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KSPC TOP 30: 3/28/11 – 4/4/11

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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.)

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SHOW REVIEW: Destroyer at The Troubadour 3/22/11

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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.

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ALBUM REVIEW: Dum Dum Girls – He Get’s Me High EP

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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.

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EVENT PREVIEW: Paid Dues Festival

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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:

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NIGHTCAP: FantaSeef – Who to Get and Who to Forget

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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:

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CREATIONISTS at PB&J, Pomona

KSPC DJ Kenn Deaton and Pitzer graduate, Erik Leubs will be performing in their duo, CREATIONISTS at PB&J during Pomonas 2nd Saturday Artwalk.  Also performing will be Injured Ninja on tour from Australia, SOCORRO from Pasadena, and Fiece Creatures on…

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ALBUM REVIEW: Starfucker – Reptilians

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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.

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SHOW REVIEW: How To Dress Well at The Echo – 2/25/11

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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?”

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