Kelley Stoltz
Skilled at crafting pop songs under his own name, excellent at producing albums for others, and a good enough guitarist to be in Echo & the Bunnymen's touring band, Kelley Stoltz carved out an interesting career for himself on the fringes of the indie rock scene beginning in the late 1990s. A series of homemade albums released on small labels led to him being signed to Sub Pop, where he delivered a trio of strong garage psych-meets-power pop albums in the mid-2000s that established him as both an artist and a producer. He spent the 2010s jumping from label to label, gradually softening and expanding his sound to include more psychedelic elements, while occasionally experimenting with it, as on 2017's synth-heavy Que Aura, 2020's mod punk Hard Feelings, and 2022's The Stylist, which was an updated take on the piano-heavy sound of his early records.
Stoltz grew up in the Detroit area, but eventually found his way to San Francisco after taking a detour to New York City, where he worked in the mail room at Jeff Buckley's management company. Armed with a four-track recorder and a wealth of lo-fi pop songs, Stoltz began recording his own material, performing all the parts himself and drawing comparisons to artists like Brian Wilson and Captain Beefheart. Those songs caught the ear of Monte Vallier, who helped Stoltz clean up and sweeten the recordings for release as The Past Was Faster in 1999. After that, Stoltz upgraded to an eight-track and self-released Antique Glow in a limited quantity of 200 vinyl copies, each one housed in a different, originally designed sleeve by Stoltz himself. Antique Glow was then picked up by Jackpine Social Club for wider release in 2003, which both raised his profile and allowed him to quit his teaching job.
Stoltz found a more permanent home for his music in 2005, when he signed with Sub Pop and released the Sun Comes Through EP. A full-length album, Below the Branches, followed in March 2006. Stolz's band toured that summer as the opening act for the Raconteurs and returned to the studio in 2008 to record his lushest production yet, Circular Sounds. Two years later, he toured with Echo & the Bunnymen and released another layered pop album, To Dreamers, which featured his live band on two tracks. His affiliation with Sub Pop having run its course, Stoltz next spent time behind the scenes as a member of Sonny & the Sunsets and produced albums for the Mantles and Tim Cohen. He returned in 2013 with an album for Third Man called Double Exposure.
In 2015, Stoltz found a new sponsor in Castle Face Records, the label founded by John Dwyer of Thee Oh Sees. They released In Triangle Time, a set of songs that blended Stoltz's love of the music of the '60s and '80s, in early November 2015. That same year he collaborated with Sarah Bethe Nelson on her Fast Moving Clouds album and also released an set of trippy acid freak-outs under the name Willie Weird called The Scuzzy Inputs Of....
His next musical move came as a bit of a surprise to anyone who didn't know that Stoltz had recorded a song-by-song re-creation of Echo & the Bunnymen's Crocodiles album in 2001, or that he once had an Echo cover band with Spiral Stairs called Crockodials. In 2016, he joined the Bunnymen as a touring guitarist, playing the songs he grew up loving. That '80s influence became even more evident on Stoltz's next album for Castle Face, 2017's Que Aura, as he explored synth pop and space disco. He quickly returned with Natural Causes. The record eschewed most of the synths and '80s sounds in favor of a gently psychedelic feel reminiscent of his early work. It was released by the tiny Spanish label Banana & Louie in the middle of 2018. After leaving the Bunnymen's employ and suffering the loss of his father, Stoltz's 2019 album My Regime, followed the same template as Natural Causes, but with some added emotional content. Of his two albums released in 2020, Ah! (etc) was very much in that vein while Hard Feelings saw him digging into short, snappy mod songs influenced by the Undertones and Television Personalities. When he returned in 2022 with The Stylist, his second record for the Agitated label, Stoltz was at a stylistic crossroads, harkening back to the piano-based, power pop-influenced sound of his earlier work while also adding woozy soft rock synths and some garage rock as well.
© Sean Westergaard & Tim Sendra /TiVo
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Discography
19 album(s) • Sorted by Bestseller
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The Stylist
Alternative en Indie - Released by Agitated Records on 10 jun. 2022
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Ah! (Etc)
Alternative en Indie - Released by Agitated Records on 20 nov. 2020
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Que Aura
Alternative en Indie - Released by Castle Face on 11 aug. 2017
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Sun Comes Through, The (Album)
Rock - Released by Sub Pop Records on 11 okt. 2005
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Below The Branches (Album)
Rock - Released by Sub Pop Records on 24 jan. 2006
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Antique Glow
Alternative en Indie - Released by Third Man Records LLC on 19 nov. 2021
24-Bit 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
To Dreamers (Album)
Alternative en Indie - Released by Sub Pop Records on 11 okt. 2010
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Circular Sounds
Rock - Released by Sub Pop Records on 1 jan. 2008
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Reni's Car
Alternative en Indie - Released by Agitated Records on 14 feb. 2024
24-Bit 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
We Grew so Far Apart
Alternative en Indie - Released by Agitated Records on 17 mei 2022
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Transnational Series Volume 1
Rock - Released by 4039716 Records DK on 15 jun. 2022
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Your Reverie b/w Owl Service (Single)
Alternative en Indie - Released by Sub Pop Records on 5 nov. 2007
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Singularity 11: Not Enough (Extended Mix)
Oh Baby (Original Soundtrack), Kelley Stoltz
Alternative en Indie - Released by The state51 Conspiracy on 27 jul. 2023
24-Bit 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Too Beck (Bonus Track)
Alternative en Indie - Released by Third Man Records LLC on 19 okt. 2021
24-Bit 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Umbrella (Bonus Track)
Alternative en Indie - Released by Third Man Records LLC on 3 nov. 2021
24-Bit 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
The Quiet Ones
Alternative en Indie - Released by Agitated Records on 18 sep. 2020
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Team Earth
Alternative en Indie - Released by Agitated Records on 2 okt. 2020
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Your Name Escapes Me
Alternative en Indie - Released by Agitated Records on 31 mrt. 2022
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo