“During the last few years, all of us have had dances with losing people really close to us,” Color Green singer/ guitarist Corey Madden says of the weighty thread running throughout Fool’s Parade, his Los Angeles-based psych-rock group’s New West debut. “I lost my dad a week before COVID happened and Coy Rose, our drummer, lost her mother right before COVID. Everyone, emotionally, was going through a lot, so the way we dealt with that is that we put it back into the music.”
Co-produced by the members of Color Green and Mike Kriebel, who is known for his work with Osees and Wand, the nine-song set was recorded at LA’s Discount Mirrors and Golden Beat Studios and then mastered at London’s iconic Abbey Road Studios. The LP, the group’s first since their 2022 self-titled debut and inaugural full-length set to boast their current lineup, also features appearances by members of Osees and The Nude Party, among other guests.
“There’s something really cool about having four minds come together into one song,” singer/guitarist Noah Kohll says of his collaborative process with Madden, Rose and bassist Kyla Perlmutter. “One of us would bring in an idea. And, by the end of a session, the whole idea was basically dissected in and out and turned into something completely different that we couldn’t have done without everybody.”
Group co-founders Kohll and Madden first met through their local artistic community while living in Brooklyn, N.Y., and truly bonded while working at a coffee shop.
“We spent a lot of time together scooping beans and realized that we shared an affinity for the same music,” Kohll says. “We had the idea to start a recording project with no intention to do anything more with it. It was just about the joy of making music.”
The duo pieced together an initial EP in a basement on a 4-track, recruiting a few friends to flesh out their tracks. Then, while Kohll was living in New Mexico during the pandemic, current tastemakers Ben Cook and Tony Price heard the recording and offered to release it. “They started freaking out about it,” he says. “And it slowly became a real band, very organically.”
After recruiting their rhythm section, Kohll and Madden, who had since moved to LA along with many members of the Brooklyn indie underground, started playing out live, honing in on a cosmic sound that balanced their love of twang and fuzz, while still leaving plenty of room for improvisation.
“Since we’re working musicians and playing all the time, we emphasize these micro jams within our songs,” Kohell says. “80% of our guitar solos are improvised, except the harmonized ones.”
They also caught the ear of Kriebel, who Madden has known since he was 16, and the lauded producer agreed to record a pair of singles for Color Green and then Fool’s Parade.
“Moving to LA, he was one of the only people I knew for a while,” Madden says. “He wanted to go as deep into the music as we did, but like any good engineer or producer, when we were teetering on the edge of psycho mode 12 hours in, he’s like, ‘I don’t think you guys need to go here.’”
In the coming months, the members of Color Green plan to balance their club appearances with choice festival dates, while also searching for a higher meaning in the music.
“A lot of world music is connected to religion and spirituality, and the goal is to produce this trance-like state,” Kohll says. “Within our world, we are looking for those avenues too. Corey and I will weave into each other, like a double helix. I try to not only pay attention to what’s going on around me, but to also focus on what’s going on inside of me.”
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