On his full-length debut West of the West, L.A.-based songwriter/producer Goldroom bends the boundaries of electronic music to build a sleekly composed but soulful update of the quintessential California sound. “I left where I grew up and came to California with all these romantic ideas of what L.A. would be like,” says Josh Legg, a Massachusetts-born multi-instrumentalist who’s made music as Goldroom since 2011. “Over the years I’ve fallen completely in love with everything about it, even all the grit and grime, and with this album I wanted to pay homage to L.A. and how it still feels so romantic to me.”
Though it takes its title from a Theodore Roosevelt bon mot—“When I am in California, I am not in the West, I am west of the West”—the follow-up to Goldroom’s acclaimed 2015 EP It’s Like You Never Went Away mines much inspiration from Legg’s love for the sea. “For me, ‘west of the West’ can mean the Pacific, which has become an important place for me over the last decade,” he says. A longtime sailor, Legg also notes that “a lot of my childhood memories are of me and my dad on this little tiny boat, cruising around the New England coast. I spent countless hours just sailing and listening to music, and the feeling of that experience has stayed with me really heavily over the years.” Throughout the album, Goldroom reveals his deep-rooted affinity with the ocean by sculpting expansive arrangements and instilling each song with a serene yet kinetic energy.
That energy’s partly sourced from Goldroom’s ingenuity in interlacing live guitar, bass, and percussion into electronic soundscapes to form a sound both forward-pushing and timeless.
LX Presents Goldroom at Kabana Rooftop
21+
Tickets on sale Thursday, 9.14 at 12 pm!!
