The restlessness of indie rock and the ethereality of Latin pop. Spanish and English. Jacqueline Santillan and Matthew Beighley. They are marriages that work on “Luces Del Sur,” the second album from L.A. quartet Wait. Think. Fast. Now about that pesky punctuation in the band’s name … “It’s not wait-think-fast,” says Santillan, explaining the derivation, […]
As a founding member and producer of Portishead, Geoff Barrow has been saddled with the unfortunate “trip-hop” tag ever since the Bristol, U.K., outfit scooped the Mercury Music prize with debut LP “Dummy” in 1995. If the band’s musically expansive 2008 album “Third” wasn’t quite enough of a departure, then Barrow seems determined to shed […]
Hearing this first single from the Chapin Sisters’ sophomore album “Two,” I’m not the least bit bothered by the fact that, despite the rhyme, palm trees don’t have leaves. I’m rather … er, frond of it. The music made by sisters Abigail and Lily Chapin (and, previously, half-sister Jessica Craven, who is currently on hiatus […]
The late-’80s British alt-rock canon looms large over a certain type of West Coast indie hopeful, to such an extent that some bands never quite seem able to step out from under the ample shadow. Not so with San Diego’s Lights On, which has followed up on the promise of debut EP “Waiting to Hear the […]
Voxhaul Broadcast has pretty much taken Los Angeles by storm this year, juggling a passel of sweaty live shows with recording sessions to complete its debut album, “Timing Is Everything.” The songs made by the quartet of David Dennis, Anthony Aguiar, Phillip Munsey II and Kurt Allen walk an exhilarating tightrope between rock ’n’ soul […]
As alluring a shapeshifter as “The Shores” might be, there’s a wry conceptual disconnect in the Sea of Cortez’s first single. The six-minute track begins with moody atmospherics, pulsates a little, and then Christian Thomas sings: “Testing the waters from the shore.” Which, of course, is no way to gauge anything. The accelerating rhythms and […]
“Come Come,” the debut single from the L.A. duo Hot As Sun is a sweetly blissed-out reverie, built on a simple Omnichord line, that conjures up the entirety of the 1980s going by in slow motion. It’s the first step toward a four-song EP for collaborators Jamie Jackson and Deborah Stoll. Jackson is a multi-instrumentalist […]
Updated: Since the download of this album has expired, we’ve included the stream below. File under limited-time offers: Jim Fairchild, the former guitarist for Grandaddy and the current guitarist in Modest Mouse, has been busy touring and working on his third album as All Smiles. I backgrounded it last November when All Smiles made a […]
The Sunset Strip Music Festival busted loose Thursday with a tribute to Slash and rocks in earnest tonight with show in five of the neighborhood clubs. Earlier I tabbed six bands I’ll be trying to see in the clubs on Saturday, but in the interests of introducing another young band, I give you Delta Rose, […]
It’d be a compliment to call the Fling derivative, and it’d have nothing to do with the Long Beach band’s ’60s-flavored folk rock. The band – brothers Dustin and Graham Lovelis, along with Justin Ivey and Justin Roeland – derives its name from an early-’80s SoCal band called the Fling. It was founded by the […]