Freelance Whales’ debut album “Weathervanes” oozes with affected chamber-pop and synthy, sugary charm. But the hard-touring New Yorkers’ latest single, “Enzymes” – recorded for the soft drink-sponsored imprint Green Label Sound – reveals a more seasoned approach both lyrically and thematically. Written on a laptop as an exercise in time signatures, “Enzymes” finds the band […]
[Disclosure: This trio is made up of longtime FOBB (Friends of Buzz Bands). Drummer Dave McKay is a contributor to this blog.] The members of Non Ultra Joy come from such disparate backgrounds you’d hardly expect their work to cling to one aesthetic. Chris McRitchie made saw-toothed hard rock in Flupejac and Big Stone City; […]
Badly Drawn Boy’s strangely mercurial career seems upward bound again. The Mercury Prize winner (in 2000, for “The Hour of the Bewilderbeast), who went on score the movie “About a Boy” and proceeded to go through two record labels in the middle of last decade, in October released the first of a three-album trilogy, “It’s […]
Four albums into his songwriting career and six years into a tour of duty as a Los Angeles resident, Chris Zerby never feels at a loss for source material. “L.A. surprises me with something every day,” the principal architect behind the L.A. quintet Hello Dragon says. “It’s a vast, crazy world that never ceases to […]
Sharon Van Etten won a slew of admirers with her sparse, intimate tales of heartbreak and loss on debut album “Because I Was In Love.” Among those new fans was feted songwriter Justin Vernon, aka Bon Iver, who recently covered the Brooklyn-based singer’s track “Love More,” which is the heart-wrenching closer on her sophomore release […]
The fact that Geographer frontman Michael Deni upped sticks from his native New Jersey and relocated to San Francisco is not remarkable in itself. Some of the music the young songwriter has crafted since swapping coasts following a tragic series of deaths in his family just might be. Deni, having enlisted the help of cellist […]
Homage does not get any more direct than this: “Brighter,” the latest single from the duo Psychic Powers, genuflects at the altar of Brighter, a short-lived pop trio (1989-93) on Sarah Records. (Background on the latter’s single collection, which is recommended.) Psychic Powers is the trans-Pacific collaboration between L.A.’s Alejandro Cohen (he of the band […]
Back in the days of impulse buys and agonizing over judging a CD by its cover, I dropped some paycheck on “Nightsongs,” the first album by Stars. Maybe I noted the cover of “This Charming Man,” or possibly I sampled the music in one of those then-revolutionary listening stations at Fingerprints. I don’t remember which, […]
“I got an obsession,” Billy Scher and Marc Gilfry repeat in “Lately,” their first single as American Royalty. But after you’ve ridden the song’s roller-coaster for 4 1/2 minutes, you realize the fixations L.A. songwriters have at least a couple of fixations – grimy synths and dirty blues rock among them. Full of samples and […]
It isn’t hard to grasp the concept behind El Ten Eleven’s new Adam Hauck-directed video for “The Sycophants Are Coming! The Sycophants Are Coming!” – after a few years of slogging through the surf, the Los Angeles duo is finally and justifiably making waves with their fourth album “It’s Still Like a Secret.” “Things have […]
