Chelsea Wolfe arrived to the L.A. music scene equipped with a gothic sheen that would ease listeners into her morose reality. Her pop noir initially seemed a Stevie Nicks prototype but as she followed up her 2010 debut “The Grime and the Glow” with 2011’s howling “Apokalypsis” and then last year’s “Unknown Rooms: A Collection […]
It isn’t surprising to hear a song titled “Majik Mtn.” from Thee Rain Cats considering the rock quartet is based in the outskirts of Disneyland. What’s intriguing is that Caleb Palomo, Miguel Gomez, Nelson Rodriguez and Patrick Palomo have coined their sound as “technicolor rock.” Now the act where bands come up with a new name for its sound […]
Need something to wake you up on a Monday? Spaceships, the garage-rock duo whose members consist of Jessie Waite and Kevin LaRose, will do the job and  knock those cobwebs out of your ears with their brand new single “Ghost” off of their forthcoming debut. “Cool Breeze Over the Mountains” follows up their self-titled EP, […]
Despite recently losing Kim Deal, Pixies are back with a new single titled “Bagboy.” The song is the first piece of new material since 2004’s “Bam Thwok.” Although, it does have ties to older days of the band. Black Francis wrote it at a Starbucks on a Harvard campus that was only 25 feet from […]
There’s only a little bit of sorcery on the first EP from the new trio L.A. Witch. But there is plenty of mystery, along with a healthy dose of take-no-prisoners distortion, in their dark amalgam of psych-rock, garage and Americana. The all-female troika of singer-guitarist Sade Sanchez, bassist-organist Irita Pai and drummer Crystal Nava made […]
We’ve been waiting a long time for Echo Park-based Spirit Vine to release their full-length, but we’ve also gotten some nice brooding tunes along the way. The pysch-rock quartet will release “Ascender” via Manimal Vinyl in August, and the latest teaser single “City Daze” is yet again another enticing hypnotic nugget to keep fans in […]
Young LA. quintet Washing Machines are so rough around the edges you’re not sure where the edges are. Not that that’s a bad thing at all. The seven tracks on their debut EP, released in April, are a spin cycle of caustic guitars, angsty screams and melody, all adding up to ferocious energy that, while […]
As they showed at Coachella, Franz Ferdinand is still right. The Scottish quartet of Alex Kapranos, Nick McCarthy, Bob Hardy and Paul Thomson proved the cream of the post-punk crop with their 2004 and ’05 albums (“Franz Ferdinand” and “You Could Have it So Much Better,” respectively) before experimenting with synths on their not-so-creamy third […]
AM & Shawn Lee have bonded over ’60s pych-pop and ’70s Italian music, but their follow-up to their 2011 debut “Celestial Electric” turns up the disco. “La Musique Numérique” may sound auspicious considering Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” becoming a smash in the same season, but no matter. Alongside disco, the new record also embraces new […]
Actress-singer-songwriter Soko possesses a certain mystique that she translates into lo-fi, highly relatable narratives that belie her celebrity in her native France as a movie performer. Her January release for Community Music (Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, Alex Ebert, Aaron Embry) was titled “I Thought I Was an Alien,” 15 songs that cast the […]
