Plummeting temperatures, stampedes at the mall, a thousand blogs readying their year-end lists.* It’s December again, and that can only mean one thing: it’s time to say season’s greetings to one of San Diego’s most sacred traditions: the local radio station annual holiday show. Continue reading…
Indie-rock mainstays My Morning Jacket have released a new video. According to a press release:
The eye-popping, surreal video for “Black Metal” was filmed during whirlwind period shortly before the quintet’s new album, Circuital, was released. The band kept things local by working with the Louisville-based Sole Solution Studio for the clip, and filmed it at the idiosyncratic local watering hole Jim Porter’s Good Time Emporium. The video also includes footage from the Jacket’s electrifying 2011 Bonnaroo performance.
My Morning Jacket are currently touring the country with the red-haired, golden-voiced Neko Case, but unfortunately no San Diego show is planned. To see whether your town fared any better, take a gander at the full list of dates below. Continue reading…
Though you might find the new Caribou album, Swim, tucked in the indie-electronic aisle, frontman Daniel Snaith samples a much wider buffet of genres in a live setting. As you’d expect, you’ll hear him match up against electronic contemporaries like Vitalic, Animal Collective, and even Paul Van Dyk, but a good portion of the show also has the wider influences featured on earlier albums. His previous album, Andorra, had vintage tributes to The Mamas and The Papas (if backed by the relentless drums of, say, Dave Grohl) as well as indie-style jams that evoke My Morning Jacket or Wilco on an experimental kick. Last Thursday at the Casbah, Snaith tied up this diverse palette with a fat beat and dropped it all over a late-night dance party. Continue reading…
The Avett Brothers are all about feeling. On Emotionalism, their last proper full length, the Avetts certainly didn’t shy away from feeling; they celebrated it. The songs from Emotionalism were mostly led by banjo, upright bass, occasional strings and the just-twangy-enough vocals of one or both brothers. Everything about that setup said these guys were playing bluegrass music, but what came out of the speakers felt different.
That element, that unique style of bluegrass that sounded more like an alt-country-influenced indie band, clearly set the Avetts apart from anything I’d ever heard before. But there was more to them than that. There were also those straightforward and heartfelt lyrics, melodies that felt nostalgic and comforting, and an overall sense that these guys grew up loving American music and wanted to make it their own, to take it somewhere new while keeping everything that was great about it intact. Continue reading
One of the things one does not expect to hear when putting on a Dead Heart Bloom album is Built To Spill. Yet this is exactly what happens in the opening moments of Fall In, the new EP that finds the band throwing everything they can at the wall and seeing what sticks.
This shotgun-approach to style is almost always a recipe for disaster (I’m looking at you, My Morning Jacket), and it’s all the more egregious when the band in question has already settled into a winning formula. Dead Heart Bloom’s previous release, Chelsea Diaries [All of their albums are available for free on their site —Ed], was an intimate, string-heavy collection of acoustic songs that showcased Boris Skalsky’s beautiful vocals, all while tugging gently at the heartstrings.