For seven albums, Eleni Mandell has been the best damned Los Angeles songwriter without a proper record contract, which boggles the mind when you consider her catalog and its graceful excursions into pop, rock, jazz and country. That distinction changes July 10, when her new collection “I Can See the Future” comes out on Yep […]
David Shane Smith continues to be one of the most compelling pop explorers in the L.A. underground. Equally adept (and some would say, inscrutable) at glitchy, sample-based electro and only slightly off-kilter acoustic guitar compositions, the prolific songwriter never met a song he couldn’t tweak, and his subversive lyrics and titles are keen and biting. […]
Shiny Toy Guns have come full circle. The synth-rock quartet, which took off after Oklahoma songwriters/producers Jeremy Dawson and Chad Petree recruited singer Carah Faye Charnow out of high school in Newbury Park, was one of the first big MySpace sensations, their single “Le Disko” eventually becoming omnipresent on rock radio after Indie 103.1 championed […]
Beat Club has the beats, by golly, and they don’t sound like they came from some computer application. The new indie-dance trio is a little bit punk, a little bit garage and a heftier amount of disco, with ’80s-vintage bass lines rolling under scratchy guitar riffs. Beat Club is the new collaboration from ex-Low Vs […]
Has it been a full year since we dashed over to Eagle Rock to hear Becky Stark and Lavender Diamond perform a batch of new songs? Indeed, that was May of last year, and finally the L.A. quartet has announced a new album, “Incorruptible Heart” (due Sept. 25). It was spring of 2007 when Lavender […]
“King Devil is the bad guy we have inside of us,” Joe Fraley says of his new nom de tune, and you can hear the singer-guitarist wrestling his demons throughout King Devil’s self-titled album. Fraley’s fearlessly eclectic brand of acoustic blues and rawboned, off-kilter psych-pop simmers with frustration and rage – music inspired, he says, […]
L.A. trio Wildcat! Wildcat! swooped in early this year and stole the hearts of indie-pop fans with two slabs of electro R&B that seemed suspended in the clouds, high on harmonies and ticklish keyboard lines. Now the threesome of Jesse Taylor, Michael Wilson and Jesse Carmichael have a full-length album (and an August residency at […]
Britt Daniel (Spoon), Dan Boeckner (Wolf Parade) and Sam Brown (New Bomb Turk) have been hinting at their new supergroup Divine Fits for a while now, and their respective fans have especially been on the edge of their seats since a snippet of “My Love Is Real” was heard in a teaser video posted back […]
I can’t tell how many times I’ve listened to the Ride album “Going Blank Again,” which came out 20 years ago this spring. The cassette (!) stayed in my car for years after its release, and the work of the Oxford, U.K., quartet remains nonpareil (let’s argue) among bands who melded pop sensibilities with the […]
