For songwriter/producer Jesse Nolan, it’s not a matter of finding soul in the machine – it’s eliciting soul from the machine. The songs from Nolan’s new project Caught a Ghost offer a rump-shaking hybrid of electronica, Stax horns and R&B crooning. Think Fitz & the Tantrums transported to the Holodeck. Nolan, who made some very […]
Jonathan Bates describes his new direction as Big Black Delta as “stream of consciousness, in every possible way.” “There’s a certain element of, ‘Hey, I sneezed on the wall and it looks like a painting,’” says Bates, the former Mellowdrone frontman who has gone on to play with M83 and White Sea (the solo project […]
Feist’s new single is pretty. Are you surprised? We are not. The fourth album by the 35-year-old former punk rocker – and her first since the multiple award-winning “The Reminder” in 2007 – is titled “Metals” and due out Oct. 4. Feist has been teasing the album’s songs with nifty video “vignettes,” but “How Come […]
Sole & the Skyrider Band last month released its latest album “Hello Cruel World,” which features collaborations with Xiu Xiu, Lil B, Sage Francis and Pictureplane. On the video for “Immortality,” they teamed up with Decadence Comics artist Dave “Lando” Lander, whose animated line drawings pack as much as the song’s sci-fi storyline – which, […]
L.A. has benefited from yet another band who has packed their gear up and migrated across the country. Originally from Washington D.C., Matty Taylor and Misha Bullock of Tennis System trade in ferocious, melodic neo-shoegaze along with them, and they’ve recruited Christopher Norman and Guylaine Vivarat (formerly of L.A.’s Useless Keys) to round out the […]
San Francisco’s Girls have returned with a new single to follow up their beloved (and apathetically titled) album, “Album,” and it’s a slow-burning, seven-minute track in which guitars roar instead of toying with the simple melodies that characterized their debut. Although the band’s melancholy had always been endearing, especially with Christopher Owen’s heart-wrenching and forlorn […]
The woozy, gravity-defying psychedelia of Diva Dompé sounds more like an artist searching for a place to land rather anybody who’s arrived, but her reverb-smothered sonic explorations do make for a long, strange trip over the course of her debut album “The Glitter End” (out earlier this month on Critical Heights). Now just doing business […]
L.A. band One Trick Pony has been making their mark in the local scene with their lush orchestral arrangements since Randolph William III founded the band back in 2003. Eight years down the road, after having a rotation of musicians flesh One Trick Pony’s sound out in a live setting, Williams has finally found a […]
L.A. three-piece Pollyn is emerging from the shadows. Last spring’s “Songs for Sale” EP saw Genevieve Artadi, Anthony Cava and Adam Jay Weissman trading in dark, sensual electronica. But in the trio’s new music, molasses-slow synths have morphed into eccentric rhythms laced with cowbell, deep bass lines and flirty guitar and keyboard riffs. “How Small […]
As one-half of the Morr Music duo Electric President, Ben Cooper traded in the kind of electro-pop melancholy that made the spines of Postal Service fans tingle. But his diet is more organic when he works alone as Radical Face, whose rapturous folk music is as stirring as it is conceptual. His 2007 album “Ghost” […]
