Marinero - Hella Love (LP) - Orange Vinyl Vinyl

Flip this one on and you can almost smell the eucalyptus on Twin Peaks. Hella Love is Marinero’s 2021 full-length for Hardly Art, a true love letter to San Francisco that understands the city isn’t a postcard so much as a mood. It’s the work of Bay Area songwriter Jess Sylvester, who records as Marinero, and he threads his bilingual vocals through bossa nova sway, bolero tenderness, and lightly psychedelic pop the way fog wraps a neighborhood. It’s romantic, but it isn’t naive. He’s writing about a place he knows, with all its sweetness and ache.

What makes the record stick is how lived-in it feels. The tempos lounge, not because they’re sleepy, but because they’re unhurried, almost conversational. Nylon-string guitars brush against vibey organs and tremolo, bass lines lope with a quiet confidence, and the percussion leans on hand drums and shakers that tick like streetlights turning on. Strings and horns float in at times, soft but expressive, the kind of arranging that nods toward classic Latin pop and Tropicália without getting cosplay about it. Sylvester sings in English and Spanish, often within the same song, which fits the city he’s painting. It’s less a stylistic trick than a fact of life.

You hear how carefully he curates atmosphere. The production keeps a warm, analog sheen, the kind of sound that lets every instrument breathe. Nothing shouts. He favors tone over flash, close-mic intimacy over studio gloss. The guitars are full and woody, as if they’ve spent years soaking up living room air. When the percussion settles into a bossa pocket, it feels like the room leans forward with it. That patience lets the melodies blossom and gives his lyrics room to glance off memory, neighborhood change, and the gentle comedy of being in love with a city that keeps reinventing itself.

The Bay Area clues are there if you want to see them. Not easter-egg fan service, more like landmarks glimpsed from a bus window. The writing keeps circling back to longing and place, and the music follows suit, drifting from café hush to ocean breeze surf tones to late-night lounge cool. It’s the rare record that can soundtrack a slow morning and still hit late in the evening, when the lights across the hills are freckles in the dark.

If you came up on vintage João and Astrud, or if you keep a soft spot for the lush side of 60s pop, this will feel like a friend right away. But there’s a modern pulse running through it. Sylvester’s arrangements have the light touch of someone who loves the past and knows how to keep it moving. He tends to let small details do the heavy lifting. A brushed snare pattern that turns on a dime, a flute line that peeks around a chord change, a harmony that arrives one bar later than you expect. Those choices give Hella Love its warmth and its replay value.

Critical ears noticed that balance when it came out, and for good reason. It’s hard to resist an album that holds nostalgia and clarity in the same hand. Even when the lyrics tilt toward melancholy, the music remains generous, like he’s passing a cup around the room. That generosity is why the record works so well as a full front-to-back listen. It invites you to settle in and then gives you reasons to stay.

On vinyl, the whole thing opens up. The low end sits deeper, the percussion breathes, and the reverbs feel more like rooms than effects. If you find a copy of Hella Love vinyl in the wild, grab it. It’s the kind of album that makes sense to live with, to file next to your mellow Brazilian records and your favorite psych-pop staples. If you need to buy Marinero records online, most shops that stock Hardly Art titles keep Marinero vinyl in rotation, and you’ll often see Marinero albums on vinyl bundled with label mates. I first stumbled on it at a Melbourne record store while flipping for imports, and it’s been a quiet favorite ever since. For folks hunting from afar, plenty of spots that ship vinyl records Australia-wide will treat it right in transit.

Hella Love doesn’t try to sell you a myth about San Francisco. It gives you a few windows, opens them, and lets the air come in. The city’s in there, but so is the artist, and that’s why it lingers.