She was bringing something fresh to the game, and managed to captivate the audience with her adorable personality, her uplifting and ascending tunes and her high-pitched voice dolling up over the pedal steel and layered guitars.
When you don’t have a car in Los Angeles, you are almost like a handicapped person, right? No way! As long as I have legs I will use them and I decided to go to this free show at the Echo during this very-slow-show-week (it’s always like this between Christmas and NYE in Los Angeles) despite my lack of motor vehicle.
Listening for an hour of VUM can be a bit macabre and be like chasing the echoing ghost behind Pearl’s non-emotive vocals while exploring distant places and exotic civilizations in a mind-dream, a bit as if you were in this ‘Avatar’ movie – without the big budget and the Hollywood special effects
I thought that one of guys looked awfully like Rilo Kiley’s Blake Sennett, then for some reasons, I thought it wasn’t him… Silly me, it was Blake, proving one more time that there is a musical life after Jenny Lewis!
They gave a tight show at the Echo on Wednesday night, with little stop between the songs, just the right amount of chatting and joking, building an enormous rock sound, whatever Sam Coomes was behind his keyboard or playing guitar
Elijah Wood was DJing before Heloise and the Savoir Faire’s set at Amoeba, well, we shouldn’t be surprised, it’s Hollywood
Still, it was pretty daring to juxtapose their own songs with these beloved youth rebellious anthems,… it’s like asking for a comparison! And I am saying this because, after this experience, Torches’ music did not entirely sound different from Arcade Fire’
they were very loud, filling the Echo with a monster sound of distortion pedals, raucous vocals, hard rocking riffs bathing in a psychedelic ambiance and a few roaring screams and whistle blows that had the most awesome retro effect
These smart people had let the masses roast under the hot sun and run after Daft Punk’s ghost, while having a cool beer and listening to one of the most influential bands of 90s alt-rock,… because we can we say this about Mudhoney, can we?
The quintet unleashed a wild and youthful energy on stage at various degrees depending on the songs, but I could tell the crowd was liking their sound very much, already familiar to their songs since it was their third week of the residency
Codi is a classically trained pianist and singer who started writing songs in first grade, whereas Brandi – and yeah she is Miley’s older sister, and she kind of looks like her,… how come I had never heard of her?
Five an stage, their sonic wall was dense and sidereal with dreamy or echoing pop vocals, but as I thought that there was this idea of space and ‘being out there’ in all this, I looked at their set list and saw that the first song was conveniently titled ‘Space Rock it’.
Alex Edkins, Hayden Menzies and Chris Slorach were only three on stage but they built a brutally furious sound, as if they were an army, they were a force playing at unison with heavy bass and super loud drumming, building a tremendous sonic furnace
I wasn’t there, but earlier this year, the police shut down two of her shows in Venice Beach, because the parties got a little out of hand, with too many underage punk kids having too much beer, and doing too much skate boarding in the middle of the street! There were some arrests made by the LAPD, and by now, FIDLAR have received their rowdy-punk-riot-trigger title.
This woman can painlessly reach highs that many only dream of, and her voice approaches perfection each time,.. well she is in fact a true classically trained soprano, and goes into operatic delivery many times during a show.
There was no doubt that tunes like ‘Pearls and Swine’ or ‘I’m Gonna Lay Down in Front of My Lord’ from their previous and self-title release, were totally at home at the Grand Ole Echo, with their beautiful country arrangements and gospelish ambiances.
There certainly was sadness but also a real serenity coming from the music, with fuzzy or reverb-soaked guitars, the use of a muted trumpet or a keyboard on some songs and smooth vocals. They were five on stage and I have seen bands of 2 or 3 being much louder than they were, but that was not their point
With a name like this, and two exclamation points in it, you would think the band put up a wild-punk-high-energy show, but not really, if there was energy, the music was all multi-layered glimmering synths (there were several of then on stage) and high-pitch vocal harmonies
Drenched in light, which was reverberating in the smog coming out the fog machines, the quartet played a series of guitar-synth stretching songs with lots of dual vocal harmonies
On Friday night, the San Francisco quartet Sonny and the Sunsets was playing at the Echo, and, right away, I definitively liked Sonny’s funny and unassuming talk, relax attitude, constant smiling face and ‘Madness takes its toll’ t-shirt.
I was first disconcerted by their weird and eclectic range,.. were they pop, electronic, funky, bluesy, rock, and what else? Each song had its bag of surprises and more shifts in the same song than you would think you could handle, but miraculously, it was working.
With their bouncy youth-hymns and their shouted vocals, they filled up the room with a trashy-careless attitude and some sunny arrangements. Especially, their blond-hair frontman and singer, Mario Cuomo, was some sight: Moving all over the place, his drunken dance had probably found some inspiration in someone like Iggy Pop
‘Work is cancelled!’ as he said with a big smile at the beginning of the show, looking at the crowd filling the club. Indeed, it’s hard to stay up till 12:30 am during a weekday, but who cares about work sometimes!
I hadn’t seen a more dynamic and electric frontman for a long time, and was wondering how he could make such mean, dramatic facial expressions, which were so engaging at the same time
Their dynamite-like short songs were fueled with an endless raw energy sent in everyone’s face like the can of corona, or whatever brand it was, that I almost received in the head mid-set, baptizing me with some beer leftover.
mixing 60’s pop elements with coarse vocals, whereas the crowd was responding to their punk attitude; one thing was obvious all of them wanted to have fun in the sloppiest way.
As this pool becomes more and more crowded, it is more and more difficult to differentiate them, but the Fresh & Onlys could lean more toward the folk side of this category, something obvious if you listen to them on record, but something far less obvious if you see them live:
Their music actually sounded quite simple to figure out on stage with all this funny business going on, but their garage-rock with shouted vocals is more difficult to describe on paper, as it was multi-influenced, often producing buoyant melodies with distorted riffs or even surfing guitars
If their music has been sometimes qualified of shoegazing, they were nevertheless showing a lot of dynamism on stage, constantly moving toward and against each others, almost reenacting a drunken dream going slowly.
As more people ended up in stage, petals were flying everywhere, the odor of the flowers was nicely filling the air and the public was catching up with the free spirit emanating from the music; people were jumping and bouncing as the sound was making more and more noisy swirls
On stage, there is alot going on, as one of the musician was juggling between synth, bass and trumpet, and all of them were at some point participating to the vocals. The female-male parts were delicate, abandoning the cinematic view for a little while, and approaching a hymn-like territory.
Listening to them on record actually gives a tamed perception of their music played live, the dreamy psych landscape is there, but live, they certainly played their gentle, soft pop at a higher level of reverb and distortion, with a lesser or greater extend, depending on the songs.
With their long introductions, their slowly installing psych pop and especially their soaring vocal harmonies, Races is a band I have seen two times with the same in-awe-state-of mind when they play
their sound was murky and fuzzy, bleeding all over the place
a beautiful mess of a chaotic noise
a drive that would lead them to some exploding rocking jams
‘If you have any questions about the images, feel free to ask!’
a mix of country-folk-bring-the tambourines, with Rademaker’s Dylan-esque nasal voice
he sang with this falsetto-angelic voice and played harp, yes harp, during about half of his hymn-like songs
turning the small room into a rock-arena
his honesty transpired all over the songs
fuzzy guitars, plenty of girl-group-vocal harmonies, strummy and catchy melodies under some punk bouncy numbers
