Nico Vega siren Aja Volkman is a mom now, and at some point next year she’ll likely begin to juggle motherhood with being a rocker, when the L.A. trio’s long-awaited, eagerly anticipated second album comes out. To tide fans over, Volkman, guitarist Rich Koehler and drummer Daniel Epand today released a video for the synth-spiked […]
In early 2011, we noted the mind-boggling, ear-tickling ThreeSixFive Project undertaken by Brooklyn-based Ace Reporter. There, the songwriter born Chris Synder had written and released a song every day for the entirety of 2010, and the result was not only a feat of quantity and persistence but of remarkable quality. [All of ThreeSixFive still resides […]
Professor Possessor are wacky. They’re dark. They’re punk, and they boast former member of the brainy pop ensemble Big Moves – Jesse Imme – along with Scarlet A. Newman-Thomas, Jacob Summers and Hayden Hall. Forming in late 2011, Professor Possessor has explored the experimental realm with their own brew of garage-wave, witch-pop, dark wave and […]
Two guys with distinguished backgrounds in indie rock get their heads together. They depart their comfort zones. They try something completely new (for them), and currently fashionable. They call themselves Night Terrors of 1927, and they don’t want you to know about their distinguished backgrounds, at least not until you hear the music, lest their […]
Golden Animals seemed to vanish from the Los Angeles landscape as mysteriously as they appeared. The itinerant duo of Tommy Eisner and Linda Beecroft materialized out of the California desert in 2008 with a stellar album of vintage-sounding psychedelic blues titled “Free Your Mind and Win a Pony” – next-gen hippies who were more concerned […]
First they conquered Minneapolis. Now Night Moves have their sights set on bigger things. By now you might know the story: The trio of singer-guitarist John Pelant, bassist Micky Alfano and multi-instrumentalist Mark Ritsema originally had their album “Colored Emotions” available as a free download. They backpedaled, tweaked it with the help of producer Thom […]
For PAPA, 2012 has been the year of growing slowly. The more everybody heard 2011’s “A Good Woman Is Hard to Find” EP, the more everybody liked it. And the more often Darren Weiss, Daniel Presant and gang played live, the less everybody thought that a good rock band was hard to find. The first […]
When Faded Paper Figures emerged out of Orange County around 2008, there weren’t nearly as many bands riding in the Postal Service’s slipstream – and even fewer slathering their electronic beats with kids-next-door boy/girl vocals. Four years later, John Williams and Kael and Heather Alden seem like old hands. Their third album, “The Matter,” came […]
The all-star assembly doing business as the Stripminers staked out a lot of musical turf on their March debut “Movies,” which quick-cut to punk, Americana and garage-rock and made it all sound pretty natural. Considering the players, neither the album’s sonic breadth nor its crisp execution was surprising – the band’s roster includes Brett Anderson […]
