Kevin Bronson on January 31st, 2012

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Musicians may just want to skip this anecdote and go straight the download. In 2007, four dudes out of O.C./Long Beach calling themselves CoCo B’s unleashed an album of brash, hooky guitar-bass-drums indie-rock that earned deserving comparisons to the Replacements, Guided by Voices and Archers of Loaf. I was, and remain, crazy for “I Live in L.A.” and “Modern Lover,” and the noise made it to the ears of folks in the record industry. What happened? Not much. I was told that CoCo B’s, who’d been a band called Retriever prior to that 1) lacked a certain dynamism onstage, and 2) couldn’t be a hot commodity because they were thirty-ish and not twenty-ish. The harsh ways of the world. Thankfully, frontman Kevin Castillo and bandmates Joe Rivera, Jeff Randall and Bob Penn have not gone silent. Next month, as Black Swan Runners, they will release an album of brash, hooky indie-rock, this time incorporating keyboards and electronic beats. This week they unveiled the first single “Sooner or Later” – not the roaring-est song on the record, but representative. Three years in the making, Black Swan Runners’ debut reminds me of the line by my favorite Western author: “There’s no stopping a man who knows he’s in the right and keeps on coming.”

||| Download: “Sooner or Later”

||| Also: You can still download Coco B’s “Modern Lover” on RCRDLBL.com.