Ears Wide Open: Joe Plummer
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Joe Plummer is a busy man. He drums for the Shins and Cold War Kids. Still, Plummer has found enough nooks and crannies in his schedule to create “Built in the Sun,” coming Aug. 7.
Stream: The Fling, ‘Nightshade’
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In the reflective song “27” on the new album from the Fling, singer Dustin Lovelis waxes about smiling in the face of impending doom. The Long Beach quintet is, after all, familiar with confronting adversity. The band’s sophomore effort, “Mean Something” (being self-released Aug. 22), marks an impressive bounce-back from a brief and arduous fling […]
Popular With Me 2011: My 15 favorite live shows
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In 2011, I saw more than 500 bands perform live over 265-plus days of show-going, and still I feel as if I missed a lot. Plenty of what I did see remains etched in my memory, though, from festival adventures big and small (SXSW, Coachella and FYF to the Silverlake Jubilee, the substitute Sunset Junction […]
Download: Just an Animal, ‘Kamikaze’
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Just an Animal’s debut album “Lonely Hunter” (out Tuesday) marks a radical turn for the Los Angeles quartet formerly known as Red Cortez, and it’s almost all for the better. Gone is the self-conscious, guitar-heavy rock ’n’ soul of the foursome’s early recordings, which (first under the name the Weather Underground) produced a series of […]
Ears Wide Open: Just an Animal (f/k/a Red Cortez)
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For Harley Prechtel-Cortez, Ryan Kirkpatrick, Diego Guerrero, and Calvin J. Love – the guys Los Angeles knew as Red Cortez – it was a matter of “recalibrating our ears.” That’s how Kirkpatrick described the quartet moving on and becoming Just an Animal, whose music bears only a faint resemblance to the amped-up rock-and-blues Red Cortez, […]
Download: Gardens & Villa, ‘Star Fire Power’
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Last time we heard from the Santa Barbara quintet, Gardens & Villa were just making a splash in our music libraries with two new-wave funk-influenced pop gems available on their Bandcamp page. Since then, they’ve signed to Secretly Canadian and precociously released their self-titled debut last week to fuel momentum. Boasting 12 tantalizing tracks that […]
Download: Gardens & Villa, ‘Black Hills’
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There’s a little bit of fractured soul – and a lot of deftly executed knob-twiddling – bubbling up in the first two tracks by Gardens & Villa, the Santa Barbara quintet of Chris Lynch, Levi Hayden, Adam Rasmussen, Shane McKillop and Dustin Ineman. No surprise that they’ve found a studio ally in sonic adventurer and […]
Tonight in L.A.: Richard Swift/Red Cortez, Eulogies, J. Tillman/Jenny O, War Tapes/Robotanists
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Top shows to take the chill off your Monday night: ‣ Richard Swift makes magic as much as he does music. The former SoCal resident, now ensconced in Oregon and releasing music on Secretly Canadian, deals in various strains of baroque, chamber, ragtime, lounge and folk pop, making it all sound timeless. I can recommend […]
New bits: Red Cortez, Voxhaul Broadcast, Eastern Conference Champions, the Satellite
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‣ Red Cortez is throwing everything it has at this month’s residency at the Satellite. Well, not everything, because Red Cortez has a wealth of music, the best of which will emerge on the L.A. quartet’s debut album later this year. But some of the rest of the songs will be released in the form […]
Popular With Me, 2009: My favorite albums
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I have only to glance at Stereogum’s post on the most anticipated albums of 2010 to be assured that next year will be better than 2009, when my most-visited album was the Stone Roses’ reissue. [Heartfelt thanks again to the person who gifted me that; you know who you are.] That said, ’09 had some […]
