Wim's feathery glam-folk makes the '70s seem OK after all

One of the best things about L.A. is the sheer aggregate amount of interesting music you can stumble into on any given night -- and not just on stages.

On Saturday night I'd ambled over to Bardot (its Saturday night Lo Hi Fi series is sneakily becoming a supremely fun live engagement every week) to catch the disco-revivalist quartet Love Grenades, whom I've somehow never seen before. Given how just about every popular varietal of dance-based music is getting constantly updated in the pop, R&B and indie worlds today, it was kind of refreshing to see a band play the earlier eras so straight. There was ESG, there was Moroder, there was Blondie, and the band's severe singer Liz Wight just dares you to look away from her.

But the even better surprise was a chance conversation with a virtuosically bedraggled quintet of Australians in town making their first full-length album. They're called Wim, "as in Wim Wenders," they said, which might make it the most pretentious three-letter band name in music history. But their sound is a fantastic revision of the meandering, sylvan folk of Grizzly Bear with the bleary tenor of Scott Walker and four-part harmonies tight enough to hang your laundry on. I feel like I need to go fall in love and then get unceremoniously dumped this weekend just so I can have the proper setting to listen to their spooky torch ballad "John" while plowing through a bottle of Macallan. And good lord, do they look the part too -- singer Martin Solomon probably doesn't get up for breakfast without first putting on a half-dozen fur and feather accouterments and eye glitter.

They're really young and have some filling out to do arrangement-wise, but if they stick around in L.A. they should make fast friends with Entrance, Hecuba and Devendra Banhart. I heartily propose they do so, if only for my own selfish motives of wanting to see them live many, many times in the near future. 

-- August Brown

Photo via wimtheband.com

Where the buffalo roam: Avi Buffalo signs to Sub Pop

Try not to hate Avi Buffalo. Still a couple weeks shy of his 19th birthday, the Long Beach-bred singer-songwriter has appeared in Rolling Stone, has been the toast of nearly every local blog and most recently signed a recording deal with Sub Pop, arguably the most storied indie rock label -- all this at a time when most teenagers are grappling with lingering acne and how to score a keg without a fake ID.

The pact with the Seattle label capped a six-month ascent in which the falsetto-voiced guitar prodigy born Avigdor Zahner-Isenberg rose from playing Long Beach house parties and coffee shops to a residency at the Echo, tour dates with Beach House, and spots at the Monolith and F Yeah Festivals. Not bad for a guy who, as of this spring, was “failing five classes and getting Cs and Ds in the others, trying to do the bare minimum to graduate [from Long Beach’s Millikan High School].”

Kitty, Daisy & Lewis -- A modern vintage

Last month, I met the very young London trio Kitty, Daisy & Lewis on their bus before they opened for Coldplay at the Home Depot Center in Carson. They play this blend of '50s country, rockabilly and R&B that, while fervently throwback, is actually very au courant in its genre-splicing sensibility and attention to production detail. Their self-titled debut is out in America today, and you can read the whole feature here.

-- August Brown

Photo by Ingrid Weiss

'Psychic City': YACHT'S new single remixed by Hot Chip's Joe Goddard

Things have changed in the YACHT household: leader-founder Jona Bechtolt has been joined by former Angeleno Claire L. Evans, who used to play in the Smell staple band Weirdo Begeirdo, an almost-unlistenable study in chaos theory. They also released a new album, "See Mystery Lights," on July 28, and they've cooked up a host of side treats for those who think albums are so Whitney Houston circa 1985. Oops, we mean circa right now.

As a companion piece to "See Mystery Lights," YACHT has compiled a mixtape, "Anthem of the Trinity," that  packages their influences in 37 minutes (thanks, guys -- you know how to make a journalist's job easy). Named for the spooky-beautiful Terry Riley song, the mixtape also includes plenty of populist fare, with Nirvana's "Negative Creep," Talking Heads' "Burning Down the House," Harry Nilsson's "Jump Into the Fire," INXS' "New Sensation" and T-Pain's "I'm N Luv (Wit a Stripper)."

