The Donkeys announce Spring tour dates

Ride the Black Wave embodies what Jack Kerouac described of California’s coast
as having an “end of the land sadness.” The Donkeys stare out at the ocean in a
“fantastic drowse” – a kind of pensiveness towards their environs that summons the
elements of sound and style that belong only to them. In “Blues In The Afternoon”,
a collective mantra, the band runs out of land and asks of the ocean to offer
suggestions about their fate. It is songs like these that prove the Donkeys are a band in the true sense of the word, sharing each other’s worry and wonder. With RTBW, The Donkeys have further caged their craft and have accomplished the delicate and artful challenge of taming the captured, while also letting it be wild.

Recorded at San Diego’s Singing Serpent and mixed by LA’s Thom Monahan,
the Telecasters have a golden shimmer, the drums seem to echo with a regional
reverberation. The notes coming off the Rhodes float on like beer-buzzed
afternoons, but just when you get lost in the hypnotic swirl of “Sunny Daze” the
churning guitars begin to circle like sharks, reminding us of the realities beneath all
beautiful surfaces. Ten tracks deep, Adrianne Verhoeven of San Francisco’s Extra
Classic appears like the mythic Calafia herself, delivering a vocal that would bring
Cortez to his knees.

So, it is with Ride the Black Wave that The Donkeys add their own stratum to
California’s ever expanding musical frontier, while maintaining their golden
“shine” as well as interjecting a tension with the sun and beauty. The record
hypnotizes as much as it awakens; it poetically puts us at ease while we sit in traffic, peck at our keyboards in cubicles, or conversely, it accompanies us as we ride along desert highways, or sway with our lovers. It is about home; it is about waves, and surrendering to their movements, trusting that they will take us to where we truly belong.