Blog Director

Kurt Vile makes American music—rambling, loose, confident—and Smoke Ring For My Halo is no exception. Layers of guitar weave in and out of each other, loose acoustic strumming, rapid finger picking and chunky electric riffs dance and overlap. Vile understands space. Each guitar part has room to meander, loop, mingle and fall back into place. There’s often a lot going on but the album never feels cluttered. A confident fluidity pervades Vile’s songs. Of course, floating in and out of the mix is Vile’s distinctive singing voice—an easy, deadpan croon. While not a traditionally beautiful voice, Vile’s vocal style creates a sense of intimacy. He often seems to musing out loud and just happened to have had a guitar in hand at the moment.

Congratulations to Toro Y Moi for having the most spins at KSPC this week! Underneath the Pine is the sophomore album from chillwave god Chazwick Bundick, and was released in February. Tune in to KSPC, as usual, to hear it! Continue after the jump for the rest of our charts. (And I apologize for reposting their album art… it’s not for the faint of heart.)

I walk out of the Troubadour on Friday night with the sound of horns still ringing in my ears, vibrant and unshakeable as my new-held belief that Dan Bejar is most certainly not a chill dude.

On the side of the Troubadour overlooking the stage is a small room. This is where Dan Bejar et al hang out during the opening act. The curtains in the room are pulled shut, but inside you can catch little flickers of action– a sleeve of somebody important, maybe; their half-finished drink on the windowsill. The spectacle is surprisingly tantalizing. Most people keep one eye trained on the sill throughout the pre-show shuffle: (“Hey, is that the sax guy”) while mushing themselves between the elbows of strangers. Tonight’s crowd is noticeably old. The guy next to me is sipping whiskey while rapidly balding. It strikes me that I’ve never seen so much chest hair in Los Angeles before.

Das Racist came to Pitzer this past weekend to the delight of 5C students from all music genre-associated demographics. By the time the set was over, I spent at least a minute trying to escape the crowd… which is a reasonably long time to be walking through an audience of a 5C concert.

Last week at KSPC the new Dum Dum Girls EP led the pack with the most plays! …And guess what? We just reviewed it! So go read that review here & don’t forget to check out the rest of the Top 30 after the jump.

The Dum Dum Girls deliver with their latest EP, the barely fourteen-minute He Gets Me High. They’re fresh from the success of their debut album, I Will Be, which won them a spot on many 2010 best-of lists despite the fact that its semi-generic lo-fi, 1960s-influenced sound tended to blend in with the other bands that jumped on that particular sound bandwagon last year. Here, singer Dee Dee’s pure yet substantial vocals have wisely been cranked up and the fuzziness has been dialed down, resulting in a cleaner, more mature sound overall.

Halloween Swim Team, Death Hymm Number 9, Crater Creator, and Natures Son are playing an all ages show Saturday, April 2, 2011 at Aladdin Jr. II in Pomona. The show is at 8:30PM and costs $5. Check it outttt!

Murs is my best friend. Thanks to the dreadlocked Living Legend, underground hip-hop heads finally have our very own musical Mecca, in the form of an all-day, three-stage lyrical smorgasbord known simply as Paid Dues. The festival, now in its sixth year, comes to San Bernardino’s NOS Events Center on April 2nd. With Black Star headlining it promises to be worth the $48+fees for entry. However, if the chance to see the reunion of two of the greatest emcees a beat has ever known isn’t enough to motivate you, here’s four more reasons to pay your dues and cop a spot at Paid Dues:

Year-in and year-out, analysts, nerds, jocks, high-schoolers, elderly people, other-aged people, dudes, ladies, fellas, gals, couples, siblings, haters, lovers, winners, losers, Bostonians, Californians, Nicaraguans, etc. evaluate way too many baseball players. All that analysis is done with the intention of figuring out how the year’s crop of ballplaying folk will fare in 10 statistical categories over the subsequent six months (AVG, R, H, HR, RBI and W, K, SV, ERA, WHIP). I’m one of those obsessive evaluators (you can guess which of the aforementioned plural nouns I fall under). Through a Fangraphs addiction, I’ve familiarized myself with every big league roster, and I’ve put together the following bits of advice:

Okay, I’ll come out and say it. Part of me loves Starfucker just so that I can feel really intense when I say their name. But even if I didn’t get that titillating thrill of rebellion each time their naughty moniker slipped through my lips, I would still argue that Starfucker’s new album, Reptilians, is one of the best albums so far this year. An enticing blend of inventive dance hooks paired with darkly complex lyrics, Reptilians is any fan’s ideal follow-up album. While it contains the throbbing, catchy dance beats of previous Starfucker albums, Reptilians shows much more musical depth, intermixing club-worthy electronic hits with more melancholic and delicate pieces.

Photo by OneThirtyBPM

It’s not supposed to rain this hard in Los Angeles, so when it does, the freeways turn into death ponds. Cars skitter like billiard balls, dumping hard mist onto windshields of trailing cars for a three-lane radius. I almost made it ten miles west on the I-10 before all five lanes of traffic ground to a sickening halt. Blue and red flickers in the rearview, and then the emergency flotilla began to show up. It was 45 minutes of cringing stand-still before they finally cleared a lane, leaving half a dozen fiberglass abortions alongside like fat sacrifices to the curiosities the morbid collective as we puttered past the steaming rubble at a speeding snail’s pace. You could practically taste the question souring everyone’s tongue as they drove by: “Gee, where did they put the bodies?”

Check out our Top 30 and the rest of our charts after the jump.

Let me first set the scene for this album: You’re drifting along the ocean waves in a sailboat, cozied up beside your loved one. The sun is slowly setting, and the entire horizon lies before you… Sounds impossibly romantic and sweet, right? This is reality for Tennis, arguably the cutest married-couple band in indie pop today.

Lia Ices just kills it in her sophomore album, Grown Unknown, creating a blend of experimental, folk, and pop influences that feels brand new. Her voice may be sweetly pure and soaring, but it’s far from bland, with just the right wailing edge and even a touch of soul.

Today we’re not looking at the tennis player (that would be an odd choice for a music blog, huh?) but rather, the other James Blake: a 22-year-old British producer and DJ, whose recent foray into the world of songwriting has been widely acclaimed by tastemakers such as Pitchfork and BBC Radio. After teasing his fans with several EPs over the last year, James finally graced us with his debut LP on February 8. It may be cliché to sing his praises considering all the hype surrounding him online, but I believe James Blake truly deserves it.