Inflight At Night

I have been enjoying The Sess‘ debut full length, Agendumb out now on Single Screen Records, all week. Agendumb is raw and crunchy and you get the feeling while listening to it that the band may at any moment lose it, of which my limited imagination can only marginally visualize as: like watching two cars narrowly avoid a head on collision.

MP3: The Sess - Sheep City

MP3: The Sess - Don’t Look Back (a hyperactive cover the The Remains classic)

Agendumb is out now, download it from iTunes or pick it up at a show.

That’s right, the venerable end-of-summer Echo Park expletive event is hitting the road for 2008. The tour will feature Matt & Kim, Circle Jerks, Dillinger Four, The Death Set, Monotonix and many others including Long Beach’s own Crystal Antlers.

28 shows in 28 days starting June 17th in Baltimore. That Bluebird bus should be pretty ripe when it arrives back in L.A. for the August 30, 31 shows (which are going to take place downtown this year for some reason).

Check out full line-up and all the dates on the F Yeah Tour website.

Haven’t had your rock bone tickled in a while? (no, not that one), then you’ll need to check out The Yelling. Apparently once known as Maryandi, The Yelling is led by transplants Nathaniel Cox and Robert Davis who appear to have arrived in Los Angeles to save it from the current invasion of mustachioed finger-painters and their tambourine wielding girlfriends who recreate Smile instead of bathing and call it genius.

I could go on to tell you how The Yelling sounds like a polyembryonal gametophyte mutation of Jack White, David Bowie, Angus Young, Cedric Bixler and Ozzy, but that would just be stupid. You should probably just grab the track and hear for yourself.

Thanks for tip Future Sounds.

MP3: The Yelling - Blood on the Steps

The Yelling play The Shore in Hermosa beach May 28th and The Roxy June 6th.

The Skull Control guys have excellent taste, and if it weren’t for them I definitely would have missed out on a few bands, the most recent being Brooklyn, NY’s Vivian Girls.

On what appears to be their first US tour, the Vivian Girls hit Los Angeles tomorrow (5/23) for an on-air performance on KXLU at 5pm and then will act like an adrenaline shot when they play The Smell later that night with Pocahaunted and Black Black. The Vivian Girls just released their first full-length album, Vivian Girls, this past Tuesday on the Brooklyn label, Mauled By Tigers, and if the entire album is anywhere as good as the first single “Tell The World” then these three gals are sure to get caught up in the wave of renewed interest in garage rock being created by the likes of The Black Lips and King Khan and the Shrines.

“Tell The World” with its driving hypnotizing rhythm and siren call vocals never really goes anywhere, but it’s a ride you can’t help but want to take over and over again.

MP3: Vivian Girls - Tell The World

Pick up the Vivian Girls self-titled LP from the Mauled By Tigers store.

Mount Righteous is a 11-piece Grapevine, TX “folk-punk-orchestral-marching band ensemble” - a sort of yin to the Athens, GA group, Dark Meat’s yang - that have embarked on a 13-date tour that will take them outside of the great state of Texas first time. Performing without the use of any amplifiers or microphones, the band make their way to Los Angeles this week with all their Trombones, Sousaphones, and Accordions in tow.

Mount Righteous recently completed their new album, When the Music Starts, which they recorded with John Congleton (the pAper chAse) in just two days at Congleton’s Dallas, TX studio, dubbed “the Paper House”. In an interview with Quick DFW’s Hunter Hauk, Mount Righteous’ spokesman and guitarist Justin Spike said “[w]e recorded the instruments live, all together, one day, and then did the vocals live the next day”, then adding “[a]nd John set up some ambient mics to get those big room sounds”.

Having worked with a band in the past who recorded with Congleton, I can say that he was definitely the best choice for a band of Mount Righteous’ nature to record with, bringing to the table his uncanny ability to capture the many nuanced sounds of groups with not-so-typical rhythm sections.

The local Dallas media seem to be picking up on Mount Righteous and have decided to champion the group, so much so, that the Dallas Observer’s online music blog, DC9 at Night, is running an ongoing tour diary from the group while on this - their first ever - tour.

Mount Righteous in Southern California!
May 21st @ Silverlake Lounge (10pm) - Los Angeles, CA
May 22nd @ UC Irvine (12pm) - Irvine, CA
May 22nd @ The Boat (8pm House Party) - Long Beach, CA
May 23rd @ Chasers - San Diego, CA
May 24th @ Tom Thumb’s - Los Angeles, CA (UPDATE: This is Larry from Future Sounds‘ BBQ, hit him up for the addy)
May 25th @ Tangier (8pm) - Los Angeles, CA

MP3: Mount Righteous - When The Child Awakes

MP3: Mount Righteous - The Feeling You Bring

When the Music Starts will be available online June 6th, but for anyone who catches the band on this tour, they will be able to pick a copy of the album at the show.

It’s been about six months since Peter Rojas and Downtown Records launched RCRD LBL, their digital only record label/blog hybrid. I like most other people who were curious about this venture (how could you not be, the hype was unavoidable) signed up and created a profile almost immediately, even though the features a profile offered were pretty limited. I had hoped that in time more useful features would be added, but that unfortunately hasn’t been the case.

Here are 3 features I as a fan/blogger/sharer of social media would like to see incorporated into RCRD LBL user profiles.

1. Custom playlist/mix widget - in just six months RCRD LBL has amassed quite a large catalog of music, the ability for users to take that content and create their own playlists/mixes that they could then embed elsewhere would make for a much more useful widget than some of the current offerings. It also probably wouldn’t hurt when trying to sign on new sponsors.

2. Variable height widgets - the idea behind the widgets is to get people to spread them around the web themselves, but when I just want to share one track, I don’t want to share it in a widget that is built to hold four or more tracks. It’s awkward, bulky and generally makes my site/page look funny.

3. Useful customizable rss feeds - currently the customizable rss feeds that are offered are the individual label and artist blogs, specific tags and front page news. And so far the only artists blogs that seem to get updated are those of Downtown Records artists which doesn’t offer much variety. It would be nice if each RCRD LBL post included a tag of the artist’s name in addition to the genre, that way more useful feeds could be customized by individual users.

One vast improvement RCRD LBL did just launch are the enhanced embed options for each widget, making it pretty dummy proof for users to embed them in their personal pages on most of the popular social networking sites. Though in the process of doing so they went and upped the OS requirement to Leopard on Macs for the “Dashboard” widget, a real bummer since I’m still running Tiger.