So it seems bloggers always like to stick together and support each other, but I have noticed that the very small amount of southern California bloggers don’t seem to even know each other exist. Is this just our culture, has the nature of our solo hour long work commutes spilled over into the rest of our lives?
People always say that New Yorkers are the most unfriendly people, but I beg to differ I’ve visited many times and have not found this to be true, infact I think Southern Californians (paricular Los Angelenos) are the most unfriendly. I have been to almost every state in the US and this theory tends to hold up, even when you travel just a few hours up the California coast, the farther you get away from Los Angeles the more friendly people get.
So in an effort to give a cyber shout out to other SoCal bloggers, here is a list of those that I read daily, and hopefully next time we’re at the same show we can get a beer.
Rock Insider - This girl is on her stuff, always on the ball with new bands.
Radio Free Silverlake - These guys got great interviews, features and record and show reviews.
Autopia Music - Though not technically a blog anymore, this fellow Long Beacher is always up on local band news, reviews, and interviews.
You Set The Scene - Duke’s got your weekly show picks, album releases, and the occasional feature.
Rewriteable Content - Interviews, interesting themed posts, and plenty of pictures and show reviews.
LA By Word of Mouth - Secret shows, after parties, art shows and other interesting events get their say here.
Portable Infinite - Alexander is a man about town that thankfully doesn’t hit all the same hot hipster shows as every other blogger.
The Rawking Refuses to Stop - Plenty of mp3s and news tidbits.
Floating Away - News, mp3s, and pop culture all rolled up in nice little blog.
Can I Get A Receipt - This little scout lets you check out what she’s digging.
Kofi’s Hat - MP3s, music news and reviews, and a sprinkling of pop culture.
If I weren’t going to the OC Fair on Saturday and seeing X/Rollins Band/Riverboat Gamblers I would be at Little Radio watching Darker My Love.
Tickets will be $20 a day or $55 for a weekend pass. One ticket gets you a wristband that gets you into all 3 venues. There will also be stand up comedy show taking place and a number of art galleries will have their doors open. Everything is walking distance from one another and is all ages.
Friday August 18th:
The Bronx
400 Blows
Burning Brides
The Black Lips
Horse the Band
Future Pigeon
Nudity (members of tight bros from way back when and dub narcotic sound system)
Blood Meridian (members of Black Mountain)
Issei Sagawa (members of the Mean Reds and on Youth Attack Records)
The Po Pos
Bad Dudes
Horses
Sex Eyes (first show. Members of the Fuse, Sabertooth Tiger and Lifter Puller)
+many more.
Saturday August 19th:
Giant Drag
The Thermals
Dios Malos
Darker My Love
Envy (From Japan. Only and first west coast show ever!)
Subtitle
Sleeping People
Brother Reade
Foreign Born
The Rolling Blackouts
Hit me Back
Carry the Casket
Graf Orlock
Chuck Ragan of Hot Water Music
Minor Canon
Whiskey Biscuit
The Strange Boys
Upsilon Acrux
Thee Make Out Party
Shapes and Sizes
Micheal Runion
Tod Adrian Wisenbaker
Wilmont Provisio
Sunday August 20th:
The Ponys
Midnight Movies
Erase Errata
Plot to Blow up the Eiffel Tower
Partyline (ex Bratmobile)
Icarus Line
Wires on Fire
Bobby Birdman
BARR
The Adored
Fortunes Flesh (ex Stravations)
Sabertooth Tiger
No Age
Matt & Kim
Teenage Talking Cars
Jack Bambis
+more to be announced.
Ok so I am kind of breaking a self imposed rule here of writing about a band that isn’t from the LA or OC area and isn’t touring through here either, but I just couldn’t help myself. I had to post something about San Francisco’s Dead To Me, a band made up if former members of One Man Army and Western Addiction, the latter I never listened to, but the former, I spent many hours listening and playing guitar along to as well as seeing them live when they played the Showcase Theatre in Corona some many years ago. See back then when I was in High School I was totally into bands like Swinging Utters, One Man Army, Dropkick Murphys, Ducky Boys, US Bombs, etc (you get the point).
