This post is brought to you by peace of mind, beauty, subtlety and assorted transportative ambient experiences. Oh, and also by Los Angeles trio Sin Fin. They are Polo Quintero (guitar, loops), bassist Mandy Sewall and percussionist Tom King. They make instrumental music, which is at times trance-inducing and consistently lushly detailed. Oh, and crushingly […]
Orange County trio Wetwood Smokes make indie-rock that carries a certain gravitas, and they came out swinging last year on their deceptively titled debut EP, the self-released “Earth Tones & Red,” which mixed pop hooks and anthemic bombast to good effect. The band — stepbrothers Josh Bowman and Steven Howard, along with their childhood neighbor […]
The new single from Big Harp is like a football two-minute drill — onrushing synths, a hurry-up pace, a little roughing-the-guitar and, finally, a boy/girl chorus that finds the end zone. “It’s a Shame” represents another nifty piece of gamesmanship from the L.A.-based husband-and-wife team of Chris Senseney and Stefanie Drootin-Senseney (along with drummer Daniel […]
Cherub punk duo Girlpool, the Los Angeles natives who now use Philadelphia as a home base, announced today that their debut album “Before the World Was big” would be out June 2 via Wichita Recordings. The smart, often confrontational music on last year’s debut EP belied its simplicity — no matter what you thought of […]
DIY roots-rocker Matt Ellis has found a comfortable station in Los Angeles, his home for a decade since departing his native Australia. He calls his fifth full-length “The Great Escape” his “most L.A. album yet,” adding that much of the lyrical content came to him while simply driving around the city. Hence, director Phil Harder’s […]
“Running,” the new single from the Lonely Wild, starts in a walk, with Jessi Williams’ mournful violin, then breaks into a trot and finally charges, seemingly into battle, with the cry “Don’t stop running!” It’s a typically sanguine outlook from the quintet of Andrew Carroll, Dave Farina, Ryan Ross, Andrew Schneider and Williams, whose brazen […]
Meg Myers is “Sorry.” No, she really is. I mean, it hasn’t sounded like it those times she’s bared her teeth on her first two EPs, last year’s “Make A Shadow” and 2012’s “Daughter in the Choir.” But the onetime Jehovah’s Witness from Tennessee, can play contrite as well as unrepentant, both with vein-popping vigor. […]
When L.A.-based indie outfit Two Sheds unveiled the single “It’s Okay” last August, we assumed a full release of their album “Assembling” was imminent. Some things take time. Some things are worth the wait. Both are true with “Assembling” (out May 26 on Crossbill Records), the follow-up to 2014’s self-titled EP and the first full-length […]
Since he released Harriet’s debut EP “Tell the Right Story” in early 2012, singer-songwriter Alex Casnoff has been prone to arresting mood swings. “I Slept With All Your Mothers,” the former Dawes and PAPA keyboardist taunted on that first solo venture, before a long period of soul-searching yielded the melancholic “Ten Steps” and the downright […]
Samira Winter is a Brazilian-American singer-guitarist who relocated to L.A. about a year ago from Boston after completing her studies at Emerson College. Her dream-pop project Winter debuted in 2012 with the “Daydreaming” EP, and last year’s “Tudo Azul” EP boasted indie-pop in both English and Portuguese. In L.A., she’s formed a live band with […]
