QUeUe (All photos by Chihiro Higaki) Sigh’s Smell of Farewell, the Cocteau Twins tribute night at the Smell, was also a night of interesting musical collaborations, as every single performance was an amalgamation of musicians. First up was Life Group, a project featuring co-organizer Scott Cornish, and former member of Veer Right Young Pastor, members [...]

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YELLOWTHIEF, UPSILON ACRUX, ZEVIOUS, AND HIKING ON FRIDAY APR. 1ST AT THE SMELL, 247 SOUTH MAIN STREET, LOS ANGELES. 9:00PM/ $5/ ALL AGES

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It’s a friendly dissection of an instrument that doesn’t sound like a guitar so much as the thing viewed through the prism of the base psychotropics of fatigue and imagination. A gateway into the velvet-lined universe of an arcane musical mind. There aren’t enough synonyms for “recommended” in the thesaurus to aptly describe this record.

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On this, their sixth album, this long-lived instrumental rock outfit begins to see history finally catch up. Onetime adornment of the San Diego maximalist movement of the late 1990s, Upsilon Acrux represents guitarist (and sole ongoing member) Paul Lai’s admirable and altogether successful attempt to be the one-man Henry Cow of his generation. UA’s sound was already wrapped Booker T-tight on 2007’s Galapagos Momentum, so this album represents Lai’s mastery of an ever more capacious bag of tricks, like the start-and-stop headfakes on “Prelude to Foreshadow’n” and the gorgeously maintained 29:21 golem’s march of “Transparent Seas (Radio Edit)”.

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I eventually did get out of the house by Thursday night, touring both floors of Amoeba Music prior to fading down Vine St. to 3 Clubs. Briefly fashionable after the 1997 movie Swingers, this venue I’ve long associated with dreadful music and gave the place up entirely after I quit martinis. Still, the Rumble’s night of indie-squawk sounded promising enough outside muffled through the walls. Both light and prospects were considerable dimmer inside, as French Miami- a trio of Bay Area collegians beloved of NME -was onstage thrashing around inside a math rock that was obviously failing to carry its twos and decimal points.

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