Top 7 choices from the embarrassment of show riches tonight in Los Angeles (and a handful of recommended downloads to boot): ‣ Greg Dulli and Carina Round at the sold-out Troubadour. The Afghan Whigs/Twilight Singers main man is doing his first-ever solo tour, and reviews have been great. “Dynamite Steps,” the first Twilight Singers album […]
Badly Drawn Boy’s strangely mercurial career seems upward bound again. The Mercury Prize winner (in 2000, for “The Hour of the Bewilderbeast), who went on score the movie “About a Boy” and proceeded to go through two record labels in the middle of last decade, in October released the first of a three-album trilogy, “It’s […]
Four albums into his songwriting career and six years into a tour of duty as a Los Angeles resident, Chris Zerby never feels at a loss for source material. “L.A. surprises me with something every day,” the principal architect behind the L.A. quintet Hello Dragon says. “It’s a vast, crazy world that never ceases to […]
The Thermals get into your head, even when your head is somewhere else. I think I spent a good part of 2006-07 waking up in the morning with “Here’s Your Future” (from the excellent “The Body, the Blood, the Machine”) echoing in my ear parts. It was the hook, and something in the way Hutch […]
Top show that’s probably worth the road trip: ‣ Blonde Redhead (with Olof Arnalds opening) plays the Glass House in Pomona. The trio’s new album”Penny Sparkle” is more ambient than “23” (the Buzz Bands album of the year in ’07) – easy stuff in which to lose yourself, as the five songs they perform in […]
Sharon Van Etten won a slew of admirers with her sparse, intimate tales of heartbreak and loss on debut album “Because I Was In Love.” Among those new fans was feted songwriter Justin Vernon, aka Bon Iver, who recently covered the Brooklyn-based singer’s track “Love More,” which is the heart-wrenching closer on her sophomore release […]
The fact that Geographer frontman Michael Deni upped sticks from his native New Jersey and relocated to San Francisco is not remarkable in itself. Some of the music the young songwriter has crafted since swapping coasts following a tragic series of deaths in his family just might be. Deni, having enlisted the help of cellist […]
Homage does not get any more direct than this: “Brighter,” the latest single from the duo Psychic Powers, genuflects at the altar of Brighter, a short-lived pop trio (1989-93) on Sarah Records. (Background on the latter’s single collection, which is recommended.) Psychic Powers is the trans-Pacific collaboration between L.A.’s Alejandro Cohen (he of the band […]
They were different, Orange Juice. They drew their energy from punk, but little else. As Edwyn Collins explained, “… it was to bring back a ’60s sensibility. To have the freneticism and tempo of punk rock but to have rhythm guitars that were influenced by Live 1969 and … Nile Rodgers.” Their music, infused with […]
Back in the days of impulse buys and agonizing over judging a CD by its cover, I dropped some paycheck on “Nightsongs,” the first album by Stars. Maybe I noted the cover of “This Charming Man,” or possibly I sampled the music in one of those then-revolutionary listening stations at Fingerprints. I don’t remember which, […]
