Kevin Bronson on June 16th, 2011

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[In response to the inevitable questions I am asked at shows – What have you heard? What are you listening to? What’s new? – today I embark on something called Random Dispatches … the contents of my notebook, spilt.]

‣ Lavender Diamond’s recent show at the Eagle Rock Center for the Arts was a revelation, and not merely because we hadn’t heard much from Lavender Diamond since singer Becky Stark and the band released “Imagine Our Love” in 2007. The quartet debuted an album’s worth of gorgeous new songs, with its siren frontwoman sounding very Karen Carpenter-meets-the Sundays. Their first album came out on Matador. This one? “We’re not sure who’s going to put the record out,” Stark said via e-mail, “but we sure are excited about it.” And in other Becky Stark developments: She is hosting “We Can Do It!,” a new video segment for ReadyMade.com [OK Go’s Damian Kulash and John C. Reilly guest; full details here]; she performs “jazz standards and other stuff” tonight at Las Perlas.
‣ Ten years after its original release on Plug Research, Sub Pop is doing a deluxe reissue of Dntel’s “Life Is Full of Possibilities,” the album that first brought Jimmy Tamborello (aka Dntel) and Benjamin Gibbard together. They teamed up on the song “(This Is) the Dream of Evan and Chan,” and the collaboration eventually would result in the Postal Service’s “Give Up” (Sub Pop’s second-best seller of all time). Dntel doesn’t tour much, but Tamborello is going out with Baths side project Geotic and electro-poppers the One AM Radio in August, finishing with an Aug. 27 date at the Echoplex.
‣ We haven’t heard the last of Silver Lake favorites Mezzanine Owls, apparently. A posthumous 7-inch is in the works, although frontman Jack Burnside says, “I prefer to think of us as inactive rather than dead.” Meanwhile, Burnside’s new band Rabbits Rabbits Rabbits are changing their name to Almanacs.
‣ Speaking of dearly departed Silver Lake bands, the late, great band The Movies will be feted on June 25 at the Satellite, with a slew of bands paying tribute to one of the neighborhood’s most head-scratching (and in a way heartbreaking) coulda-woulda-shoulda stories. Somebody should do a screenplay.
‣ Speaking of 7-inches, we’ll make room on our shelves that the one White Arrows have one coming in July.
‣ Best Coast’s next album will be a country record?
‣ Funny how things work out: Back in early 2010, when Janelle Monae did a three-night stand at the Viper Room, it took some arm-twisting to convince her management that a singer named Bruno Mars would be an OK opening act. This week, she opened two sold-out shows for him at the Gibson Amphitheatre.
‣ Their debut album took forever to come out, but now Voxhaul Broadcast is already working on new songs.
‣ Vice magazine analyzed one of Keith Morris’ dreadlocks and found … uranium?
‣ KAV is back in town and doing a DJ residency every Thursday this month at Akbar in Silver Lake.
‣ Tommy Stinson tweets that Soul Asylum are recording new material. And just the other day, I ran across his solo album from ’04, “Village Gorilla Head.”
‣ In April, Dangerbird Records retrenches. In June, the L.A. label announces the signing of veteran artists Butch Walker and Ben Lee. Business things just befuddle me.
‣ Recent sets that impressed: Electric Guest, the Belle Brigade, the Aberdeen reunion show, the Wombats, Races, Foster the People’s rooftop show at the 98.7 FM Penthouse.