L.A. native Lena Fayre is not yet out of her teens, but she sings like she’s lived three lifetimes of disquietude, alternately woozy and weary, dreamy and hopeful, piquant and playful. Her 2014 album “Oko” displays substantial production sophistication, with its refracted pop, R&B and balladry, and it also suggests Fayre is beyond her years […]
Rapper Sin Marlee is in his mid-20s; from the mid-city, Carson to be exact; and he is on the Los Angeles-based label 6J Recordings. On “King of Nazareth,” a single released last summer, he raps over smooth, jazzy production by Foisey, filled out with drums, horns, and sirens, with a flow equally as smooth about […]
Guitarist Bobb Bruno — the other half of the Best Coast creative duo — never seems to run out of ideas, even if thematically the band continues to run in place. On “California Nights,” the title track of Best Coast’s third album, Bethany Cosentino waxes plaintively on — get this — the L.A. life. She’s […]
“Hills So High,” last year’s debut from L.A. quartet A House for Lions, was a traditionalist’s dream, full of cinematic, poignant songs built from rock’s basic parts — guitars, stand-up bass, keys, percussion and Daniel Norman’s crystalline vocals. Now the quartet (Norman with guitarist Mike Nissen, bassist Eric McCann and drummer Joseph August Luisi) is […]
Scenes and friends from Joel Jerome’s Echo Park neighborhood and surrounding environs star in the new video for “Everybody Wants Somebody,” the epic and uplifting seven-minute jam from the album “Psychedelic Thriftstore Folk.” [Stream it here.] Jerome, of course, is Joel Morales, the founding member of Hawthorne pop band who has segued into a new […]
Before we get to the catchy new broadside from Surfer Blood: Please somebody send a box of chocolates to Warner Bros. Records. In announcing their back-to-DIY “1000 Palms” (due May 12) on Thursday, Surfer Blood called their time at Warner “frustrating,” saying the new album was made “completely void of the middlemen scrutinizing every bar […]
Singer-songwriter-producer Meeka Kates splits his time between Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles and Lyon, France, making style-shifting pop with production so warm it could heat half the East Coast. He says his new song “Waves” was started while he was in L.A. and finished in France; on any continent, it oozes a meditative vibe that […]
Brooklyn-based synth-pop connoisseurs Body Language have been keeping busy since their inception in 2008. Founding members Matt Young (vocals) and Grant Wheeler (multi-instrumentalist) cut their teeth working for Passion Pit while at the same time writing and releasing their own music in the form of 2010’s “Speaks” EP.  Since then, the band has released three more EPs […]
It’d be so much easier if Milo Greene were a real person. You know, a guy with good taste in sweaters and books, just the right amount of chin hair, dark-eyed and slightly chiseled but with a crooked smile, bemused but not in a condescending way, with a quirky, engaging point of view.
Strange Babes shot straight to the top of the jangle-pop heap last spring with their infectious first single “Holiday.” The band, built around the core of L.A.-based New Zealanders Sam McCarthy, Leroy Clampitt and Maddie North, this week unveiled the second single, “Come Back Around,” another track rooted in the lineage of the Beatles, Byrds […]
