Album of the Month-Neptune by The Duke Spirit

It’s always so refreshing to find a  true-blue rock band that honest-to-goodness rocks.  Sultry female singer-check. Pulsing catchy drum beats-check. Intoxicating guitar and bass harmonies-check and check. After the major let down that the new Kings of Leon album was, a band that sticks to its rock roots finds me by way of Neptune, the new Duke Spirit album and our first album of the month. For those of you who enjoy rock, do read on… Neptune is The Duke Spirit’s second album release. It finds a more polished, refined and more confident Duke Spirit attacking with a blitzkrieg... [Read more of this review]

The Walkmen - You & Me

The Walkmen don’t walk. They don’t run. They don’t even saunter. They lilt. They float. They roll and stumble along even. But they don’t walk. Never have, and on their new album  You & Me, they roll and stumble with the best of them. Hamilton Leithauser can’t really sing. He screams, yells, deadpans, talks, croons even, but he don’t sing. If you’re familiar with The Walkmen, you know they have a penchant for lilting twinkling string sections, throbbing precise percussion and a lull groggy voice with introspective lyrics that resembles a drunken inner... [Read more of this review]

The Transplants

I feel like doing a little something off the map for me. It’s something that’s been stewing in my head, the words marinating until they are glazed by a thin layer of self-righteousness and cynicism. I’ve been living in the fine and fair city of Los Angeles for a long time now. My entire life, actually.  I grew up (as did many of my close friends) going to the same grocery stores, malls, movie theaters, and clubs as the famous people that pepper the more affluent parts of this town. I’ve been inconvenienced by on-site filming down the streets I grew up in as a child. I nary... [Read more of this review]

TV On The Radio-Dear Science/Wiltern Show Review

I didn’t get it at first. I thought to myself “what is this amalgam of unintelligible sonic bantering?”. But that’s mostly because I didn’t get it. It took me a while to swallow down TV On The Radio’s EP Desperate Youths, Bloodthirsty Babies and actually remains, to this day my least favorite album of theirs. It wasn’t until Return to Cookie Mountain, their first LP, that I realized you cannot approach this band with the typical rubric of rock. To be quite honest, anything TV On The Radio isn’t lent to accessibility and anyone who says they liked... [Read more of this review]

Xu Xu Fang at Bordello

The interior is saturated with so much red you’d swear the building were hemorrhaging. Black furnishings, chandeliers impose on the monopoly of red in the room. This used to be a church. Tonight, Bordello is the venue playing host to one of the best bands in L.A. you’ve never heard. And they’re late… Bordello of Blood(sans Dennis Miller) The ambience at Bordello is striking and rich, perfectly suited for the dream-fuzz psychedelia of Xu-Xu Fang. They kicked off their set with their title track from their recently released EP, The Mourning Son. The band is the brainchild... [Read more of this review]

Why So Serious? or Who’s Feeling Guilty?

Beck just ain’t the free-wheelin’ spirit he used to be. The ingeniously poppy-melodic sensibilities of his early albums have almost completely disappeared by this point. Modern Guilt is Beck’s most recent album. He has come to terms with his heartbreak and feelings of alienation thereof which is evident on Guero, made all the more poignant by such songs as Go It Alone, Earthquake Weather, and Missing. He has also stopped fooling himself (and us) that he can somehow rekindle that childish wonder which galvanized his earlier works (see Odelay, Midnight Vultures, Mellow Gold). So... [Read more of this review]

This Is Our Punk Rock Pt. 2

Hey there my pretty little chillun, and welcome to the second installment of my article. If you did not catch the first post, you can click here to read part one.  I hope that this article will give some people some insight into this genre of rock and moreover what rock is supposed to be and shouldn’t have been.  There will be plenty more preaching coming soon, so stick around… What GY!BE do is quite deliberate.  This isn’t always the case.  For instance, take Explosions in the Sky. This band does not employ noise quite nearly as much as GY!BE, however there is a crushing monotony,... [Read more of this review]

This Is Our Punk Rock

Welcome kids, to the first installment of a series of blowhard music articles from a man who knows much more than you, but much less than, lets say, Jesus Christ.  The following is in two parts and discusses a totally awesome genre of music oft overlooked.  It’ll blow your freakin’ mind, man. “Progressive” music has always been something of a black sheep in the rock ‘n’ roll community. It has been a label plastered on most bands with a penchant for long, sweeping tracks and using non-traditional instrumentation (as far as our ubiquitous rock community is concerned).  The... [Read more of this review]