It was hard not to sway to tracks like “Hands of Steel” off of Moostache‘s first EP, but now Patrick, Sean and Brian Wardell – plus Ryan Radcliff – are back with more on their recently released “Anything, Alone” album. Sure, you may still need time to get over the band name, but lyrics like […]
[Three new tunes from locals we’ve recently written about…] Everest, “Raking Me Over the Coals”– Upon the preparation for their forthcoming album “Ownerless,” Everest has just announced fall tour dates with Neil Young and given out their latest single “Raking Me Over the Coals” as a free download. Inspired by a cold, overcast day in […]
When it comes to suspending your brain somewhere between stoner oblivion and psychedelic bliss, JUJU has mojo. The trance-y rock is the new venture of singer-guitarist Phil Pirrone (Jeffertiti’s Nile, A Static Lullaby, Casket Salesman) and Incan Abraham drummer Andrew Clinco. Over the drummer’s thunderous rhythms, Pirrone loops guitar and bass, building an almost primordial […]
Damin Suarez told me a while back that that Go West Young Man was going break up, but thankfully they have not. Purveyors of razor-sharp pop (and architects of a rather criminally overlooked album back in early ’09), GWYM earns high marks in pop’s old and new schools, with full-on keyboard and horn arrangements and […]
Here’s the way things used to work: You pick up your copy of the Los Angeles Times, you read a well-written profile of a local rock quartet and you make a note to see if the local record store (I favored Fingerprints in Long Beach or Noise Noise Noise in Costa Mesa in those days) […]
7Lions, “Born 2 Run” – Now that the Kings are toting around the Stanley Cup, we feel compelled to acknowledge the song that, ostensibly, got them their hardware. (We’re not fully conversant in jock rock, but do other pro teams in L.A. have “theme songs” as the Kings have had?) Anyway, “Born 2 Run” is […]
The first EP from Future People feels far too precise to have sprung from a casual collaboration, but that’s how the L.A. quartet started: a bunch of talented guys who happened to be living under one roof. Originally the brainchild of drummer-programmer Dan Marcellus and singer-guitarist Chris Cosgrove (and now featuring bassist Larry Sheffey and […]
Wake Up Lucid doesn’t make nice. Not musically, anyway. The band of cousins – Ryan, Ian and Jamie Baca – mete out scuzzy blues you imagine sprung from gear that barely works, seething with emotion and crackling with defiance toward those who would water down rock ’n’ roll for the digital age. After thundering onto […]
One minute, Amanda Jo Williams is in the cosmos. The next, she’s in control. The Georgia-bred, L.A.-based songstress is hard to keep up with over the 43 minutes of her new album “The Bear Eats Me” (out Tuesday on Neurotic Yell Records), but that’s half the fun. The other half is playing free association with […]
Sarah Negahdari calls her musical tangent as Pisces her “mystic pop side project,” and judging from Pisces’ forthcoming debut EP, she is every bit as comfortable as a dream-weaver as she is an agitator fronting the indie-rock band the Happy Hollows. The EP is the first in a series of music Negahdari has recorded with […]
