’t long until he was introduced to Iturri-Carpenter. Later the pair connected with pedal steel guitarist Evan Hiller and rounded out the lineup with bass and drums, recording and releasing a demo, 3 eps, a handful of singles, and a self titled debut album, all between 2018 and 2020

Upon the arrival of the pandemic, the band’s focus shifted from live arrangements
to solo production and home recording, with LoPilato holed up at his home studio experimenting with new sounds and colors. Writing lyrics and structuring songs through the lens of surrealist automatism, LoPilato layed a foundation for Iturri-Carpenter and Hiller to play with textures that moved Credit Electric towards a new sound. What started to emerge was a body of work that drew upon lo-fi jazz, dub, post-rock, ambient music, 70’s studio experimentation, and 90’s indie rock as much as the rustic folk of their past releases.

In 2021 the band hooked up with Oakland based record label Royal Oakie and producer David Glasebrook. Working together, LoPilato and Glasebrook refined the album, adding texture and crafting an evocative sonic landscape while Glasebrook mixed the album at his studio in Oakland. Painting with sound while exploring open guitar tunings, esoteric synthesizers, and experimental mixing techniques, the studio itself became the instrument upon which the songs were played.

The resulting album “out of love in face of a shadow” calls to mind influences as disparate as Hiroshi Yoshimura, American Football, Dire Straits, and Magnolia Electric Co. All the while inhabiting a world completely of its own design, a sort of unclassifiable post-modern music that defies expectation and aims to reframe the definition of folk music for a new era.