Lest you think that's all YACHT has in store, the Portland, Ore., band has also released an instrumental-only version of "See Mystery Lights." According to their statement, the songs can be used in "karaoke performances, confessional YouTube soundtracks, student films, personal analysis, atmospheric music, cover versions, chopping and screwing, or just to listen to if you don't enjoy YACHT's vocal performances."

We're digging all of that, but better still is this remix of YACHT's single "Psychic City" from Hot Chip's Joe Goddard. This is a chilly-sweet slice of minimal futurism. If it's not playing in some airport terminal soon -- a la Brian Eno, who occasionally gets played near the neon art at Chicago's O'Hare -- somebody's not doing something right.

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo courtesy Sarah Meadows

Why is Third Eye Blind so popular again?

Most artists with an inkling that their new album might top the charts probably lie awake the night before its release like a kid expecting an air rifle on Christmas morning. But Third Eye Blind’s Stephan Jenkins practically snoozed right through it.

“We just got back from touring Indonesia, and last week we played the Fox in Oakland, which is kind of our hometown. And we played the new album and had a huge party afterwards,” said Jenkins. “I fell asleep and woke up to someone from our label calling me to say, ‘I can’t believe you’re sleeping through a No. 1 record!’ ”

 “Ursa Major,” the pop-rock band’s newest album of effervescent choruses and vinegary machine-gun lyricism, topped the iTunes album chart last week and should be a strong contender for the same slot on the Billboard album charts this week (it was released last Tuesday).

But Third Eye Blind’s late success begs a certain question -- what’s the band doing there at all? “Ursa” is its first album in six years, out on its own label and with no trendsetting winds in its sails.

A first listen to Rancid's 'Let the Dominoes Fall'

Rancid never gets enough credit for writing really great love songs. The veteran East Bay punk band's lengthy career has seen plenty of thrash and spittle on its albums, but they're always leavened with more tender tunes such as "Corazon de Oro" off "Life Won't Wait" and "She's Automatic" from "... And Out Come the Wolves."

Rancid's forthcoming seventh album, "Let the Dominoes Fall," is, upon a first listen this afternoon at the Epitaph offices in Silver Lake, an album of love songs. That doesn't mean it's sonically anemic or overly flowery, or that co-frontman Tim Armstrong's time in the pop trenches softened him up.

On the contrary, six years after the band's last album, "Indestructible," Rancid sounds as vital and in command of its streetpunk-via-smoky dancehall chops as ever. The group's recent stand at the Fonda with new drummer Branden Steineckert underscored this well.

And the love songs on "Dominoes" are odes to many unexpected things -- the city of New Orleans, a brother returning from war, and Rancid's own longevity in a punk scene, one that has ever-shrinking room for bands unwilling to marginalize themselves to a genre or give themselves wholly over to pop.

PJ Harvey and John Parish's artistic marriage on 'A Woman a Man Walked By'

Musicians Polly Jean Harvey and John Parish don't believe in compromise, but they do believe in marriage -- a creative union in which ideas must be 100% agreed upon by both parties. It might sound laughably utopian for traditional matrimony, but that philosophy has yielded the near-perfect artifact of an album in "A Woman a Man Walked By," released this week.

Prickly, wicked and tender, the 10-song collection sounds wrenched from mythical landscapes and the fiery imbroglio of the id. It surely will stand as one of the year's best rock efforts.

The two British toughs split the work in an orderly way: Parish writes all of the music, and Harvey pens the lyrics and vocals. The set-up allows her to focus on her favorite task, she explained in a rare interview with both musicians in Hollywood before their mesmerizing El Rey show last week.

"Over the years, I've become more interested in writing words than anything, really," said Harvey, spider-black hair falling in tendrils around her shoulders. "So to be in a situation where that's all I have to take care of, to really explore what I can do with my voice, is a joy for me."

