Thieves victimize Eastern Conference Champions

Eastern Conference Champions finished its February residency at the Silverlake Lounge with a bang on Monday night. Then, thieves lowered the boom on the Philadelphia-area trio.

The band's van, parked on a side street in Hollywood off La Brea, was burglarized and ECC's gear was stolen. "Every bit of it," front man Josh Ostrander said this morning, still in shock. "Well, they left our T-shirts."

Ostrander said drummer Greg Lyons had driven the van to where he was staying, with the intention of taking it to the DMV office today to get it registered in California. Thieves broke the van's window to gain entry and made off with guitars, amps, drums -- "and even a television, which was bolted down," Ostrander said.

ECC is now squarely in a bind. They are due to perform at the South by Southwest Music Festival in a little over two weeks, followed by tours with Mew, the Films and the View in advance of the June release of ECC's full-length debut on Suretone Records.

Between the 'Rock Life' and soft place

Whitestarr is the cubic zirconium of Los Angeles music -- imitation rock.

Oh, they can play, especially guitarist Rainbow Jeremy, he of the beach ball-sized white man's Afro. Whitestarr can strut, preen, strip, shimmy and pose too, and that's just front man Cisco Adler. But despite the swagger, you don't believe for a second that they believe what they're doing, unless you've had a lot to drink. Or think maybe "Meatballs III" was funny.

They come equipped with pedigree -- Cisco is the son of record producer and Roxy Theatre owner Lou Adler, and drummer Alex Orbison is the son of music icon Roy -- but they are so affable it's impossible to resent them because they're privileged. There are scads of trust-fund kids around L.A. who wear their ostensibly higher aspirations on their oh-so-pained brows. At least Whitestarr, as it turns the Southern-fried rock 'n' roll of decades ago into the soundtrack for every kegger party in Malibu, never goes for the tortured artist effect.

Or do they? On Saturday night, as the band gave an uncharacteristically ragged show on Adler's home stage, cameras dotted the room. Turns out the night was being filmed for a reality show called "The Rock Life," scheduled for later this year on VH1. Simple storyline: Band tries to overcome odds to make it big. That adversity includes things like getting signed and then dropped by Atlantic Records a couple years ago, struggling to get its album "Luv Machine" released, young Orbison ending up in rehab and the Hummer blowing a tire on the PCH. Sorry, just kidding about the flat.

This "Rock Life" has nothing to do with slapping together recordings in a friend's studio, saving your tip money to have 1,000 CDs pressed and then hopping into van for three months to play venues smaller than Adler's family room. This "Rock Life" has everything to do with party-or-die hedonism, the kind that comes easily to a band with four musicians and a fifth member named Tony Potato, who, in his role as "dancer," removes his shirt (thereby making the 147-pound weaklings in house feel good about their bodies) and channels Belushi to Whitestarr's riffs. In this "Rock Life," the also-shirtless front man feels obligated to invite varying degrees of groping while announcing to female admirers that he is, sigh, probably sleeping alone tonight. Ah, sadness on the tumbleweed-strewn streets of Malibu.

It's all so "Girls Gone Wild," and when the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue was in easy reach.

The show will probably be a big hit. After all, the band needs one. I just hope that at the end, Whitestarr winks.

Photo: Whitestarr rocks the Roxy (Kevin Bronson / LAT)

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Saturday night's opening act, a Malibu rapper named Shwayze who is signed to Suretone Records and is being produced by young Adler, is also a party animal. But his sense of melody, charm and flow -- solo and during a duet with Adler -- marked him as an artist to watch.

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Monday's touts: Orange County quartet the CoCo B's, whose finished album has been making the rounds in the industry, play the early set at the Silverlake Lounge as Eastern Conference Champions close out their February residencies. ... Simon Dawes closes out its residency at the Echo, and Division Day winds up its string of Monday nights at Spaceland. ... The John Butler Trio's show at the Hotel Cafe is sold out. ... Piebald plays Safari Sam's. ... And the Happy Hollows and the Movies are among the bands on the bill at the Viper Room.

P.S.: I am scheduled to be impaneled today at 11 a.m. on Jonesy's Jukebox Jury on Indie 103.1 (KDLD-FM). It's the show on which DJ Steve Jones' guests weigh in on new music he plays for them.

Festival fantasy for Friday

Shut out of Coachella? You might want to consider a road trip to the Pacific Northwest.

The Sasquatch! Music Festival goes off Memorial Day Weekend at the Gorge Amphitheatre in central Washington, featuring some of the heavy hitters (Bjork, the Arcade Fire, Manu Chao, Interpol) who are playing Coachella in late April.

Tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. Saturday, March 3. They are $55 per day for the on-sale weekend and $65 thereafter. Camping and VIP packages are available too. The full lineup (expect additions) for the three-stage event:

Saturday, May 26: Bjork, the Arcade Fire, Manu Chao, M.I.A., Citizen Cope, Neko Case, the Hold Steady, Grizzly Bear, Ghostland Observatory, Electrelane, Two Gallants, the Slip, Loney Dear, Aqueduct, the Thermals, Viva Voce the Blow and Gabriel Teodros.

Sunday, May 27: Beastie Boys, Interpol, Michael Franti & Spearhead, Spoon, Bad Brains, Ozomatli, the Dandy Warhols, the Black Angels, Mirah, Tokyo Police Club, Money Mark, St. Vincent, Jesse Sykes & the Sweet Hereafter, Smoosh, Common Market, the Helio Sequence and Minus the Bear.

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Tonight's touts: There's not a lot of straight-on prog rock going round these days, but L.A.'s Opus Dai, whose album "Tierra Tragame" from last year embraced the genre in all its sprawling glory, does prog well. The quartet headlines the Roxy. ... Singer-songwriter Matt Wertz plays the Troubadour. ... DJs extraordinaire Aurelito & Shakespeare host the Chocolate Bar party to inaugurate the Ex Plex, the new 700-capacity room located beneath the Echo. ... The Good Listeners, great last week at the Scene in Glendale, return to the venue where they did a residency last year, Tangier. ... And a side project of Irving, Afternoons, debuts at El Cid.
 

If these songs are any indication, Elevator is going up

Only one member of the band is old enough to have a beer, and three others look as if they just walked out of a casting call for "The Brady Bunch." But Great Glass Elevator dispenses sophisticated pop songs, marrying its merry melodies with unexpected choruses and bridges, none of which is wasted on the trifles of playground love.

"A lot of men turn / their hearts to ashes / while they suck the world dry / to please the masses," David Braun sings in "Drunk on Another Planet," the first song off the band's third EP, "Our Hands Turn Into Machines."

When I first saw the Orange County quintet in early 2006 playing to a typically giddy all-ages Tuesday night crowd at the Key Club, Braun and band mates Andrew Honore, Matt Mason, Barrett Slagle and Josh Stephens augmented their theatrical live show with videos and sundry antics. None of that was present, or necessary, when Great Glass Elevator played Tuesday night to a small crowd at the Troubadour. The songs were enough.

Signed to Atlantic last May, the quintet is currently touring and writing songs for its full-length.

Meanwhile, they are offering the "Our Hands Turn Into Machines" for free download (email address required). As the kids would say: Totally worth it.

Click here.

Porcelain resurfaces, ready to shine

When Porcelain first crossed the International Dateline to bring their amped-up melodrama to L.A., it was 2003, and the Australian quintet brought a little bit of everything -- heavy metal riffage, a punk sensibility and an electronic violin that made it all sound proggy. After playing to crowds in the thousands in their native country, they were slugging it out in downtrodden Hollywood clubs, trying to get the industry's ear. "Buoyant and mesmerizing" is how it seemed to me when I wrote about them in August of that year.

That they had signed to Universal escaped my notice until this week, when they announced their showcase tonight (7:45) at the Roxy, with a backgrounder telling of "musical sessions" with a litany of A-listers as they marched through the arduous process of making their debut album. That process began in late 2005, and the yet-to-be-titled album is only now being mixed, guitarist Ben Richards says, with an eye on a late-summer release.

Porcelain eventually recorded the album with producer Mike Green, who has worked with another violin-toting rock outfit, Yellowcard. On the sampler CD, "Better Off Without You" and "Heaven Let It Rain" come off as a bit overwrought, but, hey, that's epic to some listeners. I'll wait for the full album to decide. One thing for sure: People like their rock stars, and Porcelain front woman Lo Roberts has that quality. Between her emotive caterwauling, Richards' guitar leads and Asha Mevlana's violin, the quintet brings arena-rock energy to their live show. Overlong sessions in the studio won't change that.

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The Taste of Chaos Tour lands at the Long Beach Arena tonight, with the Used and 30 Seconds to Mars headlining. Orange County quintet Saosin, the subject of my Buzz Bands column in The Times print edition this week, is on the bill too.

