Photos and videos of the Shrine always show the boys skating in pools around broken furniture and tattered debris. Listening to the Shrine’s Bless Off demo works well to evoke that same mindset, where the fast-paced dangers in front of you actually slow down time and give you a sense of manic focus. It’s the difference between hippies, taking massive bong hits, and revolutionary freaks snorting the same prepared cannabinoid snuff the Zulu used to knock the shit out of the British. The Shrine are hesitant to call their music “metal,” though that seems the best fit for all the solos going up and down the fretboard, and singer Josh Landau’s occasional falsetto (more of this, please!). But it’s young, very American stuff, the kind that brings a can of spray paint when it leaves the house and owes as much to Black Flag’s My War as that album owes to Black Sabbath, all with a late seventies flair that hints at what could have been in the NWOBHM had been the NWOAHM (look it up). Think “Stone Cold Crazy” by Queen, or the fastest of fast Thin Lizzy, or a more boogie version of Motorhead—true Americana by people who learned it second-hand. Lyrically these songs seem to be first-hand accounts, sticking to angry hangovers, Troglodyte pride, and deceptively insane girls: “She had her head on straight/or so it seemed!” Boy, can I relate. You’ll be surprised at how familiar this music feels, even if most of the trucks and wheels in your life come from dodging traffic on the 10.

—D.M. Collins

For about fifteen years, the generic, catch-all genre suffix for music was “–core.” Now it’s “–wave.” FYI, Magic Wands is a –wave band. Their singer is a girl, and she doesn’t sound like she cares about anything she’s singing about. You can imagine her wearing sunglasses in the studio—you can’t really imagine them ever without sunglasses. For some, this sort of 10s aesthetic is going to be too gauche to give a chance, and that’s a shame. I mean, you wouldn’t be wrong. There’s a song called “Teenage Love” for christ’s sake. You could definitely move some designer denim with this album. But for what it is, it’s masterful. The vacant 80s guitar works perfectly in a sort of invisible homage to the Cure. The lyrics are spaced out and vague, like the vocal effects. Fans of the Xx and Yeasayer will find much to like. For my money, “Kaleidoscope Hearts” is the strongest track, blending a gaze-y guitar foundation with a hip-twisting backbeat and a bassline that’s strictly by the books. Magic Wands draws a lot from the dark, sad British synths of the 80s, but with enough modernity to keep it fairly obsequious—to keep it from sounding “retro.” In fact, you’ll probably only hear about the 80s-ness of this album in reviews. Because this isn’t going to be the return of New Wave. This is the new New Wave. This is just –wave.

—Matt Dupree

THE KOREATOWN ODDITY
Buzzmixer’s Revenge cassette
self-released

I’m too recognizable—at this year’s L. A. Zine Fest, I had to fight off a Pigpen-esque cloud of bashful young people flurrying around me, all of them asking, “Hey, do you know Dan Collins from L.A. RECORD?” as they thrust their cassettes and business cards and manifestos into my hand. And so I learned a couple new things: one, I need to change my name (done), and two, there’s a crazy kid named “the Koreatown Oddity” making musical collages in the name of hip-hop. No iMac here—this lo-fi assemblage of beats around looped vocal clips feels put together with twine, and reminds me of one of the best eras of hip-hop, when groups like EPMD really got out the scratchy vinyl and put together smart, evocative new songs that respected their source material while standing on its shoulders to achieve something utterly new. Except, you know, EPMD had rappers, and here there are none, except maybe the loops of Ned Flanders saying “Son of a gun-diddley-un!” over a maudlin orchestral piece. TKO (hey, I bet that acronym is intentional!) doesn’t hesitate to fade out the beats in order to play Dr. Seuss records, or to do a random mic check with lots of F-bombs. But it’s not just fucking around. When a groove suddenly breaks out based around the chiming music from an Egyptian orb knocked over by Homer and Lisa in an ancient Simpsons episode, you realize you’ll never watch TV the same way again.

