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As Jess Sylvester finished his Hardly Art debut as Marinero in the fall of 2020, he realized it was time for a change. Sylvester grew up in Marin County, on the doorstep of San Francisco. It was a nurturing community for a high-school punk with a pompadour and, later, for a sober songwriter with a proclivity for moody psychedelia. But he wanted to be challenged and inspired by a new setting and new people who would prompt him to approach his music in unexpected ways. So, in September 2020, as the world continued to reel in lockdown, Sylvester headed to Los Angeles, a city that, despite the relative proximity, he knew more from classic and cult films set there. When he arrived, he dug deeper into that cinematic past: Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, or classic 90s movies about East LA, many featuring Edward James Olmos. They shaped his understanding of his new town as he began to experience it firsthand.

This is one pillar of the multivalent and endlessly lush La La La, Marinero's new album about sobriety, identity, and fantasy that is playfully named both for the city that shaped it and the sophisticated pop it contains. On some tracks, Sylvester sings of characters outside himself: a heroine reckoning with her version of keeping clean, screenwriters whose work was deemed communist simply as a political convenience. Others are motivational anthems about self-acceptance, and playful numbers about flirting through food. The sum of these parts is a 12-song set rich in humor, empathy, and encouragement.

La La La is a continuation of the slippery genre play Sylvester started with 2021's Hella Love, 2019's Trópico de Cáncer, or even before that. But it also feels like a fresh beginning for Marinero, as Sylvester incorporates the music of his childhood, his familial roots in San Francisco and Mexico, and the salsa he absorbed as an impetuous teenager. In Los Angeles, he found a wealth of players who spoke this musical language, including Chris Cohen and Chicano Batman's Eduardo Arenas. Sylvester has also been sober for 21 years. Today, he sees friends facing the same decisions he made two decades ago, and he brings that experience to bear in songs that feel like self-help anthems.

In the past, Sylvester has been intractably linked to his identity as a Mexican-American, born to parents of Mexican and Irish-American descent who settled in San Francisco. That can be limiting, tying him to notions of sound and style that aren't always correct. On La La La, he simultaneously steps into and out of those preconceptions, singing above salsa in joyous Spanish, or pondering the Hollywood Ten and blacklists over mysterious lap steel and teasing trumpet. His identity, then, should now be clear: He is a Californian, making music shaped by the diversity of encounters and experiences that are a central part of that state's fabric. Never before has he presented himself so fully and unabashedly on tape as with La La La, an album Sylvester built with new inspirations to deliver new charms.