There’s running and jumping and skipping and dancing and marching and climbing and parkour and, yes, even some walking in director Warren Kommers’ video for Fitz & the Tantrums’ single “The Walker.” The song, intended as a homage to the legendary “Silver Lake Walker,” Dr. Marc Abrams, who died three years ago, becomes daytime disco […]
Coming from two of Janelle Monae’s collaborators, the music of Deep Cotton is, not surprisingly, rather giddily all over the map – eccentric pop and punk and funk with a defiant sensibility even as it smilingly skips down the road toward musical comedy. It’s the work of Chuck Lightning and Nate Wonder, who with Monae co-founded […]
For more than two decades, the Black Watch have been dependable purveyors of intelligent indie-rock – in particular, the strain informed by the fuzzy pop leanings of the Velvet Underground and Soft Boys, British post-punk bands and the lovingly slack jangle of the luminaries on New Zealand’s Flying Nun Records. Professor/author/songwriter John Andrew Fredrick has […]
Synth-pop quartet Lovelife makes the kind of vacant New Wave that sent thousands of music fans scurrying back the guitar rock in the 1980s. Which is strange, because not terribly long ago three-quarters of the band – Lee Newell, Frank Colucci and Sam Jackson – were in the hyped U.K. guitar band Brother (which then became Viva […]
We are not fans of Halloween, unless you are under the age of 14 and have a sweet tooth, or are charged with shepherding small humans under the age of 14 who have a sweet tooth. We have trouble enough dressing up as ourselves, I guess. Anyway, it’s Oct. 31 and Bleached made a Halloween […]
The new album from O.C. four-piece Audacity is rather ironically titled. “Butter Knife,” the quartet is calling it, and it’s easy to counter with the statement that the album (out this week via Suicide Squeeze) is sharper than that. Unless we’re miscounting, “Butter Knife” is Audacity’s third full-length since last July, this one more fully […]
The pubescent faux-folk that’s barged into the mainstream isn’t really that far from last generation’s emo-pop – swap out the electric guitar for an acoustic, ditch the synths in favor of something your great-uncle played, remember the handclaps/foot-stomping/tambourines and practice, practice, practice those gang choruses. The latest sugar rush comes courtesy of SoCal quartet the […]
Kiwi band the Naked and Famous didn’t have trouble keeping the momentum once they released their smash hit “Young Blood” off their debut “Passive Me, Aggressive You” back in 2011. Singles such as “Punching in a Dream” kept fans of electronica, post-punk and dream-pop near before they launched into songs like “Hearts On Fire” off of […]
Chino Hills’ Vex Ruffin is set to release his self-titled full-length on Nov. 12 via Stones Throw, who signed him after getting an unsolicited demo in the mail (the only artist the label has acquired that way). Combining a variety of influences including primitive electronica, hip-hop, psychedelia and new wave, Ruffin creates understated, beat-driven music […]
In conceiving Best Coast’s new video for the song “I Don’t Know,” frontwoman Bethany Cosentino says she was going for something “super fun and L.A.-inspired without doing anything at the beach like so many of our videos.” So director Patrick O’Dell convened at a Sun Valley skate park, where, Cosentino says, “I got to hang […]
