Few boy/girl duos have negotiated the sometimes vast chasm between boy and girl as Annalee Fery and Christian Stone have on their self-titled debut album as Howls. On the album, which came out in May, the longtime collaborators – once of the Lonely Trees, and separately of Monsters Are Waiting and Campfire Girls, respectively – fashion brooding […]
Summer’s not over until Goldroom releases a new single, it seems. Songwriter/producer Josh Legg teams up with Australian vocalist Mammals on the breezy new “Till Sunrise,” a song that already has 30 remixes because of a campaign Legg did called “The Premix” – offering the song’s vocal stem for free download. The song, Goldroom’s first original […]
With the release of last fall’s self-titled EP, L.A. quartet Dear Boy distanced themselves from the alt-rock masses, with singer-guitarist Ben Grey and mates Austin Hayman, Nils Bue and Keith Cooper affirming their new band identity by injecting some Anglophile-friendly edginess into their pop grandiosity. And so it goes with the anthemic “Hesitation Waltz,” a […]
If drama were a fluid, Night Terrors of 1927’s new song “Always Take You Back” would be drenched. The band’s slow-building, shimmering anthem is the first new song to emerge since last November’s “Guilty Pleas” EP. Surfacing early last year as the creative tête-à -tête between Jarrod Gorbel (the Honorary Title) and Blake Sennett (Rilo Kiley, […]
“I’m love with every emotion,” Jessica Dobson sings in “One by One,” the latest from Deep Sea Diver, a clarion call to embrace life’s every peak and valley … “before it’s gone.” The song is jaw-dropping in its complexities – haunting ooh-oohs, shifting rhythms, shreddy guitars, the big, emotive chorus – and offers yet another example […]
“Make Me Yours,” the second EP of pop noir from L.A. duo Vow, comes out next week, and the dark “Charm,” a song about personal and emotional transparency, is one of its most rapturous meditations. Vow’s principals, singer Julia Blake and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Thomas, wanted to keep it simple in conceiving a video for the […]
Remember teenage crushes? The scratchy, catchy new single from L.A. pop-rock quartet Act As If sums up those obsessive moments, all in under 2 1/2 minutes of exuberant power-pop. “Uh Huh” is a taste of the new full-length from the L.A. quintet of Peter Verdell, Diego De La Rosa, Sara Lindsay, Derrick Wong and Tristen […]
The hard-to-type but easy-on-the-ears duo Pr0files emerged last year, its principals Danny Sternbaum and Lauren Pardini both boasting impressive songwriting credentials. Besides rocketing them to the top of the synth-pop duo class, their first single “Call Yourself a Lover” offered an intense, hypnotic foray into the dark world of regret, a moodiness they’ve maintained in […]
Besides resumés from playing in various art-rock bands around Los Angeles, members of the new quartet TETE say they share a mutual love of metal, reverb, drone, art, wolves and Gummi Worms. Their first song might boast a sonic kinship with all but the Gummi Worms. There’s nothing sweet about “Good Luck,” a sinister 4 […]
The first single from Los Angeles trio Ghostel is part Motown rave-up, part retro-pop delirium and part playground taunt. And it’s “So Annoying” you probably will not be able to get the chorus out of your head. It’s the work of 21-year-old singer Bryce Buckmaster and the husband-and-wife team of Daniel Knowles and Jennifer Farmer. […]
