The Girls played their wonderful fuzz-pop hooks while flash bulbs flickered and I yawned myself into a coma. I appreciate it if a band even manages to smile while playing live—something that shows they’re even enjoying the show themselves. Nope, sorry, we’re the Dum Dum Girls, and it’s best we stay as stoic as the vocals of the phenomenal Iggy Pop album from which we swiped our name. Sister Midnight is back, and she brings us girls in too-short dresses and black tights, and it was stupid. And I quit. Good night.

[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 →]

I caught up with some L.A. RECORD peeps at the Echo’s No Culture show last week, but not before catching up with Lucky Dragons, owners of one of my few whole-souled enthusiasms on the current SoCal scene. The rara avis duo of Luke Fischbeck and Sara Rara don’t so much give performances of their Minkowski Space postrock as collaborate with the audience and they did so tonight, passing out various tone-making apparatus to rapt ones sitting semicircle on the concrete floor. They view the craft of song the same way long-gone late-‘70s postpunk experimentalists the Swell Maps did—as a mere conventional pretext for astonishing ventures into the arrangement of pure skronk.

[Read more →]