Los Angeles duo The Bad Years, the project of Sami Akbari and Aaron Mort, put out their debut double A-side single in the fall, and are back with the eclectic but cohesive four-track “Beautiful Liar” EP, which is a departure from their previous material insofar as expanding their sonic palette and switching up their tempo. […]
Translator had an excellent four-album run from 1982 to ’86. Formed in Los Angeles in 1979 and then based in San Francisco after signing to Howie Klein’s 415 Records, the quartet fused the sound of British Invasion rockers with punk and psychedelia, taking off with the college radio-then-MTV hit “Everywhere That I’m Not.” The foursome […]
Kodak To Graph is the nom de tune of Michael Maleki, a transplanted Floridian whose almost-anything-goes compositions combine organic instrumentation with electronic wizardry and samples. The L.A.-based artist just released a full album for free download — “ISA” runs the gamut from intensely filmic to whimsical and wonderful. Either way, it’s powerful stuff, as is the […]
Cayucas, the breezy musical vehicle of twins Zach and Ben Yudin, return June 23 with “Dancing at the Blue Lagoon,” their sophomore album for Secretly Canadian. The brothers made the album, the follow-up to 2013’s “Bigfoot,” at the celebrated Bear Creek studio in Washington State with producer Ryan Hadlock (the Lumineers), yet the new single […]
L.A. native Nicky Blitz, born Nick Scapa, cut his teeth in Miami, where he attended the University of Miami and was a cog in some songwriting machines, penning tunes for films, TV shows, ad agencies and other artists. [See this interesting narrative.] His polyglot tastes (and talents) are on display on the new, self-released “Hawk” […]
The new single from The Moth & the Flame is a roof-rattler the L.A. quartet have been playing in concerts for several months now, “Young & Unafraid.” The band — Utah ex-pats Brandon Robbins (guitars and vocals), Mark Garbett (keyboards and vocals) and Andrew Tolman drums) along with L.A. cohort Michael Goldman on bass — […]
Dutch Party’s laced-with-cool funk-pop debuted in December with two tracks from the mind and fingers of singer-songwriter Ken Franklin. With Dutch Party now playing around town as a five-piece, the band last week released its debut EP “Astral Nights,” which features those first two songs, “Paper Moon” and “Echo Girl” and four more, including the […]
Vanessa Long calls the often-mystical, always-clever songs she makes as Cillie Barnes “gyp-hop” — sung and sung-spoken meditations that have the quality of diary entries. Her downtempo new single “Symmetry,” part of a small collection “The Friendly Witch” that she is releasing this week, feels like she’s letting you in on a secret. “I wrote ‘Symmetry’ […]
There’s nothing like some projectile vomiting to announce your long-awaited third album. That’s a disclaimer for the video above, “New Coke,” which is the first song to emerge from Echo Park’s experimental noise band HEALTH‘s new album, “Death Magic,” their first album since 2009’s “Get Color.” Since then, they recorded the soundtrack to the video […]
[File under Things I Slept on During March Madness:] Oxnard native Nic Hessler had a good thing going a few years back, making music under the name Catwalk while he was still in his teens and prepping an album for the Captured Tracks label. In late 2012, he was sidelined with the autoimmune disorder Guillain–BarreÌ […]