Well just the other day I got a CD from Dead To Me and not having really paid much attention to those type of bands mentioned above for quite a few years I was pleasantly when I poped this into my CD player and was instantly transported back to my days of riding around in my car with my friends listening to The Clash and hitting up thrift stores and Spin Records (before it changed owners and went belly up).
Download By The Throat from Cuban Ballerina and buy it at insound!
Dying to tell everyone about the awesome album you just picked up? Or tell the truth about that album everyone loves, and you hate? Well, submit an album review at Insound! Just click on the product page and select ’submit a review’ below the product description.
And for helping out your fellow Insound shoppers, they’re giving away coupons. One in every 25 submissions will receive a 25% off coupon at Insound, and once a month, they’ll randomly choose someone to receive a $100 gift certificate!!!
Go HERE for all the details.
The onscure Austin duo of Aaron Behrens and Thomas Turner, better known as Ghostland Observatory recently released their second album Paparazzi Lightningare and are set to make West Coast appreance at The Scene Bar in Glendale on August 10th.
Said to be influenced by electronic artists such as Daft Punk, Laurent Garnier and Green Velvet, as well as rockers such as The Animals, David Bowie, and The Clash, Ghostland Observatory have cultivated a sound that is the culmination of past influence and present inspiration. Not only creating something that appeals to our hips and the beats they crave, but also pumps rock ‘n roll into our darkened souls.
What reminded me of this band and prompted me to revist them was a new mash up of their track “Midnight Voyage” with Ghostface Killah’s “Be Easy” that I read about on GorillavsBear. Which was funny that I had to read about this on some dude from Dallas’ blog when I am friends with the duo (Car Stereo (Wars)) that are responsible for this mash up (where was the heads up dudes?). Anyways, not being much of a mash up fan, other than the one that started it all, The Grey Album, and Q-Unit, and most recently For Those About To Rock from Deaf In The Family, so I was pleasantly surprised when I found this to be quite good.
Find Ghostland Observatory tracks on the Hype Machine
Download Ghostface Observatory the Car Stereo (Wars) Mash Up
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Blackstrap - Steal My Horses and Run
Initially released in Europe in October 2006, Blackstrap’s second full length, Steal My Horses and Run, is finally seeing it’s official release in the U.S. via New York’s Tee Pee Records.
At first pass it would be easy to write off Steal My Horses and Run as just another retread of the JAMC and My Bloody Valentine catalogs, that is if it weren’t so well executed and/or if you weren’t able to make to the last quarter of the album where the band really opens things up with some more diversified song writing. Coming across much the same as Black Rebel Motorcycle Club did on their first album, Blackstrap wear their influences (Velvet Underground, My Bloody Valentine, Neu!, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Stereolab and Suicide) on their sleeve, writing songs that would fit on any of the aforementioned bands’ albums, only with much better production.
...continue reading » -
Triclops! - Out Of Africa
Made up of former and current members of Bottles and Skulls, Fleshies, Lower Forty-Eight and a drummer who is in too many other bands to list, San Francisco’s Triclops! are a veritable hybrid of the Bay Area underground punk/hardcore scene.
Triclops!’s “trademark” are their vocals, which for about half of Out Of Africa are run through broken solid state amps with a phaser explosion - achieving a sound that I can only describe as how the Mars Volta’s Cedric Bixler-Zavala would sound singing underwater. While slightly off-putting on first listen, the phasered vocals effects - delievered by Fleshies’ Johnny - become pretty aurally addictive over the course of the album, so much so that when the effect is not being used, I found myself anxiously awaiting it’s return.
...continue reading » -
Princeton - Bloomsbury EP
Yes, basing songs upon classic literary works and-or their creators at first always seems pretentious, even ColinMeloyian, but hey, if it was good enough for the likes of Iron Maiden and David Axelrod who are we to disagree. Enter Bloomsbury, the new 4-song EP from Eagle Rock, CA’s own shaggy academes turned shaggy indie rockers, Princeton. All glib - borderline sarcastic introductions aside, Bloomsbury is well put together and accessible, surprisingly so when you consider the lyrical focus on early 20th century London intellectuals and the long list of instrumentation.
