There’s a single track title on Shana Cleveland’s dazzlingly good third solo album that tells a thousand stories. The song is called Sheriff of the Salton Sea, and it captures the mood of the record perfectly: the Salton Sea is a saltwater lake in southern California, whose waters and shores have been despoiled by human exploitation, despite it being a short drive from Palm Springs, that Californian symbol of turning the desert into a playground.
Manzanita is an album about the contrast between beauty and desolation. The lyrics offer both. Mystic Mine Lane opens with Cleveland – by day, frontwoman of surf-rockers La Luz – hymning life outside the city in the most disconcerting way: “Mystic Mine Lane, cars rotting away / I feel so relieved to be / Back in the country.” Or try Ten Hour Drive Through West Coast Disaster: “Ten hour drive through West Coast disaster / Saw the flames and fire planes over Shasta / Cattle farms out of horror films / Will you find a way to love this world?”
The music, though, leans right into the beauty – it’s soft and ornate, a perfectly woven tapestry of delight. Cleveland’s soft, blank voice and acoustic guitar are supplemented by upright bass, Wurlitzer, glockenspiel and pedal steel to create something that’s at the Venn diagram intersection of the baroque psychedelia of the Left Banke, Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter pop, and a kind of gothic folk. It’s utterly transfixing – not just for the gorgeousness of the tone, but for the absolute wondrousness of the melodies.