The Gold Souls - Good To Feel (2018)

The raw, beating heart of funk, soul, jazz and hip-hop—all of which the furious Sacramento five-piece known as The Gold Souls have incorporated into their style—has always been the blues. Blues and its far-reaching tendrils have defined pop music in the last century, but it is not of pop. It can make you dance, it can speak to your inner being, it can heal, but it always deals with pain on some level, existential or otherwise. Through the wide branches of its influence, it continues to speak to the artist’s eternal conflict between escaping and confronting the abyss, and although the layers of time have polished it and its offshoots with a mellower, safer reputation, there is always the yearning, fearless voice within it that dances along the dire edge of life. That’s where The Gold Souls come in, crafting good-time music while never losing sight of its implications about life, the self and the soul.

Consisting of Juniper Waller (vocals), Matt Hevesh (guitar), Alex Severson (keys), Jace Dorn (bass) and Billy D. Thompson (drums), the band is not shy about laying the heart of their music bare thematically while still managing to make crowds dance.

“With funk, you get an immediate reaction,” says Severson. “It grooves and all that, it lets the lyrics sit. But also, I think it reflects how people go about their day greeting each other happily when they might really be dying inside. It’s all socially masked in not wanting to cause too much friction, and nobody wants to talk about how they really feel about things. With funk you can put it all under this fun, jovial layer.”

The new degree of honesty that characterizes so much of our discussion in the era of sharing is, with no exception, a central feature of The Gold Souls’ ethos. But you might not guess it while listening to sultry numbers like “Take it Easy,” a breezy neo-soul daydream reminiscent of Erykah Badu; or more uptempo jams like “Hunger,” a majorly danceable album-finisher that slyly deals with the difficulty of putting off romance in order to achieve the self-betterment needed to sustain it in the future. Both tracks are highlights of the band’s forthcoming debut, Good to Feel, a definitive introduction to The Gold Souls that covers the variety of their influences while also telling a loose story of loss in confidence and gain in character.

“That tune ‘Hunger’ is all about taking time to make sure you’re OK,” says Thompson. “The whole album is kind of a journey towards that. It starts with this confident, no-nonsense character who is self-assured and feels like they know what’s going on. And then, they start going through shit—life starts happening. The depth of the songs increase as it goes on. We noticed some common threads in the songs and tried to tailor the track order to tell a little bit of a story.”



Track List:
01. Silver Tongue 02:45
02. The Truth 05:27
03. Nobody 04:43
04. Take It Easy 05:43
05. Good To Feel 05:31
06. Sweet Release 04:15
07. Midnight Song 05:17
08. Bbg (Interlude) 02:15
09. Get On By 02:43
10. Park Boulevard 05:27
11. Hunger Is The Best Spice 03:40

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