With its vein-popping choruses and Spaghetti Western-fueled arrangements, the Lonely Wild’s debut album “The Sun As It Comes” is equal parts blood and dust. Those qualities come to life, or maybe death, in the quintet’s new video for their grandiose, 5 1/2-minute track “Buried in the Murder.” Out in the dusty landscape the Lonely Wild […]
Sharon Jones is feeling better, thank you. The 57-year-old dynamo with the late-arriving but affecting career at forefront of the soul/funk revival underwent treatment for bile duct cancer earlier this year, and today’s news is that after a successful operation and treatment, Jones has recovered. And her latest effort with Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings […]
Almost three years after the release of their debut EP, L.A. four-piece State to State is back, reaching for sky. The quartet’s expansive sound owes to a handful of bands you saw in stadiums 10 or 15 years ago, and on the tensive new song “Comprehension Headache” frontman Shea Stratton sings as if he’s pleading […]
Garage-rock from New York City. Yes, it’s inevitable Skaters would be drawing comparisons to the Strokes, especially with the way singer Michael Ian Cummings tosses off lyrics like cigarette butts. Not quite the swaggering, black-clad garage-rockers your cool uncle likes, Skaters at times sound like a more sober FIDLAR (your call on whether that’s a […]
The Warlocks sounded like the next big psych-rock giants – or at least worthy successors to Spiritualized – a decade ago when they released the druggy, dynamite “The Phoenix Album” (2002) and followed it up a couple years later with “Surgery,” for Mute. While a cloud of other bands emerged to engage in psychedelic and […]
Foreign Press is both a cover band and a spinoff act – but not in the way you generally regard either. Follow along: Back in the middle of last decade, a quartet called Richard Bivens & Foreign Press – the singer-songwriter-guitarist, joined by guitarist Ali Ghanavat, bassist Robert Pavlovich and drummer Richard Rizk (soon replaced […]
Nicole Vaughn has released two solo albums, but unlike 2011’s “Say It” and predecessor “Walk Into the Night,” Vaughn is getting ready to unleash her latest record under the moniker Ranger. Working with producer, engineer and multi-instrumentalist Jon O’Brien (Young the Giant, LA Font, Yellow Red Sparks) again, her two-part album “Songs For Leaving | […]
Singer-guitarist Arden Fisher cultivates a thrilling sense of foreboding – early songs from her trio Dekades such as “Dark Horse” and “You & Him” had that standing-on-the-edge-of-the-abyss dread common in all the ’80s and ’90s electro-rock you enjoyed while wearing all black. Dekades’ debut EP, “1.1,” came out this week, and the title track is […]
Not only are some of the landscapes beautiful in the (rather hodgepodge but trippy) video for Jonathan Wilson’s “Dear Friend,” but owing to the singer-guitarist’s remarkable solos and production, the song creates soundscapes to match. In seven-plus minutes, “Dear Friend” evokes the Beatles, Pink Floyd and Neil Young without plundering any of them – Wilson […]
There’s never been any shortage of music in the Adrienne Pierce–Ari Shine household: Vancouver native Pierce has released four-albums-plus of retro-mini epics known to fans of TV’s “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Veronica Mars” and beyond; Shine’s songwriting chops have shone on his solo releases (including last year’s “Songs of Solomon”) and his work as a composer. The […]
