[Birthday greetings go out today to Paul McCartney … in L.A. tonight we have something of a Brooklyn Invasion:] White Rabbits’ new album “It’s Frightening” was produced by Britt Daniel of Spoon, and the music brims with the same spare-but-urgent qualities (that’s the video for “Percussion Gun,” above). The Brooklyn-based sextet headlines the Troubadour tonight […]
[New videos from L.A. artists …] LA Weekly cover guy Busdriver will have to dumb it down a few dozen IQ points if he ever wants to be a hip-hop star, but thankfully we have guys like him to skip stones across the mainstream. The veteran underground rapper shows no signs of being more accessible […]
Oh, you say, another actor’s musical tangent. Indeed, on the surface that’s what actor-director-producer Adam Goldberg’s debut as LANDy is – even if, as he points out, he is merely an “occasionally famous actor.” I interviewed Goldberg for a piece in the Los Angeles Times, and, not to steal from that piece, suffice to say […]
I witnessed two of Band of Skulls’ approximately 1,000 shows (OK, they played five, I think) in L.A. in the past week, and it was hard to not to get a little bit excited. The U.K. trio’s no-frills but high-skills take on blues-rock is simply a lot catchier than some of their contemporaries doing the […]
Leave it to Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros to have big ambitions for the visual accompaniment to their forthcoming album, “Up From Below” (due July 14). This video for the L.A. ensemble’s “Desert Song,” directed by Benjamin Kutsko and Cory Marrero, is billed the first of 12 parts of a “feature-length movie musical.” That […]
Now that “Oracular Spectacular” rolls off everyone’s tongue as if it were part of our music vocabulary all along, MGMT will slowly be rolling out new material in live appearances this summer – possibly some songs they wrote while holed up recently in Malibu. Ben Goldwasser said in an interview with Australian radio that he […]
Regina Spektor’s new album “far” comes out June 23, and color me infatuated with “Eet,” especially this video. The album will mark her first new material since 2006’s “Begin to Hope” (except that song on the “Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian” soundtrack), and it’ll be a welcome addition to the summertime CD bag. No U.S. […]
[Post-holiday weekend zone-out time …] Cass McCombs’ career has apparently survived an appearance on “Rockville, CA.” His new album “Catacombs” is due July 7, and the troubadour collaborated with director Aaron Brown for this visually labyrinthian video for the song “Dreams-Come-True-Girl.” Skaters, strings and … Karen Black – conceptually, there’s a lot to digest here. […]
This is genius. Cold War Kids – along with Sam Jones, the man behind Wilco’s “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” – have released an interactive video for their song “I’ve Seen Enough.” (It’s not embeddable, so if you just click on the image, or here, it’ll take you to the video.) Through the […]
[Neither of these is particularly hot-off-the-presses, but I love both songs and feel like sharing;] The Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s self-titled debut remains in heavy rotation at Buzz Bands HQ, and the New York quartet” will be back in Los Angeles for a show at the Echo on July 20, two days after […]