...continue reading » -
Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul - Collectors Edition
Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul is arguably one of Redding’s best albums, if not one of soul music’s best. It presents a cohesion beyond the usual collection of singles and b-sides common of the time, and it also set the stage for what would become his most recognizable and influential yet ultimately tragic song, “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay”. In many ways Otis Blue is the last Otis Redding album, not technically as there’s his duet album with Carla Thomas and the posthumous Dock of The Bay, but in terms of an album that’s Otis through and through, not to mention proof of what could have been to come from the young Georgian, this is the one.
...continue reading » -
The Heavy - Great Vengeance Furious Fire
heav·y; Of great intensity, Having great power or force, Indulging to a great degree, Of great significance or profundity…
Not since the The Clash has a band’s name been as succinct and appropriate as The Heavy. These four guys and one gal hailing from the town of Bath (UK) have an arsenal of sweet baadasssss songs that transport you back to a time when blow was big, hair was bigger and Dracula was black. However you slice, dice, cut or sort it, their album Great Vengeance and Furious Fire, released in the UK last year and here in the states just a few weeks ago, is one goddamn heavy piece of work.
...continue reading » -
The Black Keys - Attack and Release
It can be an all-too-common occurrence for those whose musical tastes extend beyond, or completely avoid, commercial radio, that a band who one champions as underappreciated gets the recognition they deserve… but for the wrong album! And then subsequently tours ad nauseam until releasing another album to a fickle public who may or may not care anymore. Too many examples spring to mind, but my elitist and ultimately meaningless point is that while I was worried the same fate laid waiting for The Black Keys with 2006’s Magic Potion, I was thankfully wrong. It’s not that MP wasn’t a good album, it just wasn’t the album (see; Rubber Factory), but now with their latest release I can rest calmly with the assurance that The Black Keys’ (Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney) upward trajectory is analogous with the mastery that is Attack and Release.
...continue reading »
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Company: Drag City (2008-04-22)
Random Bytes
- WordPress for iPhone, now I’m a little more interested in getting one of these
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- Acres of Books in Long Beach sale starts on Thursday (7/17)
- Bit.ly: URL shortener with built-in tracking
- Maria Taylor Latest To Have Tour Gear Stolen; tonight’s Echoplex show now a benefit
- The battle between Web. 2.0 and PR rages on
- Hi, are you in PR? Yes. Then read this before sending me or anyone else another email press release of pitch.
- Video Savant: Love’s Your Mind and We Belong Together
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IfAN Elsewhere
- TRUST AND LOVE | TIJUANA KNIFE …
Where in Long Beach is your band most likely to be found when you aren’t playing a show? Dan Cady (vocals): Alex’s Bar or the Pike—Alex was our original bass player so we just hang out there. It’s just kind of home base for us. And the Pike becau - Last Night: The Muslims, Crash …
This is cool: UCI student, Sam Farzin, has started to put on music shows at the UC Irvine’s The Phoenix Grille, one of the campus’ dining spots. Located in what one of the members of Wounded Lion described as “the anus” of UCI (you have to twist a - Last Night: The Henry Clay Peo …
My apologies to The Year Zero, whose set I missed due The Paper Planes getting a late start at The Puka Bar. I heard your performance was drenched in sonic goodness and that The Henry Clays are jealous of your harmonizing capabilities. I arrived just as L - Last Night: Soft Hands, The Yo …
While at The Prospector last night, some friends and I were discussing how the venue has really been on its game as of late, consistently hosting the best shows Long Beach has to offer. It is pretty much guaranteed that any night of the week you can walk - Last Night: Baroness and The R …
Ahh, the Showcase Theatre. I hadn't been there in almost seven years. The Showcase was the club that I started going to shows at when I was in high school, back then they had all the best punk rock acts that were coming through town, unlike today. These d
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