***Just a little over a year since Rob Garcia (Product Placement, Telepathic, Reading/Bleeding Rainbow) debuted his Graphic Violets project with the six-track Immune from Evil cassette, he’s back, this time with Endless Parade, a full-length album out on HoZac Records.
Immune from Evil was all about living through a terrible moment in history, and unfortunately, things have only gotten worse. That’s what Garcia’s concerned with on Endless Parade, 13 songs that ruminate on that downward trajectory.
Endless Parade is about realizing you’re stuck in a vicious cycle, a neverending loop of control, addiction, fear. The search for happiness winds up at a dead end. All attempts to assign meaning are futile. Nothing works.
Garcia’s themes are heavy, it’s true. But the music isn’t a drag. With Endless Parade, Garcia puts his spin on the Dunedin sound for the present moment: jangly, pop-oriented, self-aware and thoughtful, but without a trace of treacle. He found kinship in the sounds of Tall Dwarfs, Swell Maps, Wire, and Psychic TV, and in the message of Sly Stone’s “There’s a Riot Goin On.”
Graphic Violets is Garcia’s return to music after some time away.
In the four years prior to working on the cassette, Garcia didn’t write any music. He moved multiple times, worked jobs that weren’t the right fit and lost people who were close to him. Life kinda sucked.
Playing drums for longtime collaborator Sarah Everton’s Added Dimensions project set him back on the path toward music.
And once he started writing again, he couldn’t stop.
Garcia wrote, played and recorded every note of music on the album. Solo creation can be lonely for some, but for Garcia, it’s freeing. He can fully react to his own thoughts and respond in real time to inspiration without having to explain or filter it for anyone else. It makes him feel whole. In a world that is constantly wrestling art away from the artists, Graphic Violets fights back and persuades the rest of us to do the same. — Erin O'Hare
