Flying Lotus’ forthcoming album has a morbid title (“You’re Dead!”), but there’s a resurrection going on the Hiro Murai’s video for the song “Never Catch Me.” The tune features the speed limit-bustin’ rhymes of Kendrick Lamar, making for, as we pointed out last week, “two master chefs in the kitchen.” In the context of today’s […]
If you’re headed to Pioneertown this weekend for the Desert Stars Festival and do some of the things people do while communing in the Joshua Tree environs, your experience might sound something like this. Slow White is the L.A.-based psych-rock crew of singer-guitarist Reed Palmer, bassist Daniel Aquarian, drummer Matt Kavannah and keyboardist Whitt Evens. […]
When the Bulls quietly debuted last March at Hemingway’s in Hollywood, it was almost a shock to the senses – seeing Anna Bulbrook without her usual musical appendage, the violin. Then the guitars kicked in and things got interesting, or at least atmospheric. Here, Bulbrook, the multi-instrumentalist and backup vocalist in the Airborne Toxic Event, […]
It’s been almost five years since the Black Ryder – the L.A.-based duo of Australians Scott Von Ryper and Aimee Nash – released their album “Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride,” which placed them squarely in the middle of the pack of next-wave shoegazers. Given the long incubation period for the follow-up, could the Black […]
Night Terrors of 1927 emerged last year with an EP of emo-gone-electro (not a pejorative here) titled “Guilty Pleas” that was worthy of the resumés of the principal songwriters, Jarrod Gorbel (The Honorary Title) and Blake Sennett (Rilo Kiley, the Elected). With their dramatic flair for composition and meatier-than-most lyrical offerings, you wondered what Night […]
By John Girgus Indie-pop, twee, jangle … for the 30 years in the current of popular music, these are often vague (and lately misused) terms in reference to a genre, that does, in fact, have a documented (though maybe difficult to define) lineage. While the aesthetic can be traced to Buddy Holly, the Velvet Underground, […]
Here’s one that’ll fit snugly on your shelf in between those Cocteau Twins, Psychedelic Furs, Echo & the Bunnymen and New Order records. (Huh, you don’t have such a shelf? What are you, new?) Stranger Kings are an Orange County-based four-piece launched by guitarist Eric Campuzano and bassist Herb Grimaud. The latter made ambient rock […]
Los Angeles quartet Northern American emerged last year with their “Happiness Hungover” EP, a short collection of sophisticated songs fusing pop, rock and jazz that seemed to be wonderfully out of place in the midst of surf- and garage-rockers usurping the SoCal scene. Since they played Buzz Bands LA’s Echo Park Rising stage and Chinatown […]
You want a peek inside the mind of Kera Armendariz? Watch what you wish for. Armendariz, the provocatrix at the front of L.A. ensemble Kera and the Lesbians, is at the mercy of mad scientists and crazed clergymen in the video for “Snakes,” a song that came out earlier this year as part of the […]
It’s taken a second, but the L.A. quartet Detangler has unveiled a new song to follow up its self-titled EP from almost two years ago. The project of Davin Givhan (whose credits as a sideman include gigs with Lauryn Hill, Saul Williams and the Bravery), along with Bryan Kertenian, Mike Corwin and Joel O’Neill, Detangler […]
