Yesterday  in Santa Ana, I relived a bit of my youth at the homeland-security-threatening Cacophony Society documentary extravaganza that included a preview screening of Jon Alloway’s Cacophony Society documentary Into the Zone: the Story of the Cacophony Society followed by the grand opening of the Cacophony Society Zone Show “art” retrospective at Santa Ana’s Grand [...]

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Somehow the Aggrolites are of that Warped world, and yet they have successfully fought its worst urges and drained all the suck out, leaving behind a “dirty reggae” sound that is highly pure, largely instrumental, organ-driven, and at times even beautiful. Listening to this album is like watching the female skinheads of This Is England walking down the street in their braces and boots.

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Every rainbow owes its existence to a rain cloud, and that dark space between the two is filled by Corridor’s music. As Corridor, Michael Quinn has recently released his second album, Real Late, with Manimal Vinyl. It’s heavy, intense stuff that wields a fine metal edge to reveal something beautiful. We sat him on the couch between L.A. RECORD’s Dan Collins and Daiana Feuer.

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I pride myself on being able to capture the sound of music in words, but there really is no way to convey what came out of that man’s throat and into our hearts Friday night. The closest I can get is to say that he sounded effortless and full of love, like butter melting slowly over Mom’s pancakes. He sounded awake and alert, classy, not cluttered in Rastafarian claptrap but “transcendent” in as close to a literal meaning as an atheist like me can believe in.

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In case you’re wondering, Jade solo is the same Jade you think you know, just as smiley and happy from two feet away as in every photo of her in Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros on a festival stage you’ve ever seen. As she tuned and tried to adjust to the crappy sound system by leaving her elevated stool and sitting cross-legged on the low stage, even her eyes smiled, and her eyebrows too. And if I’d had a magnifying glass, I would suspect that her dimples are smile-shaped.

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Shannon and the Clams are NOT a girl group: they glean insights from Danzig as well as from Patsy Cline, and they sneak messages about loving dogs and blinding Prince Charming into songs inspired by the soundtrack to Indiana Jones. They speak to us now from the road as electronic children’s records about botanical delights blast from the van’s speakers, somewhere between god-knows-where and Vegas. This interview by Dan Collins.

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You’ll almost want to cry at the great indie-label talents that went fallow due to the shoddy distribution issues of the pre-digital world. But you’ll also revel in the funkiness and creativity on display—from the synth-sax growl of York Wilborn’s Psychedelic Six to the early party rap of Le’Chance. Most of all, though, you will shake your fucking tail-feather to these grooves, everything from JB-style sax jams to blaxploitation-score soul to utterly unique songs.

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Hank Williams, Jr. has had a lot to long for–a dead famous father, an accident that left him scarred and forced to wear his trademark beard, hat, and sunglasses at all times, and he must be upset that all his “rowdy friends” in country music are actually liberal pinkos who love prisoners, government programs, and true American freedoms, i.e. Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, the late Johnny Cash, you name it.

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I wonder if the mysterious Dada Man is my own age, because his approach is similar to Man or Astro-man? spinoffs I remember from the late 90s (Servotron, Operation Re-Information), though he strips them of all humor and levity and takes them to their logical sci-fi sampling conclusion, leaving just enough “music” for this to be a CD and not an artifact. This is not electronica, this is post-punk noise with a drum machine.

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Album reviewing isn’t that glamorous: we get so many submissions that literally, all we want to do is curl up in the shower naked like Glenn Close in the beginning of The Big Chill because we just feel so defeated and confused, without answers to the meaning of it all! By providing us with those answers, you also provide yourself with a big leg up against the competition.

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