Nik Freitas, the singer-songwriter and sideman extraordinaire (he’s played with Conor Oberst and Broken Bells and on records by Miles Kurosky of Beulah, Jason Boesel and All Smiles, among others), added a healthy dose of keyboard shimmer to the warm folk-pop on his fifth full-length, “Saturday Night Underwater.” The album came out in June on […]
Peter Bjorn and John have brought the mere act of streaming an album to an entirely different level. Although their latest album, “Gimme Some,” has been out since March, the Swedish trio have offered a visual component to accompany the whole record. With a very clever treatment by directors Ted Malmros and Gustaf von Arbin, […]
“Every Little Thing,” the first single from Soft Swells, is a tight, tuneful day-brightener that bleeds optimism with every echoing chord, percussive jab and twinkling key. Funny, then, that the Mike Berlucchi-directed video for the song counterposes its sunny disposition against the overheated despair of the Salton Sea, but the desert does breed its own […]
[So it’s “Mötley Crüe Day” in West Hollywood today as the Sunset Strip Music Festival begins in earnest tonight with a tribute to the hard rockers at the House of Blues. Don’t know whether to bring an autograph book to the red carpet or a taser.] It’s a too-many-damn-shows Thursday. Top recommendations: ‣ L.A. roots-rock […]
Mad Planet’s first album, 2010’s “All Elephants,” was more about the beats and textures than the shreddy guitars of principals’ previous bands, Bang Sugar Bang in singer-bassist Cooper Gillespie’s case and the Nervous Return in drummer Greg Gordon’s. But the beguiling trip-hop of that first record is almost nowhere to be found in “Pieces of […]
Five observations about “Miracle Worker,” from the über-super-duper-group SuperHeavy – Damian Marley, Dave Stewart, Mick Jagger, A.R. Rahman and Joss Stone: 5) Pretty sure I saw five dudes in knit caps in Venice doing this song in 2003. 4) This is all for charity, right? How many structures could have been rebuilt, or people fed, […]
So Many Wizards has always offered a sound that has been difficult to pin down in terms of genre, and even after expanding his project to a three-piece band including Erik Felix and Warren Woodward, Nima Kazerouni’s playful yet untamed melodies have only been able to fall under the “bedroom pop” umbrella. However, this is […]
One more cycle of 365 days and it will roughly be seven years since the Parson Red Heads first moved from Portland, Ore., to City of Angels. Of course, we were sad to see them go when they decided to return to their original hometown last year, but the folk group, which centered around husband […]
Talk about heavy messages. Shadow Shadow Shade’s life-affirming anthem “Say Yes” has been paired up with mini-documentary by O’Shea Read on an immigrant worker named Alonso Alejo Lopez. Flowers. ||| Live: Shadow Shadow Shade plays Saturday, Aug. 27, at Sunset Junction, and Saturday, Sept. 17, at Lobsterfest.
This week goes from 0 to 60 in about 5 shows: ‣ British songstress Adele, who postponed L.A. dates in June because of a bout of laryngitis, brings the songs from her Top 10 album “21” to the Greek Theatre, a show rescheduled from June 6. That’s her video for “Rolling in the Deep,” above. […]
