Damien took the stage with a disclaimer: he was under the weather and was going to try his best to push through. Although I didn’t detect any hoarseness, his stamina was definitely lacking.

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Andy Cabic and company both rocked and soothed Spaceland for the better part of an hour, lightly bouncing this way and that—alternating between breaths into the harmonica and words into the microphone.

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Williams plays a brand of pop music that is hard to categorize—his melodies are the crux of the songs, but the subtle augmented instrumentation and the soaring guitars are what sets him apart from contemporaries. The pop comparisons to Nilsson and Clifford Ward can definitely be heard in Williams’ songwriting and it excites me that Los Angeles has someone that is playing a modern twist on these kinds of tunes on a regular basis.

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There’s always something different about a Vanderslice melody, and this night was full of them. He ended the set by moving his band out on the floor and playing an unplugged version of “Keep the Dream Alive” from 2001’s Time Travel is Lonely (my favorite of his records). When it was over he looked truly pleased with how the night turned out, thanked everyone for coming and walked around and hugged anyone who would hug him back.

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Long Beach’s Valley Arena deliver a dynamic, well-crafted modern rock album—I guess you could say that their sound has evolved and grown up, but they bring enough of their old building blocks to the studio to have assemble something mostly new, yet hazily familiar. They’re able to strike that delicate balance of their noisier/more frenetic elements with newly focused song structure that lends itself well to their individual playing styles.

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Without employing tired band comparisons to the Valley Arena’s angular modern rock sound, it’s hard to put a finger on exactly what makes this band interesting. It might be the calculated bass and guitar composition, or it might be the varied song structure; it’s most likely that they are talented song writers. In an A.D.D.-addled music scene where every band around town has to have a gimmick—which isn’t always a bad thing—it’s still somehow refreshing to hear a three-piece that just writes high-quality, straight-forward rock songs.

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