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Songs We Love: Promised Land Sound, 'She Takes Me There'

Promised Land Sound's song "She Takes Me There" is on their new album, <em>For Use and Delight</em>, coming out in October.
Courtesy of the artist
Promised Land Sound's song "She Takes Me There" is on their new album, For Use and Delight, coming out in October.

Not every reverie is a happy one. A title like "She Takes Me There" suggests the floating bliss of a new love, but in this new taste of what the rising Nashville band Promised Land Sound is up to on its second album, the dream is a haunting.

"Well I wonder where she lays tonight," sighs Peter Stringer-Hye, his tenor breathing up and down the scale as guitarist Sean Thompson builds lines that circle back on themselves like a gentle obsession. He pictures her with another and wonders if she's laughing or crying. Evan Scala's stalwart drumming keeps the mood together, but there's just a hint that things are really falling apart. "Where could she be?" Stringer-Hye cries; "She's over me," background voices answer, desolate.

The loveliness and vitality of "She Takes Me There" reflects all of For Use And Delight. With a sound that's at once more focused and wider-ranging than on its first album, the group shows why psychedelia is always a great aesthetic to revive: It provides plenty of historical touchstones, from The Byrds to the Rain Parade to Promised Land Sound collaborator Steve Gunn; but because the psychedelic experience is about mind expansion, it always goes somewhere new. Sad or happy, calm like this track or ripping up the studio, this band is on a path that's deeply pleasurable.

For Use And Delight comes out Oct. 2 on Paradise of Bachelors.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Ann Powers is NPR Music's critic and correspondent. She writes for NPR's music news blog, The Record, and she can be heard on NPR's newsmagazines and music programs.