[Not even a month into the new year, and Buzz Bands HQ is already swimming in new music. In the interest of servicing your iPods, I’ve batched several recent mailings into one post. These include two label samplers, a promo company’s sampler and Paste magazine’s Songs for Haiti vault. Happy clicking.] L.A.’s Dazzler covers the […]
If you haven’t live this moment, you’ve witnessed it: Singing with the headphones on, consumed by the song, oblivious to your surroundings. The scenario makes for an interesting conceptual video for Fol Chen’s song “The Longer U Wait” (off 2009’s Asthmatic Kitty release, “Part I: John Shade, Your Fortune’s Made”). The piece, filmed in India […]
Venice-based the Dustbowl Revival sounds dusty, all right – the ensemble describes its take on orchestral folk “hillbilly jazz” and harks to an era when a washboard and kazoo were cutting-edge. The 10-member-strong group, fronted by Zach Lupetin, will release its sophomore album, “You Can’t Go Back to the Garden of Eden,” on March 16. […]
German quartet Lali Puna, one of the leading purveyors of the entrancing IDM for which German imprint Morr Music is known, is returning on April 1 with its first album in five years, “Our Inventions.” With the likes of Owl City making their watery strains of electro safe for “Twilight” fans, Lali Puna – fronted […]
[Today: Happy birthday to Mike Patton. Tonight: Some nifty little shows in the neighborhood.] Speaking of birthdays, Michael Runion [pictured] is celebrating today. The Jenny Lewis/Elected sideman and solo artist is playing a Bootleg Theater show along with a bunch of his musical co-conspirators, including Rilo Kiley drummer (and now solo artist) Jason Boesel and […]
L.A. quintet Vanaprasta has come a long way since they got inside my head with their nifty guitar work last March. Not so far that they have an album out yet – that’ll happen when “Heathy Geometry” is released later this year – but far enough that their dramatic blend of churning rhythms, bright riffage […]
Raymond Richards has been something of a two-headed beast the past few years, his burgeoning duties as an up-and-coming producer at his humble garage studio forcing his singer-songwriter side to the back burner. But now Richards (whose Red Rockets Glare Studio has birthed albums by Local Natives, the Broken West and Ferraby Lionheart, among others) […]
Active Child sounds like a side project for a church’s youth choir, and that is in no way a pejorative. In fact, it’s close to the truth – New Jersey-born Pat Grossi (who moved to L.A. as a teenager and then attended college in Colorado) plied his falsetto for the Philadelphia Boys Choir, an experience, […]
The Mother Hips‘ trippy power-pop has aged awfully well. On the Bay-area outfit’s seventh album, “Pacific Dust,” singer-guitarist Tim Bluhm and crew avoid the pratfalls of many of their psych-pop brethren – they’re heartfelt but not sappy, amiable but not goofy, expansive but not indulgent, with songs that exude a 1970s warmth without feeling microwaved. […]
So the story of Lucy Schwartz’s big break is that her father was jogging past the house of KCRW’s Chris Douridas and hand-delivered Lucy’s demo to the DJ. Which led to airplay on KCRW. Which led to Schwartz – as an 18-year-old senior at Palisades High – writing songs for the opening and closing credits […]
