Migrating from the populated and frenetic, sweaty plains of her recent live performances, Ms. Jo Williams has descended into dank, wooded forests; the sun is fading. Here, there’s a walloping loneliness in her voice, as if there may not be anyone out there anymore, and even the crickets have gone quiet.

[Read more →]

This record is ruthless and filled with weather. Sometimes it’s rain-addled, green and gasping; sometimes there’s barren, scorpion-infested desert fire; sometimes you see constellations. The band (really, more a militia) seamlessly oscillates between each microclimate, never at risk for jetlag.

[Read more →]

They are enveloping. Potentially they are in an echo chamber, or they are reenacting the scene in Ghostbusters where the EPA shuts off the containment grid and there are ghosts everywhere. Tommy, with family, vacillates between delicate tenor pleas and a stabbing coyote yelp. I have seen them perform five times in the last two months and, beyond all hyperbole, dammit they are good.

[Read more →]

Jacqueline Cingolani, all with acid-wracked moaning and uncontrollable stomping foot, converged on the surrounding crowd, pulling them towards her, perhaps in hopes that the epically tall and mulleted bassist would turn into some hallucinatory lizard grandfather monster and feed, while the guitars fuzzed flowers into the cosmic universe brain.

[Read more →]

Progressing from manic laughter to viscous black drool to glowing fabric monsters, the video for the Random Patterns hallucinatory calypso epic “Psychic Luau” is a nightmare adventure covered in rainbow puke.  Favorite part: the expression on the one dude’s face when he realizes that he now has the arms of an inflatable dancing balloon man.  [...]

[Read more →]

Being Two Places At Once from Halloween Swim Team on Vimeo. As a primer for their upcoming EP series, ANTENNAAA, keyboard gurus Halloween Swim Team play with old televisions and toy robots over a spaced-out drone.  Also, there seems to be some sort of wormhole?  And one of the robots dies at the end, which [...]

[Read more →]

Despite the presence of the monstrous and somber lamentations for a lost past, Roky sounds and looks faintly triumphant, his weighted, beaten figure growing increasingly buoyant, floating. Quieter moments of doubt and defeat would descend—a slow trumpet, meditations on failure—and would be dispelled soon after by crunching exuberance.

[Read more →]

This is part of the awesome diversity of Los Angeles experience. In the midst of all the civilization, you can find music that was created in its absence. Songs written by men who lived seventeen years before coming across another soul, but kept alive by dedicated folk who are surrounded by other bodies at all times.

[Read more →]

The film plays with all the tropes. Emmett Malloy, the director, seems to have a supernatural understanding about what makes the band so intriguing and why they were the sole survivors of the bloody neo-garage wars of the early ’00s.

[Read more →]

I know alot of people have been tossing around the word “psychedelic” in descriptions of these dudes—I mean, I just did—but they don’t have any of the cloying spaciness. They’re of a more dusty and adventurous stance. At the end, Chris Frias’ guitar strap comes undone and he’s left smiling, singing and holding his guitar like a rubber chicken. If this was an acid trip, it’d be one with convulsing laughter, climbing trees and rolling on blankets, thinking you’re a dog.

[Read more →]