—D.M. Collins

SUMMER TWINS
Summer Twins
Burger Records

In the tradition of the Thompson Twins, the Cocteau Twins, and actual twins Kim and Kelley Deal come the Summer Twins: Chelsea and Justine Brown. Theirs is not “another stupid summer” in the parlance of 50 Foot Wave, but one of soft-serve, cartwheels and tranquil afternoons in a hammock. The production on their self-titled debut is refreshingly clean and the instrumentation minimal, in contrast to both current indie pop bands and the original Wall of Sound. They bring to mind 90s Brit acts like Helen Love or Talulah Gosh—you got it, twee! Their closest contemporaries would be Still Corners or Betty and the Werewolves, but the Twins add a proud streak of Americana. The record’s standout is the single “I Don’t Care,” which echoes the graceful disengagement of Nancy Sinatra’s “Sugar Town,” Kirsty MacColl’s “They Don’t Know” or Young Marble Giants’ “Include Me Out.” “Stars Aligned” has a hula-like quality, complete with crickets and a gong. “Apple Orchards” shares the rhythm of Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy,” but replaces the saccharine come-on with earnest natural fructose. “I Could Never Break Your Heart” acknowledges that reality never lives up to fantasy, but resists becoming cynical—and the guitar lick would make Mickey and Sylvia proud. The innocence is alarmingly authentic: the Twins are still quite young! They awaken my big sister instinct.

—Bonnie Johnson

BLACK BANANAS
Rad Times Xpress IV
Drag City

If you’re a Jennifer Herrema fan, you already know that RTX changed their name to Black Bananas, and you undoubtedly already own this album because you’ve been waiting with baited breath since 2010 for it to come out. But if you’re lukewarm on the RTX and Royal Trux discography, this album is a force to be reckoned with on its own terms. Though there’s plenty here for the familiar fan, Herrema’s taken the Frampton vocoder vibe from the last RTX album and stretched it in a new, funky direction: music with boogie, from boogie rock a la Edgar Winter to the kind of synth boogie DAM FUNK champions, though perhaps never for an entire track. She’d do well to go full immersion at least once: even on tracks like “Hot Stupid,” which begins almost exactly like George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog,” she sounds like Alice Cooper by the end. But it works the other way too, and so songs like “My House” that sound EXACTLY like Def Leppard’s Pyromania wind up having cool phased guitars reminiscent of Funkadelic or 70s Isley Brothers.  There’s something both exciting and familiar about this album’s sound, which hearkens to that period in the 80s where George Clinton and Zapp were making way for Prince, albeit with backward-masked sounding guitars and plenty of leftover hair metal vibe. This is the rock of party vans and melted 8-tracks. And fair warning: songs with titles like “Rad Times” and “Do It” are going to make you want to do all the cocaine in the world!

—D.M. Collins

-Tom Child

(Watch: director Dave Markey discusses and shows deleted scenes from his documentary The Reinactors, available now in a limited edition DVD package from We Got Power Films)

The Reinactors is nearly over, it’s after midnight, and I am on the verge of sobbing. A prepubescent girl with a keyboard on the curb of Hollywood Boulevard is singing the saddest version of “Hotel California” I have ever heard, and behind her, El Capitan’s dazzling marquee illuminates the faces of Freddy Krueger, Shrek, and Captain Jack Sparrow as they watch and listen.  Someone in this crowd will definitely want a souvenir of his or her trip to Hollywood, a photo with a bona-fide movie character.  Maybe there’s even a casting director out there, a talent scout looking for the next Hollywood superstar (or a body double for Johnny Depp).

David Markey’s latest documentary isn’t about Sonic Youth or Nirvana; it’s about the shabbily costumed “ambassadors of Hollywood” you see every time cruel fate shoves you near Hollywood and Highland.  And not even Courtney Love in The Year Punk Broke will prepare you for the desperate fame-seeking hunger in the eyes of The Reinactors’ skinny Superman, or the crazy-eyed Marilyn Monroe who claims to have slept with him, or the shockingly realistic (and white) Michael Jackson, or the weird demon-man with wings and fangs and cat’s eyes who seems to adore a character in his own mind, even if that character is hard to explain to tourists who just want to meet Charlie Chaplin or Minnie Mouse.

These actors playing actors have bought into the true American dream of fame, and they want it bad.  They love any camera, and for Markey’s lens, they gush, they affect accents, and they tell personal details about themselves and each other that are by turns desperate and poignant.  While Markey treats their stories with sympathy, these costumed buskers never let you forget just how sick they are, and not only with the mental health and addiction problems you’d expect.  You’ll see and hear about diabetes and prison beatings, maced faces and missing teeth in this movie—it’s hard to be in lock-up when you’re dressed like Batman!  Yet there is also a Dickensian sense of pride, camaraderie, and even love amongst these outcasts.  If you work in movies or aspire to, you may just recognize your own career struggles played out here in gruesome miniature—and for you musicians, especially those of you who draw less of a crowd with your own music than with your all-female Misfits tribute band, who’s to say these ambitious actors are more deluded than you?   

