Taraka - Welcome to Paradise Lost (Red Vinyl)

Since the breakup of legendary cult psych-rock band, Prince Rama, former front-girl Taraka Larson has thrown herself headlong into the dark existential world of her ""inner teenager"", finding refuge in her busted electric guitar while drifting homeless through Peru, the Catskills, and a Texas gallery where she lived in isolation with a seven foot long constrictor-snake in a simulated Garden of Eden. A departure from Prince Rama's sparkly esoteric-pop sound, her debut solo record (on her self-founded record label), Welcome to Paradise Lost, is a playful yet powerful query into the human condition... a raw, dirty, surreal journey through the labyrinths of disenchantment and the failures of utopia, an orgiastic celebration of ennui and disillusion, drenched in distortion. Taraka's songwriting is arresting as it is eccentric... like the dusty lost bridge between outsider psych and 70s New York punk. Affectionately dubbed ""Spiritual Music for Teenagers"", the songs are simultaneously nihilistic and galvanizing, disheveled anthems for an innocence destroyed.