The rush is short but sweet, and most importantly, familiar. Not a full-blown removal from reality, granted – it’s more like smoking your first filterless roll-up after a week-long cold. Vallesteros and his bandmates have mastered this art, and as a result, Idle Labor works well as an escapist record. Whatever your reservations about this often forcibly otherworldly, blog-friendly genre – when executed well, it can be immensely evocative and even fun to lose yourself in.
Vallesteros got his first bit of momentum in autumn last year, when blogs were raving about ‘Party Talk’, a nice enough, slightly bouncy track that combined ringing guitars with hazy, indifferent vocals – it didn’t sound that different to a lot of other Captured Tracks artists, and it certainly isn’t the best track on Craft Spells’ first record. The solitary man in this case is Justin Paul Vallesteros, and the album that has come out of his bedroom strumming is the sweet, detached and melodic Idle Labor. But this is pretty much the background to California’s Craft Spells. The story of a lonely, sensitive and probably unemployed white dude whiling away his days with only his Macbook Pro and a guitar for company and then channeling his limited knowledge of the outside world and nostalgia for a decade he’s never lived through into softly-softly dream pop tracks isn’t particularly exciting.
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