Jenny O recently joined the Manimal Vinyl family, releasing her new album Home on the West Coast friendly imprint. We wanted to know what tunes she’s been digging and Ms. O said she spent 2010 listening mostly to 1970s music. So we asked her for a “best of” the most prominent year in her record [...]

[Read more →]

The Mekons lived Leeds but dreamed Texas and Tennessee and after finding their feet in first-wave punk songs like “Where Were You,” they left the world of Rough Trade for the open range. They are working on a new album tentatively called 100 Years and singer-guitarist-activist Jon Langford speaks as he takes his dog to the vet. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

[Read more →]

L.A. RECORD is proud to co-present Allison and Tiffany Anders’ annual Don’t Knock The Rock music documentary festival, which starts tonight and runs every Thursday at Cinefamily at 611 N. Fairfax Ave. in July and August. Get the complete schedule and musical line-up—plus clips of all the films!—below! THUR., JULY 2 at 8 PM: Chicano [...]

[Read more →]

Moore’s frequent aw-shucks shoulder-shrugs accompanied gentle apologies for her earlier work, and admissions that she’s still something of an apprentice to Viola and other musical veterans and friends. When asked about influences, the mentions of Wings-era McCartney and Bette Midler somehow sounded perfectly sensible coming from her, but in retrospect, it’s impossible to imagine those two names in any similar context, other than the most exciting potential cage-match the world has ever known. And if anyone can coax them into it, it’s Mandy Leigh Moore. Daaaamn. Girl could charm the jaws off a shark.

[Read more →]

The Shins right now are no longer the Shins they used to be—founder James Mercer debuted a new line-up (with members of Modest Mouse and Fruit Bats) last week and will be taking the band from Sub Pop to their own label Aural Apothecary for their next releases. He speaks now about this and Bob Dylan, Heath Ledger and Kermit the Frog, too. This interview by Daiana Feuer.

[Read more →]

We flopped happily far up front at mainstage as lengthening shadows set the mood for My Bloody Valentine. Management was handing out earplugs at the gate and small wonder, since toward the end of “You Made Me Realise,” guitarists Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher (the latter impassive as a Xanax-bombed soccer mom) loosed a gorgeous fifteen-minute-plus feedback annihilation that was easily the loudest thing I’ve ever heard in decades of doting on amplified music. It was less a solo than a hideous (and hideously effective) evocation of nightmare; a compressed and aestheticized variation on the opening bombardment at the Somme, another historic din that produced few actual causalties.

[Read more →]

Watching X and My Bloody Valentine put into perspective all these kids making noisy pop music by recalling the rich and fabled genealogy of this newfangled uprising and putting a sincere (albeit wrinkled) face on sounds that were once something controversial and that today’s babies take for granted… it must be oddly pleasant to play a show you never would’ve been asked to play in your own heyday, knowing that tropes you helped invent are propelling smooth-skinned foals into stardom from what middle-aged critics are carelessly referring to as the “outside” or the “fringes” while you wonder where the hell that leaves you?

[Read more →]

A Place To Bury Strangers believe in girl groups who ride motorcycles and custom-made guitar pedals that punch identical holes in ceiling and floor. They perform today at Coachella opposite Paul McCartney, who would probably like them. This interview rescued from the archives and conducted by Vanessa Gonzalez.

[Read more →]

Although we have yet to toy around with the Coachooser, we present here (via Goldenvoice and Coachella) the set times for this weekend:

[Read more →]