MAXEX30

FORMAT: DIGITAL SINGLE

PRODUCER: CALVIN LECOMPTE

EXECUTIVE: TONY PRICE

MAXEX30

© 2022 MAXIMUM EXPOSURE INC.

"Calvin LeCompte’s Reservations at Red Rose is a lovelorn lullaby for a state of emergency. The music recalls what it sounds like to wait in line in the shadow of a parking garage, while well-dressed couples file past you arguing. At a restaurant, at the DMV, at the jab office. Amazon trucks idle in the distance; a car stereo is barely audible from a far away street. Straightjacket this to the baritone hiss of a four-track recorder, lysergic late night radio shows, the perfume of gasoline, and ancestral musics only discoverable on tape, and you arrive at a place where LeCompte’s unique brand of song-writing preserves a forgotten golden age in a sort of fuzzy amber, like a sackcloth of cassettes from an obliterated decade.
Taking his signature brand of euphoric sun-starved sweetness to the masses, LeCompte’s guitar work mellifluously splutters a chordal static infused with a haunted psychedelic jangle. Reservations at Red Rose was recorded on a Korg CR-4, which places the listener inside a monophonic nostalgia for a time that never was. Here, production techniques feel warm to the touch. The cables to the noise gate have been cut; a pastoral cityscape traffics in the spacings between chords, lyrics, and melody. Mooning words shimmer in the slow dissolution of our collective life:

“Because lovers grow (they go away) And promises break

She was my melody


Sweetly she sang to me


Her elusive style's so far away from me.”

The video for Reservations explores the archon entrepreneurialism that throws the world into crisis whenever it seems profitable to do so. Directed by Guy Kozak, the video was shot at the MasterCard International Global Headquarters, which is some 30 miles north of NYC. This serves to make the already eerie production values of LeCompte's song a somber prism of refracted candor—like a ketamine-induced hallucination. A spectral ode to bourgeois frailty reduced to a flickering hologram, LeCompte’s love song drifts like a sirening chemtrail through azure skies."