featured interview:
Aimee Mann’s wry worldview helped inspire the film Magnolia, and her epic battles with her major label – and subsequent liberation in 1999 – helped inspire a generation of songwriters who wanted to strike out on their own. Bachelor No. 2, her Magnolia-era solo album, is the crown jewel in her catalog – its success made even sweeter by the fact that it had initially been rejected by the majors for lacking commercial appeal. The newly released @#%&*! Smilers is Mann’s best album since Bachelor No. 2, a return to form of sorts (it’s even being publicized as such)... More
latest interviews:
The Submarines
from the archives:
A conversation with
Jimmy Tamborello
May 2007: As the beatmaking half of The Postal Service, Jimmy Tamborello helped bring laptop pop and electronic music into the mainstream, thanks to a gold-selling debut record (Give Up) and its ubiquitous single "Such Great Heights." Prior to that success, however, Tamborello had already established a presence in the genre with his work as Dntel and Figurine, and the seeds for the successful Postal Service collaboration (with Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard) were planted on Dntel's Life is Full of Possibilities... More
featured review:
Silent Movie
(!K7)
Silent Movie is the 59 minute mind trip of a record by Quiet Village - comprised of members Matt Edwards (a.k.a. Radio Slave) and Joel Martin, who borrowed the record’s name from a 1997 release by Martin Denny (also known as the king of exotica/lounge music). The UK-based duo claim their creation takes influence from Italian film soundtracks, BBC library music, disco edits, acid rock, vintage soul, and easy listening...More
latest album reviews:
So Many Nights
The Accident That Led Me To The World
The Island Gospel
Mercy (Dancing for the Death of an Imaginary Enemy)
live in los angeles:
(Echoplex - June 16, 2008)
The two-man Helio Sequence played to a surprisingly sparsely populated Echoplex. The spring saw the release of their second full length Keep Your Eyes Ahead, from Sub Pop. This album should have put them on the map and made them the band to watch for in 2008, but for some reason, it seems that they are still a hidden treasure waiting to be discovered... More
latest live reviews:
Spring's Awakening
out in the world:
THE LAMEST DUCK:
First, the Bush administration reluctantly admitted that maybe there is something to all this global warming talk after all. Then they realized that they can just run out the clock without taking any meaningful action on the environment. Happy housewarming, President Obama! Their cowardly stance has drawn heat not just from the usual suspects (Sen. Boxer), but even from some stray earth-conscious Republicans.
DRILL YOUR PROBLEMS AWAY:
Desperate times sometimes call for desperate measures, and just as the Bush administration used 9/11 to bamboozle the public into going along with something the administration had wanted all along (invading Iraq), now they're feeling the pain of consumers at the gas pump - and saying the recipe for relief at the pump is putting rigs wherever necessary.
DEMOCRATS COWER ON CIVIL LIBERTIES...AGAIN:
The Democrats have made some noise about standing up to the Bush administration's tendency to encroach on our civil liberties. But when push comes to shove, the Dems seem to want to neither push nor shove. One of the very few Democrats who's been taking stands since the beginning, Sen. Russ Feingold, considers his colleagues' reasons for wimping out.
dunce's corner:
Have a seat, Ron Paul. And joining him here should be his confoundingly large legion of allegedly liberal supporters, whose understandable disillusionment with politics at large seems to have led them to mistake "speaking occasional truth to power" for "being right about lots of things." Paul, of course, has spun the recent revelations (more like reminders, really) in the New Republic with a dance routine just this side of absurd; those newsletters that went out under his name for all those years, the ones with all the crazy and underhanded and hateful shit in them? Yeah, he didn't write 'em - didn't have anything to do with them, in fact! The fact is that GOP has sunk to such lows that Paul was able to gain traction simply by taking the majority opinion on the war, having his air time limited to prevent the airing of some of his, uh, lesser viewpoints. That shouldn't be good enough - not for any of us. He's played a valuable role in shaping the national debate, but when you peek behind the curtain, there's a lot not to like about Ron Paul.