It’s difficult to place The Color Forty Nine into a simple box. Their music is an elegant mystery, spacious and lush, haunting and jubilant. It’s a balance of divergent themes and soundscapes, subtly unmoored to predictability. The lines between fiction and confession are blurred as the stories unfold hypnotic. The songs explore the pace and passage of hours, the struggles and joys in the process, the underbelly of intimacy, touch, the flood and rush of life, all delivered with a calm patience that conveys landscape and time. The music is a desert reflection on the border town complexities of San Diego and Tijuana, the unwanted fences, the blending of culture, the sprawling skies.
The music is cinematic, it’s an open road drive to the proverbial west. With violins etching the movement of clouds, pianos spelling out the rain, the haunt of synthesizers adding a unique element to the gothic Americana ballads. There’s a hint of gypsy and barrio, roots reaching outward into new terrain. It’s the music of the Mojave sunset.
Collectively having been contributing musicians in bands such as The Black Heart Procession, Album Leaf, Pinback, Via Satelite, Manuok among others, the band mines their experience to create a sound that is both distinct and familiar. It is a sound that sits well with a wide range of companions, lending them to share the stage with bands as varied as Pinback, El Ten Eleven, Acid Mothers Temple, Eric Bachmann, and Film School, as well as conducting a successful tour of Japan in 2019 and shows in Mexico City in pre-pandemic 2020 on their own.
Their first self-release in 2018 clearly defined a unique quality and was rewarded with two San Diego Music Award nominations, including a coveted “Best New Artist” nod.
With the shut down of 2020, the band used the time to record 12 songs for two new EPs to be released in the spring and fall of 2021. Of note, the band collaborated with Café Tacvba vocalist, Rubén Albarrán who sang the Spanish verses to “What Would I Know? / Yo Que Sé?”, a song dealing with border issues and larger notions of the human condition. The band also collaborated with Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery Prize winning artist Hugo Crosthwaite to create a hand-drawn stop animation video for the song to be released in July of 2021.
