It's so easy to get angry - there's a lot to be mad about, the world is filled to the brim with awful shit, and screaming feels good, so does a vein bulging out from your forehead, so does a clenched fist. Let it all out, let your spittle hit the fuckers in the face. There's plenty to yell about and by all means, keep yelling. People in bands have been angry forever and they continue to be, rightly so and for obvious reasons, but, hang on, doesn't that let the evil in the world know you've been gotten to? That your goat's been got? And that they got some kinda power over ye?

So, what about staying cool? And what about a calm refusal? With a serene understanding that we are many, they are few, that the lions will rise from slumber? What about crooning it out, never deigning to rumple your olive green nehru suit while a wurlitzer plunks away? And better yet, what if a french horn chimed in while you sipped on something chilled from a highball glass?

The band Transistor Ray stays cool, sometimes heartbreakingly so. Suri singing up front - usually barefoot - exhales her chromatic vocal lines, smoke from a cigarette in a tortoise shell cigarette holder. Brothers Giovanni and Giancarlo charm from either side, the former belting and clanging on a dan electro drenched in spring coil reverb, the latter hunkering down and locked in on bass. Caley knows the score, a true pro seated at an electric piano, and Daniel gently but firmly coaxes the drums alive, like a session player at Rudy Von Gelder's, 1963. Tracy on her various horns makes it all magisterial, ties it all up, gives it that unstoppably toe tapping quality that makes these songs get lodged in your head. The band is fond of saying that they sound like if the Velvet Underground decided to cover Burt Bacharach, but it might also be like if the Beach Boys ever watched the Umbrellas of Cherbourg or if Nina Simone decided to cover Pavement. Vibrolux torch songs that sounds like the 60s tuned in, wisened up, and refused to drop out, brought to you in living paisley technicolor in the waning days of capitalism.

Giovanni, songwriter and guitar player, has this to say about their songs:

"I need to make this music the way a drunk needs a flickering lamp post in the middle of the night -- partly for rest and partly for illumination. We exist amidst so such swirling chaos that making music that even momentarily evicts shadow feels important to me. And so I write this music to shelter, preserve, suspend, and bring light to the things that I find beautiful, painful, and funny about being alive. So in general it's an archive of thoughts, jokes, emotions, and images from my life and the lives of my dearest friends."