[Today: Happy birthday to Mike Patton. Tonight: Some nifty little shows in the neighborhood.] Speaking of birthdays, Michael Runion [pictured] is celebrating today. The Jenny Lewis/Elected sideman and solo artist is playing a Bootleg Theater show along with a bunch of his musical co-conspirators, including Rilo Kiley drummer (and now solo artist) Jason Boesel and […]
L.A. quintet Vanaprasta has come a long way since they got inside my head with their nifty guitar work last March. Not so far that they have an album out yet – that’ll happen when “Heathy Geometry” is released later this year – but far enough that their dramatic blend of churning rhythms, bright riffage […]
[Birthday wishes today go out to Lucinda Williams. … Here’s your Tuesday fare on a night I will need to be home in time to catch Silversun Pickups on “Jimmy Kimmel Live”:] The Cribs, the U.K. quartet who made a lot of noise when Johnny Marr joined the band and then made even more on […]
As the main man in his tongue-twisting side project Everybody Was in the French Resistance … Now!, Art Brut frontman Eddie Argos launches verbal volleys at some well-known pop songs. The video for “G.I.R.L.F.R.E.N.” – off the band’s forthcoming album “Fixin’ the Charts (Volume One)” – features partner-in-rhyme (and girlfriend) Dyan Valdes, keyboardist of the […]
[It ain’t Radiohead – which raised over half a million dollars at its Haiti relief benefit on Sunday night at the Fonda – but here’s tonight abbreviated show menu:] It’ll be their last SoCal appearance before Coachella – San Francisco quartet Girls [pictured in August at the El Rey Theatre], still getting all kinds of […]
The power of the Cold War Kids’ music has always been its ability to wrap the frailties of the ill-starred characters in their three-minute novellas into a Tennessee Williams-like ball of emotion. The Long Beach quartet’s sweat-stained storytelling has raised the room temperature in small clubs and smoky bars, but putting that spare, wiry blues-punk […]
The video for Beach House’s eight-minute epic “Silver Soul” is quite … well, silvery. It’s the vision of the band’s own Victoria Legrand, and a rather murky Busby Berkeley dream, if you ask me. Like Beach House’s hotly anticipated album, “Teen Dream” (which comes out next week on Sub Pop with a companion DVD containing […]
Nathan Willett sounds like a man ready to plunge into the abyss, or at least a guy at a crossroads. In a way, he and his bandmates in Cold War Kids are. Four years after the scrappy quartet from Orange County (now, Long Beach) elbowed their way into indie hearts with their sweaty blues-punk, Willett, […]
I’ve scheduled an extra appointment so my therapist can figure out why I’m not as crazy about The xx as everybody else seems to be, or as everybody who knows me thinks I should be. Maybe it’s a predisposition against bands that thumb their noses at the laws of capitalization, but it’s probably more a […]
[Buzz Bands welcomes back Stolen Lyric from a New Year’s hiatus …] ||| Source: Cold War Kids, “Hospital Beds” ||| Live: Cold War Kids perform tonight at the Wiltern Theatre.
