[This made for a nice trip into the Buzz Bands archives; check out the two bands I featured almost five years ago …] Five years ago Shanna Halligan arrived, with some degree of sultry splendor, as the vocalist of Bitter:Sweet, an electronic duo whose trip-hop/bossa nova stylings seemed perfect for spy movie soundtracks and slick […]
Local stuff first, then the other stuff: ‣ Nice surprise in store at the Californian’s residency at the Satellite — She Wants Revenge will play the opening slot, setting the table for the One AM Radio and the residents. And leading the late dance party will be San Francisco’s the Hundred Days – whose video […]
On the One AM Radio’s fourth album “Heaven Is Attached by a Slender Thread,” songwriter Hrishikesh Hirway’s finest outing yet, the juxtaposition of chamber-pop and electronic elements provides for some mighty ephemeral moments. “Sunlight,” the song we touted back in March, is one of them, and Andrew Huang’s new video for the track give it […]
The debut EP from Hand is titled “Antiquities,” and it is in no way disparaging to point out that it feels like a museum piece. The work of L.A. songwriter Eric J. McEntee stokes the fires kindled by ’70s folk and pop song artists whose lush, clarion songs are easy on the ears, if hard […]
[In the midst of all other summer festival news, Make Music Pasadena will be the first to follow up Silver Lake Jubilee as a local music outdoor event. They’ve got a diverse lineup with artists playing in every nook and cranny of the city. Here’s a quick preview of three different bands playing on Saturday…] […]
Avi Buffalo this month releases its first new music since the 2010 debut album that announced Avi Zahner-Isenberg as a prodigy to watch. “How Come?” is lo-fi and meditative, and, judging a recent live performance (pictured) at the Getty Center during which the Long Beach quartet played some noisy new numbers, not exactly indicative of […]
[In response to the inevitable questions I am asked at shows – What have you heard? What are you listening to? What’s new? – today I embark on something called Random Dispatches … the contents of my notebook, spilt.] ‣ Lavender Diamond’s recent show at the Eagle Rock Center for the Arts was a revelation, […]
Whether you find beauty in darkness or just think it’s downright scary, the gothic sheen of Chelsea Wolfe’s ethereal pop noir can be pretty compelling. Whereas Austra’s dark disco is rooted in pop-opera and Tamyrn’s brew is a mixture of psychedelia and stoicism, Wolfe’s reverb-heavy doom-folk bristles with bluesy elements, her shadowy guitar riffs and […]
Acoustic pop and soft electronica go hand-in-hand these days, and if there’s a new L.A. band who has embraced this concept, it’s Mind the Gap. The duo that formerly went by Cahn & Yang (and the Driving Force before that) expanded to a quartet once founders Greg Cahn and Alex Yang moved from the Midwest […]
Band bios are full of lore, much of which should be enjoyed for entertainment value only. But even if the story behind War Widow is only partially true, it’s one of my favorites: Jon Peloso and Eric Blackwell met in a bar fight in which they were both defending a drag queen, a brawl that […]
