Owing to the band having played 4,523 shows last year in southern California, and a few more at varying locales east of here, every avid showgoer on the Eastside has a favorite Local Natives song. “Airplanes” is mine. I liked it way back when (yes, that long ago); I like it now … something about […]
Giant Drag, the on-again, off-again rock persona of Annie Hardy, is finally resurfacing. The “Swan Song” EP, which I believe was originally due out in 2008, is set for a Feb. 16 release, and director G.J. Echternkamp makes Hardy the target for everything from glitter to green beans in this video for “Stuff to Live […]
As the main man in his tongue-twisting side project Everybody Was in the French Resistance … Now!, Art Brut frontman Eddie Argos launches verbal volleys at some well-known pop songs. The video for “G.I.R.L.F.R.E.N.” – off the band’s forthcoming album “Fixin’ the Charts (Volume One)” – features partner-in-rhyme (and girlfriend) Dyan Valdes, keyboardist of the […]
The video for Beach House’s eight-minute epic “Silver Soul” is quite … well, silvery. It’s the vision of the band’s own Victoria Legrand, and a rather murky Busby Berkeley dream, if you ask me. Like Beach House’s hotly anticipated album, “Teen Dream” (which comes out next week on Sub Pop with a companion DVD containing […]
Nathan Willett sounds like a man ready to plunge into the abyss, or at least a guy at a crossroads. In a way, he and his bandmates in Cold War Kids are. Four years after the scrappy quartet from Orange County (now, Long Beach) elbowed their way into indie hearts with their sweaty blues-punk, Willett, […]
I’ve scheduled an extra appointment so my therapist can figure out why I’m not as crazy about The xx as everybody else seems to be, or as everybody who knows me thinks I should be. Maybe it’s a predisposition against bands that thumb their noses at the laws of capitalization, but it’s probably more a […]
Here’s a little music video noir from the French duo Air. I will follow. The song “So Light Is Her Footfall” was one of the few highlights on the group’s fifth album, “Love 2,” which came out last year. Air performs March 28 at Disney Hall, with local singer-songwriter AM opening.
It’s rather music video noir in the Ravi Dhar-directed treatment for the Polyamorous Affair song “New York City.” We follow the husband-and-wife team of Eddie Chacon and Sissy Sainte-Marie on a soggy tour of NYC in all its disconnectedness, leading up to a steamy rendezvous at the famous Chelsea Hotel. Compelling stuff. Eddie backgrounds the […]
Once you got past the little joke about the Deerhunter guy playing in the Hall of North American Mammals, Bradford Cox’s set on Friday night at the Natural History Museum in L.A. wasn’t terribly extraordinary. Performing in his solo permutation as Atlas Sound, Cox floated through a set of dreamy material from his sophomore album […]
Ah, Warpaint – atop everyblogger’s Next Big Thing list, signed to Rough Trade, well-connected, conjuring up strange images of a vaguely Fleetwood Mac-related waking dream I had in 1974 … and with not a single song I remember five minutes after I’ve heard it. “Elephants” is an airy slow-grower from the band’s “Exquisite Corpse” EP. […]
