Took me about 50 seconds – the length of the woozy, haunting intro to “Marmalade” – to completely fall for Sea of Bees, the nom de tune of Sacramento indie-popper Julie Baenziger. Her debut album “Songs for the Ravens” sounds folky in some places, gauzy and ambient in others and twee as hell in still […]
Canadian indie-rockers Wintersleep are one of those bands that inspires a whole litany of this-meets-that comparisons. Band of Horses meets Interpol? My Morning Jacket meets the National? Or, my own concoction, Silversun Pickups meets R.E.M. You get the idea – the Nova Scotia quartet’s is a brooding and occasionally explosive sound, familiar enough to be […]
You might remember Under the Influence of Giants from their 2006 album and their party-starting shows on the Sunset Strip. Frontman Aaron Bruno has turned the page but maintained the energy with his new please-capitalize-me outfit AWOLNATION. The band’s debut EP “Back From Earth” was released in May, and the first single, “Burn It Down,” […]
Chasing Kings set the bar pretty high simply with the title of last year’s debut EP, “The Current State of Our Future,” six songs of high anxiety and higher energy in which Matt Schwartz’s big voice presides over a fast-paced duel between piano licks and guitar chops. “Once upon a summer / we were desperate […]
Through five albums, London-based singer-songwriter Ed Harcourt has seldom stood in one place, except maybe in the shadows. Sonically, the onetime Mercury Prize nominee (for 2001’s “Here Be Monsters”) has channeled his moodiness in piano ballads, orchestral excursions and chamber-pop, never playing the mope to the point of disdain. His fifth album, the lushly arranged […]
L.A. quartet Saint Motel has been busy working on new music to follow up the release last year of the six-song, six-video “ForPlay.” One of those tunes, “Dear Dictator,” is a dramatic rock stomper that’s always been one of the highlights of the foursome’s sets, and now it gets remix treatment from electro maestro Sam […]
In his collaboration with Richard Davies as Cardinal and solo outings including two essential albums for Sub Pop (1995’s “It’s Heavy in Here” and ’97’s “The Lateness of the Hour,” go get ’em), Eric Matthews made lush headphones music that turned the space between your ears into kaleidoscopic mush. Something about the orchestration and arrangements […]
There’s a lot of geography involved in the emergence of Santa Monica quartet Chief: The members are all private-school kids from southern California who got together at NYU and, signing with London-based Domino Records, relocated back to Santa Monica and ended up making their debut album in studios on both coasts. But Chief’s most important […]
Must be something in the water in Australia – bands with classic rock references worming their way into our ears with flashes of the familiar. While Wolfmother come over like sixth-form swots playing in the garage, learning the Black Sabbath songbook from A to Ozzy, Tame Impala are their slacker younger siblings, hanging out in […]
Last year I got my mind expanded by the instrumental rock of Jonathan Haskell, who was making music as Firs. Now Haskell has combined that moniker with his side project as Seven Saturdays, still bending ears with intricate compositions that unfold like time-lapse photographs of flowers blooming. Seven Saturdays’ new album-length EP (five songs, almost […]
