After a steady stream of releases over the last few years, Los Angeles-via-Ohio beatmaker Ted Feighan – doing business as Monster Rally – is back with his third full-length album, “Return to Paradise” (coming in October). Its first single is the shimmering and seductive “Orchids,” which begins with a dusty riff that wouldn’t be out […]
With a name like Body Parts, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Ryder Bach, Alina Cutrono, Raymond Proudfoot, and Taylor Dexter have kept it moving this year. “People” is the fourth song they’ve churned out this year and with each tune, the harmonies and textures vary in every way any fan of art-pop would want them […]
Kassia Conway, doing business as Conway, debuted in February with the prickly single “Big Talk,” which cast a larger light on the singer-songwriter who previously had fronted the indie-rock outfit All Wrong and the Plans Change. It turns out Conway is more than just talk – her “Big Talk” EP, featuring the single and three […]
Over the course of a little over a year, Broken Anchor, the new-ish project from singer-songwriter Austin Hartley-Leonard and Michael Duffy, released a series of EPs that displayed the luminous melodicism of indie heroes such as the Shins, Band of Horses and Death Cab for Cutie. We’re not sure anybody outside of the TV synch […]
L.A.-based garage-rockers Adult Cinema carbon-date to the late 1970s, when punk rock was morphing into a thing called new wave and power-pop bands were adapting their infectious hooks to soul and disco beats. Enormous fun at the time, and just as exhiliarating the way singer-guitarist Randy Michael and his quintet are doing it now. Michael […]
As they have been known to do between full-length releases, Cold War Kids sprang a new release on fans this week. The digital-only “Tuxedos” offers two previously unreleased songs and a gorgeous cover of Antony and the Johnsons’ “Aeon” and another of the Band’s “You Don’t Come Through.” The instantly karmic title track of the […]
It’s been almost a year since In the Valley Below dropped its electro-flavored slice of nostalgia titled “Peaches,” which has led to a fruitful few months for the L.A. duo doing business as Jeffrey Jacob and Angela Gail. Today they release their debut EP, “Peaches,” for Capitol Records, and fans of ITVB’s brooding synth-rock will […]
At its Bootleg Bar residency in August, O.C. quintet Kiev displayed an ambitious, even audacious, feel for creating expansive soundscapes out of seemingly disparate parts. Twitching beats commingle with funky bass lines; psychedelic freakouts give way to jazz interludes; yearning vocals wriggle through arrangements that many prog-rockers might have stripped back. It’s not three-chords-and-a-cloud-of-dust music, […]
The last time we heard from Morgan Kibby (when she wasn’t off singing and playing keys with Anthony Gonzalez) was back when she released the gorgeous “This Frontier” EP in 2011. Nuggets like the ethereal anthem “Mountaineer’ and dark R&B-laden jam “Ladykiller” showed Kibby’s strengths as a solo artist under the moniker White Sea, which […]
Five minutes before Local Natives took the stage Friday night at the Greek Theatre, some bro in the pit started chanting “Cavil at Rest!” Whether he merely wanted to impress his date with his deep knowledge of the headliners’ Orange County days or he just longed for the 2007 version of “Sun Hands,” it was […]
