[Buzz Bands LA today welcomes a new contributing writer, Dan Frazier, whom many in L.A. might know as the man behind Free Bike Valet.] Venice Beach’s Mind the Gap have always been in a limbo between pop rock and electro funk, but their upcoming EP “Youth” doesn’t yield its dance-floor intentions with the singles “Find […]
Rainbow Jackson thrashes around in the dizzying space between today’s next-wave garage rockers and Stooges-inspired power-pop of the 1970s. The L.A. quartet of Chad Carlisle, Sam Daggett, Laith Khalaf and Andy Ford play as if they’re daring someone suggest they clean it up – which, happily, they haven’t and probably won’t. Their newest three-minutes blast […]
Gypsy punk provocateurs Gogol Bordello have spent a decade raising hell – if not in socio-political arenas then on festival stages all over the world. They’ve been silent for a couple of years (except for the single “Let’s Get Crazy,” made in 2012 for a soda company’s ad campaign), but two weeks ago they announced […]
Smallpools are Sean Scanlon, Beau Kuther, Mike Kameran and Joe Intile. They make unfailingly catchy, bouncy, feel-good electro-pop, judging from their first volley. They sound like Passion Pit, Foster the People and Youngblood Hawke. They are Hype Machine-hot right now because the market can’t seem to get enough of unfailingly catchy, bouncy, feel-good electro-pop. Their […]
[Buzz Bands LA today welcomes a new contributing writer, Andrew Veeder. He has flow too.] Last year, a 17-year-old kid from Brooklyn put out a new mixtape – but it sounded as if it’d been buried in a time capsule since his birth in 1995. Now eighteen, Joey Bada$$ is emerging as one of the […]
We marvel at this because, at age 23, I’m pretty sure I was still sucking my thumb: Lucy Schwartz’s third full-length album, “Timekeeper,” will be out Aug. 6, the latest chapter in an artistic growth spurt that started when she was at Palisades Charter High (her debut came out in ’07) and then wrote songs […]
On the surface, there’s not very much folk about Grizfolk, the L.A. trio that for a time was going by the name Griz Adams until, one imagines, they got a threatening note carved in tree bark from a mountain man. There is, however, a whole lot that’s familiar about the first two songs from Adam […]
Since they appeared on the landscape in 2011, L.A. quintet Y LUV have embraced a so-romantic-it’s-almost-squishy take on synth-rock, with diminutive frontman Freddy Janney’s boyish, pleading vocals leading the way over saccharine melodies and danceable rhythms. Their new EP “Take the Ride” (released this week) aims high – lead single “All I Wanna Do” seems […]
The 12th annual Sasquatch! Music Festival kicked off Friday at the Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington state, highlighted by rip-roaring performances by main stagers Macklemore & Ryan Lewis and Arctic Monkeys; shoulder-to-shoulder throngs flipping out to Vampire Weekend and Youth Lagoon; strong showings by Northwest favorites Built to Spill and Telekinesis, some shredding from Red Fang […]
There’s Amanda Jo Williams’ voice – a playful, birdlike instrument, flitting around her country-fried arrangements like an intrepid hummingbird. And then there’s what she’s saying; she delivers her lickety-split vignettes and stream-of-consciousness observations as if she expects you to be on the same page, immediately. If you missed her first three albums, it’s worth getting […]
