[Random transmissions that have reached our ears …] ‣ Revolver, “Parallel Lives.” Gorgeous pop song from the French outfit who turned some heads last fall when they played Filter’s Culture Collide Festival. Their EP – the follow-up to 2010’s “Music for a While” – is out Feb. 22 on Astralwerks (and includes a cover of […]
Back in November, L.A. quartet Hands teased us with the single “Brave Motion,” and now the Philadelphia ex-pats have sent along another song off their forthcoming EP. The music made by Geoffrey Halliday, Ryan Sweeney, Sean Hess and Alex Staniloff is two-sided tropical pop – face up, you get frisky beats and skittering guitar lines; […]
When we last checked in with L.A. quartet Robotanists, Sarah Ellquist, Daniel de Blanke, Keith Boyarsky and Preston Scott Phillips were dazzling us with a covers EP. They have not been idle. Their second full-length, “Plans in Progress” – the foursome’s first new material since 2008’s “Close Down the Woods” – comes out Feb. 25. […]
There might be a long story to be written that involves lawyers, managers, musicians and label reps spitting venom at each other, but the bottom line is this: Hellogoodbye is back, four-plus years after its debut album “Zombies! Aliens! Vampires! Dinosaurs!” was released. When they emerged in the middle of last decade, the Huntington Beach […]
Unless you’ve heard his songs in the background of “Grey’s Anatomy” or “One Tree Hill,” chances are you’re not yet familiar with James Vincent McMorrow. The honey-voiced singer-songwriter has been gaining acclaim in his native Ireland since releasing his debut full-length, “Early in the Morning” in Europe this past summer. After releasing a teaser EP […]
On his first two releases as the Western States Motel, L.A. songwriter Carl Jordan impresses as a songwriter whose four-minute snapshots feel like landscape paintings of yearning and disconnectedness. Like many a bedroom popster, Jordan can’t quite live in his own pictures, but the simple melodies and plaintive narratives on “The Western States Motel” (2007) […]
They’re the first Next Big Thing of the new year: The Vaccines are being hailed as the British quartet that could lift music out of its suffocating, synth-drenched morass. A friend e-mailed me Thanksgiving week to gird my ears (and background me with this excellent piece from the Guardian) – was I ready for the […]
It’s nice to hear that three albums of marital bliss haven’t dulled the Submarines’ songwriting chops any. Starting with 2006’s “Declare a New State” and with “Honeysuckle Weeks” two years later, the husband-and-wife team of John Dragonetti and Blake Hazard have fashioned smart, sweetly melodic boy-girl pop delivered with big smiles and often subversive undertones. […]
When Trish Keenan, the Broadcast vocalist, died last week at age 42 from complications of pneumonia, it hit fans of the U.K. band’s dreamy electronica hard. Among those fans were Mark “Frosty” McNeill, Elvin Estela (better known as DJ Nobody) and other leading lights from the Dublab DJ collective, all of whom attended a memorable […]
There’s a bit of foreshadowing in “Headspace,” the restless new single from Long Beach-based trio We Barbarians. “I need to get some movement / Get out of my headspace / Get into a good place / A place where I can wake up,” David Quon sings on the new song, the first to emerge from […]
