Sibling-fueled L.A. quintet Babes have a subversive sense of humor, especially when it comes to matters of the heart — having dialed the band’s “hotline” (470-BABES-77) and seen the lip gloss and monogrammed panties on their merch table, we know that. The new video for “You & Me,” a song from Babes’ debut EP, follows […]
Ready your ears and free your mind — Aussie band Pond released its sixth studio album today. “Man It Feels Like Space Again” is full of fresh psychedelic tunes, created by songwriters Nick Allbrook, Joseph Ryan and Jay Watson. The title track, “Man It Feels Like Space Again,†can only be described as if Tame […]
Back in late 2013, singer Rachel Fannan described her new music — being made under the name Only You — as “some dirty Dusty Springfield-sounding sh*t.” It’s taken a while for that music to emerge, but her new single “The Pressure” is indeed dirty and dusty, its ragged guitar and Fannan’s howling vocals evoking vast, […]
If the first single from Panthar doesn’t get you out of your seat, might we suggest some sort of electric prod? “Ghost Rocket” is a glammy new-wave rave-up with the kind of surging guitars liable to induce visions of, as the lyrics say, a “radium light shower.” The new L.A. quintet was founded by singer […]
The skinny on Natalie Prass is that she’s a singer-songwriter born in Cleveland and raised in Virginia Beach who did a stint at Berklee and eventually ended up in Nashville, releasing the “Small & Sweet” EP in 2009, and the “Sense of Transcendence” EP in 2011. The real scoop is that after performing in Jenny […]
Director Grant Singer’s brilliant video for Ariel Pink’s “Dayzed Inn Daydreams” stars eccentric rocker Rick Wilder, once of Hollywood bad boys the Mau Mau’s and the Berlin Brats. Filmed near Bakersfield, it follows a very haggard Wilder, a past-his-expiration-date rocker working at a grocery store, as he encounters Pink, who had played the town the […]
Long Beach-based Nahneen Kula make an intoxicating mélange of experimental pop, mixing electronic and organic instrumentation with samples and the bright, nimble vocals of its namesake singer, Charlene Gibbs. The 24-year-old Garden Grove native derived the band’s moniker from her junior high nickname, Nahneen, and her Malaysian mother’s maiden name. Bjork (or, locally, Liphemra) might […]
San Francisco guitar-drum duo the Dodos mark their 10th anniversary this year. In anticipation of their sixth full-length album, “Competition” is a light and sweet peek into the matured craft of Meric Long and Logan Kroeber. Albeit a straightforward indie-rock song, the first single off of the nine-track album reminds us of the strength in […]
The raging punk-cum-blues of the band Virginia Reed isn’t the work of anybody named Virginia at all — the L.A. quartet is helmed by singer-songwriter-multi-instrumentalist Keith Hendriksen, who in the current lineup is surrounded by John Klein, Jeff Watson and Bryan Hamilton. The band’s moniker derives from a 1940s-era portrait of a woman that Hendricksen […]
First, it was “Paul Newman.” Then, “Dustin Hoffman.” And for their third single, the Fontaines continue the march of apparent celebrity homage with “Cate Blanchett,” their most throwback-sounding ditty in their growing retroist catalog. Siblings Hank and Charlotte Fontaine call their music “new-wop,” and indeed it updates the finger-snapping goodness of the 1950s with modern […]
