Greg Ashley’s Jardim Pintado

GREG ASHLEY by LUKE MCGARRY

Greg Ashley stands up front in Oakland’s Gris Gris, one of the best bands on the West Coast, but he’s also the curator of a one-of-a-kind home studio just shy of total short circuit where he records self-portraits as solo records. His new Painted Garden isn’t a loner album like Gary Higgins, where you can hear songs bend out of tune because even the guitar wants to get away home to friends and family; it’s a producer solo record by someone who got to try everything the way he wanted, like Skip Spence (often and justly mentioned around Ashley—“Medication”’s incarnation here is cousin to “Weighted Down”), but also like Emitt Rhodes or Phil Pearlman, all left to make masterpieces in peace. Here we get sixties psych (but like ’67 psych, when you could hear back-masked guitar on the AM radio) and sixties folk, too, if Leonard Cohen qualifies (“Pretty Belladonna” is “So Long, Marianne” reinterpreted with more gypsy-boy sentiment), and weirdness like the Fugs (“Sex is death / Schedule my funeral,” sings Ashley, as honorable a line as “Ask me about my philosophy, baby!”) and the Shaggs (the off-register harmonies on Ashley’s “Fishing with Bobby”) and pop like the Shangri-Las, whose signature producer Shadow Morton would appreciate all the prickly little found-sound patches of Painted Garden. It’s not one of those ether-jar retro records—it’s just that few have the patience to put something like this together anymore, and you gotta drag back a while to find references from when people were left alone long enough to make whole albums like this.

GREG ASHLEY WITH DA BEARS, UPSIDE DOWN, AND HIGHWAY THE PROSPECTOR 2400 E SEVENTH ST | LONG BEACH 90804 | 562.438.3839 | PROSPECTORLONGBEACH.COM | THURS 10PM | CONTACT VENUE FOR COVER | 21+