In which we attempt to write about Alexi Murdoch and 'Away We Go' without using the words 'hipster,' 'precious' or a 'Staggering Genius' pun

Were you one of those twenty- or thirtysomethings who fell hard for the Shins while Zach Braff pondered the many possible directions of his future on an airport escalator in "Garden State"? Did you grow up, get hitched and have children but never quite lose your appetite for an airport-people-mover metaphor and lovelorn indie folk? Then you, good sir or madam, should meet singer-songwriter Alexi Murdoch, the driving voice behind the soundtrack of "Away We Go," a film where John Krasinski grows a beard, knocks up his adorable lady, Maya Rudolph, after which they spend much time in poetic transit.

It's based on a collaborative script by author Dave Eggers and wife Vendela Vida and directed by Sam Mendes, which means your opinion of it is probably preordained one way or another. We'll spare you the mountain of white-people's-heads-exploding jokes to be made here. But our question is: Given possibly the most chip-shot platform ever to launch his profile among tender-hearted hipste -- ah ha, caught ourselves -- does Murdoch have the goods? After the jump, our prognosticating awaits.

John Rich video reunites Kris Kristofferson, Mickey Rourke

Big & Rich’s John Rich rounded up Kris Kristofferson and Mickey Rourke to join him in a video for his single “Shuttin’ Detroit Down,” his angry tract about the taxpayer-funded bailouts going to the nation's auto makers and financial institutions. It’s the first single from his new solo album “Son of a Preacher Man,” scheduled for release Tuesday.

Rich, who performed at rallies last year for John McCain during the Arizona senator's bid for the presidency, levels his sights with the following lyrics:

Now I see all these big shots
Whining on my evening news
About how they’re losing billions
And it's up to me and you
To come running to the rescue
Well pardon me if I don't shed a tear

He'll be making a string of TV appearances next week, including the "Good Morning America," "The Today Show," "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon" -- and several Fox News shows. He invited Kristofferson and Rourke to appear with him in the video because “I cannot think of two guys who have pulled themselves up by the bootstraps time and time again, blue collar-level superstars, than Mickey Rourke and Kris Kristofferson,” Rich said in a statement. “Two of the all-time great American artists in what they do, and the faces that these guys have, they have faces that tell a story.”

Shooting the video earlier this week in Nashville was a reunion of sorts for Rourke, whom Rich met a couple of years ago in a New York City bar, and the esteemed actor/singer-songwriter, who flew in from Los Angeles where he’s been working on a new album of his own.

“I’ve known Mickey since we worked together on ‘Heaven’s Gate’ back in ’79 and ’80,” Kristofferson, 73, told The Times. “I finally just saw ‘The Wrestler’ -- he was great.”

We can only guess which provides a better subtext for Rich’s song -- the recent Oscar-winning film about a past-his-prime athlete who is forced to reevaluate his priorities, or one of the great financial debacles in Hollywood history.

--Randy Lewis

Photo, left to right: Marc Oswald (John Rich's manager), George Flannigan (co-director), Mickey Rourke, John Rich, Robert Deaton (co-director) and Kris Kristofferson, by Terry Calonge.

11 L.A. artists honor Paul McCartney's 'Ram'

Justin Gage would have cringed at the critical catcalls that greeted Paul McCartney's second solo album, "Ram," when it was released in 1971 -- that is if he'd been alive. Gage, 33, discovered the album through his Beatles-obsessed father's record collection and was puzzled at the notion that it was labeled as "irrelevant" and "lightweight" when it was originally issued.

"It's beautiful. I think it was his last great moment before going off to do the Wings thing," said Gage, who helms the popular L.A. blog Aquarium Drunkard and its spinoff label, Autumn Tones Records. "In the past year or so, I kept hearing it turn up on turntables at house parties...  People were talking about it, and a lot of artists I knew seemed to be fans of it."

Harnessing that groundswell of interest, Gage assembled "Ram on L.A.," which features a track-by-track tour through "Ram" by 11 L.A. indie rockers, including Earlimart, Radar Bros., Amnion, the Parson Redheads and Bodies of Water. It's available for free download at Gage's website, but patrons are asked to make a donation to McCartney's favorite charity, No More Landmines.