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Tonight's touts: Nice benefit at Safari Sam's, with the likes of the Prix, the Shakes and New Fidelity performing the music of the Byrds, Love and the Kinks. A canned food donation gets you $2 off admission price. ... Cold War Kids have a sold-out show at the Troubadour. ... Gomez guys Ian Ball and Ben Ottewell perform at the Hotel Cafe. ... Michael Franti & Spearhead, along with Blacklicious, rock the Wiltern. ... Flogging Molly plays a sold-out gig at the Fonda Theatre. ... And Polus and Red Monroe are among the acts playing the Echo.

Washed over by In Waves

Ambient music can make you feel as if you're enveloped by fog, torn between the comfort of its womb-like sonics and the anxiety over what might lie beyond the shroud. The aptly named L.A. band In Waves wratchets up the tension considerably, with furious, melodic drums punctuating distortion-laden guitar and reverb-heavy vocals. Ethereal, meet ghostly.

A collaboration between Orange County boyhood friends Jimmy Notorleva and Dean Cooper -- "We'd play old surf songs while our parents talked about mortgages," Notorleva says -- In Waves landed in local clubs about a year ago with no proper recordings (they have only now begun that process), their sense of experimentation intact. In stark contrast to many of the bands with which they were billed, the two-piece featured just Notorleva's echoing voice and guitar (often over prerecorded loops) and Cooper's rhythms.

"We started as kind of a post-punk band, but we never felt like it was our thing. So Dean and I kept practicing until our own voice emerged," Notorleva says, not that he is quite sure of that voice's origins. "But it seems the most subconscious things come from darker places."

Cooper's artful work emerged as he slowly "learned to articulate things" over a 10-year love affair with the kit. "The drums can speak a lot more [in In Waves' setting] than they can in just a regular rock song with a backbeat," he says. "The rhythms add texture to the songs ... On a lot of our stuff, I just listen to Jimmy's lead and play to that, either to complement or call-and-answer his parts."

For this month's Tuesday night residency In Silverlake, the duo has added bassist Tim Gregorio, who will be in on the band's three-song recording project for Henry Records.

||| In Waves plays tonight at the Silverlake Lounge and next Tuesday at El Cid.

Photo of Jimmy Notorleva, left, and Dean Cooper by Brian White.

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Tonight's touts: Northern continues its residency at the Key Club's Ruby Tuesdays. ... Silverchair plays a sold-out show at the El Rey Theatre, and the House of Blues, with Cartel, Cobra Starship and Boys Like Girls on the bill, is sold out too. ... The Minor Canon has an in-store performance at Sea level Records for its album "No Good Dead Goes Unpunished." ... Johnette Napolitano performs at the Hotel Cafe. ... And, as noted earlier today, Jesu's Spaceland show was cancelled due to the British band's problems getting U.S. work permits. 

Tuesday Bazaar: Pop from Pop, and maybe for Pop

It's a busy Tuesday for releases -- and is it too early to have spring fever?

Top shelf

Pop Levi, "Return to Form Black Majick Party" (Counter Records): Maybe it's the way Pop Levi sings baaay-beee and hunn-neeee -- as if his black magic transported him to a time of AM radio and Sting Ray bicycles -- but the former bass player of British electropoppers Ladytron makes his revisionist rock work with sparkling guitar licks over chunky, fuzzed-out bass. Anything wimpier, and Levi's debut would deteriorate into the comic affectation with which it flirts; instead, it's a giddy romp through glam, jangle-pop, psychedelia and even bubblegum. Dads of a certain age will dig this album -- they're liable to muse over the punny "Sugar Assault Me Now" or comment that "Pick-Me-Up Uppercut" sure does remind them of the Foundations' "Build Me Up Buttercup" (1968). Others might find Levi's pinched vocals a sweet change-of-pace from today's ostensibly tortured singers, if those listeners can stop shaking their hips long enough to give it some thought.

Other recommendations

Richard Swift, "Dressed Up for the Letdown" (Secretly Canadian): Brilliant storytelling and gorgeous arrangements from the ex-Southern California purveyor of baroque- and ragtime-influenced pop. [See post of Jan. 15.]

Jesu, "Conqueror" (Hydra Head): English three-piece front by Justin Broadrick constructs another formidable wall of guitar, inviting the listener to pick out a wave and ride it. [Note: Jesu's show this week at Spaceland was postponed because of problems the band had obtaining work permits.]

Elvis Perkins, "Ash Wednesday," (XL): The singer-songwriter with a tragic backstory (his father was the late actor Anthony Perkins; his mother died on 9/11 when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the Twin Towers) works his way through it on a debut album that never gets squeamish, despite its sentimentality.

