John McCauley is a busy man. After deciding to go forward with Middle Brother, the side project whose members also include the Delta Spirit’s Matt Vasquez and Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith, McCauley is back at it with his own band, Deer Tick, less than a year later. Their fourth studio album in just five years, “Divine […]
The lean-and-mean indie rock on the first EP from L.A. trio Chop Love Carry Fire is deceptively straightforward – stabs and flicks of guitar, sturdy rhythms, biting vocals tinged with just enough angst, all courtesy of three guys who know what they’re doing and have the resumés to prove it. Singer-bassist Jeremy Toback (pictured) co-founded […]
The Black’s gritty garage-Americana is like a slightly rusted saw that still works, cutting deep into whatever needs cleaved – in this case starry-eyed romance and not a little bit of rock ’n’ roll history. The Austin quartet, featuring Matt Simon (ex-Voxtrot) and Dave Longoria (ex-Trail of Dead) along with Bryan Mammel and Amy Hawthorne, […]
Quite a tease, that Cut Chemist. The former Ozomatli/Jurassic 5 dude is busy working on an as-yet-untitled album due next year, but to stir the pot for his current Tunnel Vision Tour, he’s released a new collaboration with Blackbird titled “Outro (Revisited).” His album in the works will get previewed on his five-city club swing, […]
One more cycle of 365 days and it will roughly be seven years since the Parson Red Heads first moved from Portland, Ore., to City of Angels. Of course, we were sad to see them go when they decided to return to their original hometown last year, but the folk group, which centered around husband […]
For songwriter/producer Jesse Nolan, it’s not a matter of finding soul in the machine – it’s eliciting soul from the machine. The songs from Nolan’s new project Caught a Ghost offer a rump-shaking hybrid of electronica, Stax horns and R&B crooning. Think Fitz & the Tantrums transported to the Holodeck. Nolan, who made some very […]
Jonathan Bates describes his new direction as Big Black Delta as “stream of consciousness, in every possible way.” “There’s a certain element of, ‘Hey, I sneezed on the wall and it looks like a painting,’” says Bates, the former Mellowdrone frontman who has gone on to play with M83 and White Sea (the solo project […]
San Francisco’s Girls have returned with a new single to follow up their beloved (and apathetically titled) album, “Album,” and it’s a slow-burning, seven-minute track in which guitars roar instead of toying with the simple melodies that characterized their debut. Although the band’s melancholy had always been endearing, especially with Christopher Owen’s heart-wrenching and forlorn […]
The woozy, gravity-defying psychedelia of Diva Dompé sounds more like an artist searching for a place to land rather anybody who’s arrived, but her reverb-smothered sonic explorations do make for a long, strange trip over the course of her debut album “The Glitter End” (out earlier this month on Critical Heights). Now just doing business […]
L.A. band One Trick Pony has been making their mark in the local scene with their lush orchestral arrangements since Randolph William III founded the band back in 2003. Eight years down the road, after having a rotation of musicians flesh One Trick Pony’s sound out in a live setting, Williams has finally found a […]