It’s a rare movie that feels both like a funny clip from YouTube and like a Mike Leigh film, yet The Reinactors manages to mesh the two in a way that is horrifyingly, hilariously bleak.  Prepare to cry, but also prepare to watch Superman smoke pot and talk shit about black people.  If Hollywood has its own branch of Hell, this would be it, and the damned sculpt their brimstone out of celluloid dreams.

-Dan Collins

Rumspringa
Self-titled EP
Cantora

Rumspringa’s vibe can be defined as East of the Brite Spot Americana: sweet potato fries with pepperjack cheese, crispy on the outside, soft and orange in the middle. It takes 20 and a 1/2 minutes to get through all 6 tracks on their EP. On opener “Shake em Loose Tonight,” Joey Stevens and Itaru de la Vega invite you to hit up their back patio, “Brothers and sisters/Won’t you gather around/Don’t need no tickets/We’re all from the same town,” for a little Devendra meets Black Keys bluesy after-hours—less folky than the former, not as punk as the latter. On “Goldmine,” Stevens’ vocals twist a tempered yarn around his cat-walkin’ guitar licks, as Vega’s lilting shuffle on the drums hits the spot that connects your shoulders to your belly-button and inspires a gentle rocking motion. The chorus (“Ah, Sativa, I feed you g-g-g-olden touch…”) could almost get crunk if Lil Jon poured it into his platinum chalice. The third “member” of Rumpspringa, the little-lupe memory pedal, allows the boys to traverse a range of layers and to really swing a strong rhythmic groove. Stevens harnesses his inner Tom Waits chi on “Skulls ‘n Phones,” with Vega’s “dow, da dow, da dow, da” takin’ it to the river for a romp in the leaves. Best if consumed after 2 AM.

— Daiana Feuer

Da Beatsmith Benny Blaze
An Eclectic Life Orchestration
Undaworld Production

The idea sounded great: a hip-hop mixtape made using samples from 1970s rock powerhouse Electric Light Orchestra. And on the instrumental side, it was great. ELO’s records were busy and very overproduced, making their music an unlikely but perfect foil for today’s rap climate. Da Beatsmith does a great job weaving the band’s over-the-top instrumentals and catchy hooks into fresh-sounding backing tracks. But the rappers here don’t even come close to being as good as the beats they’re rapping on top of. At best they lack charisma; at worst they can barely keep up with the beat. Take “The Evil Woman,” which starts with an excellent stop-start rhythm from one of ELO’s biggest hits, only to be ruined by the vocals from Jen Jen, who raps so fast that her verses could be placed on top of any track here and sound the same. The vocal highlight on the record comes from the sung (not rapped) vocals of Alisa on “Summer Feeling,” a summer jam in the style of Len’s “Steal My Sunshine.” But if the most positive thing that comes out of a mixtape is a reference to a one-hit-wonder from the ‘90s, there’s a problem. Still, anyone interested in hearing the great sounds and mediocre vocals of this mixtape can currently download it for free over at Undaworld Productions’ website.

— Adam Fisher

The Weather Underground
Bird in the Hand EP
Self-Released

This third EP for the Weather Underground is a collection of short stories, each told by a different character. First: “Fight Song for the Desalojos,” a mariachi-esque song born from a recent trip to Guatemala that sounds like a great street festival and uses about every type of percussion and wind instrument to propel the party. The EP was written around the second track, “Trainwreck,” a strong, straight-forward rock anthem that pleads passion to the masses, with a feel like the Shys “Call in the Calvary” or many of the Walkmen’s up-tempo songs. The title track is a slower, more reflective piece that tells a personal story of learning to move on when your life is turned upside down, and the record closes with a somber, more gospel-inspired “All Ye People.” The band evidently believes that things happen in threes, so Bird in the Hand is the third and final EP for a while, though they are looking toward to releasing a full-length album late this year. There’s obvious inspiration here from artists such as Spoon, Delta Spirit, Tom Waits, Otis Redding and any old soul music they can get their hands on, and the spirits of each float comfortably throughout this record.

— Julia Swanwick