The Black Keys are getting ready for their “Back to Black” campaign in support of their forthcoming album “El Camino.” The rock duo follows up their Grammy-winning album “Brothers” by reuniting with Danger Mouse for production, and “El Camino” will arrive Dec. 6 on Nonesuch Records. Although December may seem a long time from now, […]
Harper Blynn is no doubt an alternative rock band, but the Brooklyn quartet does a fine job of peeling away the narrow, rough connotation that often accompanies the label. Guitars roar and the drums are a driving force in their songs, but folk influences from their initial days as a duo consisting of Peter Harper […]
Voxhaul Broadcast’s debut album “Timing Is Everything,” which came out back in March, wasn’t so much a feast as a sampler platter of of fare that the L.A. quartet found tasty in its first four years – soul-infused pop, biting indie rock, and even a bit of U.K.-flavored psychedelia from material originally recorded for its […]
Austin’s the Strange Boys get out of the garage – at least production-wise – on “Live Music” (out this week on Rough Trade), their third album in as many years. But they still haven’t gotten out of the ’60s, which is all right, considering their folk ’n’ blues ’n’ psych ’n’ roll seems made to […]
No matter whether you buy into the Holloys’ mythology*, the Los Angeles band’s chief mystic and bottle washer Jim Brown has been recalibrating sonic weights and measures for eight years now. (* “Holloys” are intelligent energy frequencies that propel the band’s music from a place called Lake Land to a place called Everything, i.e. Earth […]
When he fronted the lamentably overlooked Mere Mortals, Axel Steuerwald fashioned tunes that seemed beamed across the Atlantic from Manchester and sprinkled with garage-rock fairy dust. His new quartet United Ghosts, founded with Sha Sabi, build on that approach – driving Euro dance rhythms, hazy guitar and synth textures and boy/girl vocals straight out of […]
Guitar rockers making mind-bending electro – “Stitches,” the first single from the Polinski album “Labyrinths,” features two of them. Polinski is the nom de tune of Paul Wolinski of U.K. math-rockers 65daysofstatic, and the phased vocals on the track belong to Jonathan Bates, the Mellowdrone main man whose own foray into electro, as Big Black […]
Yuna first picked up at guitar at the age of 14, but it wasn’t until she was in the midst of studying law that she began to hone her songwriting craft with performances in the public eye. Now, the 24-year-old Malaysian singer is making herself at home in L.A. while she brings some of those […]
Bradley Hanan Carter sings with the weight of a guy who’s wrestled some demons, or at the very least covered a lot of miles. The latter, in Carter’s case, is inarguable – he’s the former guitarist/backup singer in the New Zealand rock quintet Steriogram, largely idle (except for a digital album in 2010) since 2007, […]
In the battle between original sin and disco, there are no losers. At least, when said fight is orchestrated by Alex Lilly and Bram Inscore, the multi-instrumentalist art-schoolers whose wry take on electro has been realized in the new project Touché. Longtime friends Lilly and Inscore are familiar faces on the L.A. scene; Lilly for […]