The One AM Radio, "This Too Will Pass" (Dangerbird): Singer-songwriter Hrishikesh Hirway lovingly marries electronics and acoustics on his fourth album of dreamy pop, the kind of record that is at home in your bedroom.

From behind the counter

[Today's tip comes from Michael Davis of Poo-Bah Record Shop, 2636 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena.]

Explosions in the Sky, "All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone" (Temporary Residence): Davis reports there has been a buzz of customer interest in the fourth album by this Texas band. Indeed, Explosions have earned a reputation for being one of the top purveyors of instrumental rock, and their inclusion on this year's Coachella bill caused a minor stir among fans of their shimmering guitars.

Band on the move: Commuter

"Brightly Shining, Dimly Lit," the album that the L.A. duo Commuter self-released last summer, is a hunk of soundtrack-ready pop that's three mood swings waiting to happen. With no label backing, Collaborators Dan Zacharias (from the band Imperial Z) and Jay Skinner (Appogee) have taken a DIY approach and have landed their music in myriad television shows (including "The O.C."), movies ("The Mothman Prophesies" and "The Rules of Attraction," among others) and commercials (Lexus, Samsung, Burger King, et. al.). Vocal contributors on the album included Sam Nelson (son of Ricky), Colin Gilmore (son of Jimmy Dale) and Mark Morales (of the band Astra Heights).

Just finished is this video, directed by Randy Stoudt, for the winsome electro-pop number "Chapters," which features Gilmore on background vocals. Bicycles, subways, buses, skateboards, airplanes -- these guys really know how to move on:

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Tonight's touts: Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys perform at the El Rey Theatre. ... Low Stars celebrate their album release with a show at the Hotel Cafe. ...  The Airborne Toxic Event and the Sharpe Ease are on the bill for the Indie 103.1-sponsored night at the Viper Room. ... And the trio of recommended Monday residencies continues: Simon Dawes at the Echo (with Glacier Hiking supporting); Eastern Conference Champions at the Silverlake Lounge (with Meho Plaza supporting); and Division Day at Spaceland (with Bedroom Walls, Twilight Sleep and Tigers Can Bite You). ... Oh, and local favorites Silversun Pickups appear on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno."

Sparta: The riffs are all right

Can emo still be smart?

Sparta sure is trying, and if the El Paso quartet's 75-minute show Saturday evening at the Echo was any indication, fashion be damned. There was hardly a crooked haircut in sight, let alone any comically applied eyeliner, as Sparta demonstrated convincingly that it is a band that doesn't need to wear its brand to ply its trade -- furious riffs, edge-of-hardcore emotion-letting and volleys against moral turpitude.

After three albums on three labels, Sparta is a band to be appeciated alongside the likes of Sunny Day Real Estate and Joan of Arc. But you had to enter the sold-out room Saturday with that predisposition, because frontman Jim Ward and his band mates -- drummer Tony Hajjar, bassist Matt Miller and guiarist Keeley Davis -- were so businesslike that any fans who arrived in the margins probably stayed there. Even the most captivating of the band's songs, such as the anthemic "Taking Back Control" and "False Start" off last October's release, "Threes," seemed to be exercises in the foursome's formidable technique rather than transcendent.

No matter, though, to the fist-pumping, head-bobbing throngs, most of whom sang along with Ward's poetry and helped him finish his choruses. To them, the opportunity to see their arena-ready heroes in a 350-capacity room was a pretty smart buy.

Photo: Jim Ward, right, and Matt Miller of Sparta (by Kevin Bronson)

They're calling it Burning Sam's

Sam Lanni's struggles to get his east Hollywood nightclub Safari Sam's open were well-documented. It hasn't been exactly smooth sailing since -- for one thing, the patio smoking area had to be shut down for a few months while permissions were sorted out. Then, on Jan. 27, Safari Sam's lost its "face." The sign on Sunset Boulevard bearing the silhouetted Sam's mask shorted out, caught fire and burned.

No one was hurt, unless you count egos.

Tonight at 7 the club will hold a wake for the sign, followed by a benefit featuring performances by the Freak Show Deluxe, Conquistador, Lion of Panishir and Drive A. A moment of silence, please. But only a moment.

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Tonight's touts: Pretty indie-rock rules on the Eastside tonight, with Syd Straw performing at the Echo and the Autumn Defense at Spaceland. ... Todd Snider (with Mike Stinson supporting) entertains at the Troubadour. ... Cradle of Filth heads a heavy metal lineup at the Fonda Theatre. ... And pianist Christopher O'Riley salutes Nick Drake with a show at UCLA's Royce Hall.