Veronica, Alison, get thee to the El Rey tonight: Rumor has it that your favorite bespectacled Catholic (lapsed?) will be playing a secret show after his turn tonight at the Hollywood Bowl. We confess we know no more than that but a phone call to the El Rey revealed someone rehearsing in the background, though there is nary a name on the official schedule for tonight.
–Margaret Wappler
Photo by Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times
For all you wannabe Mo Tuckers, Cindy Blackmans and Susie Ibarras out there, your time has come. The electrofunk duo Chromeo is looking for a lady drummer to perform “Fancy Footwork” with them on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on June 17. What are the requirements? According to the call out sent by a band representative, you need to be in the studio “roughly 2pm to 8pm” and you need to be down for “some costuming and movement + snare drum playing.” Oh, and you “don’t need to be Sheila E. or anything.” Sounds like an easy way to make $308 to me. To be considered, contact Mac Burrus from “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” at jklmusic@gmail.com.
– Margaret Wappler
Photo by May Truong
Dance party on Sunset Boulevard — alert the authorities.
Brooklyn eight-piece !!! (Chk Chk Chk) will be announced as a Sunday headliner for the Sunset Junction Street Festival, sources say. The two-day, three-stage fair — with carnival rides, food booths and plenty of toasty pavement — goes off Aug. 23-24 in Silver Lake.
Isaac Hayes and Stephanie Mills will join the party too — along with the likes of Langhorne Slim, Menomena and Health. Previously confirmed for the festival were Cold War Kids and Broken Social Scene on Saturday night, and Sister Nancy, Kinky and the Black Keys on Sunday night, as well as a reunion of psych-rockers Beachwood Sparks.
The Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra will be headlining the Sanborn Stage on Saturday night.
The annual steamy shindig always offers a pretty decent barometer of the local scene too, with SoCal bands occupying the afternoon and early-evening slots on the rock-oriented Bates Stage. This year’s no different — besides ascendant noise-rock outfit Health, the Happy Hollows, Radars to the Sky, the Henry Clay People and Gram Rabbit are a handful of the locals said to be playing the festival. Stay tuned for more.
The schedule so far is posted here.
– Kevin Bronson
Photo/collage of !!! courtesy of Warp Records
Beachwood Sparks, the L.A.-based band that breathed some new life into California psychedelia in the early part of this decade, will play the Sunset Junction Street Festival in August as part of a reformation that will see the group begin work on its third full-length album.
“It just feels like everybody involved, including the audience and the fans, are ready for it,” singer-bassist Brent Rademaker says from Tampa, Fla., the hometown to which he returned two years ago. “We started the process a while back, and when Chris [Gunst] came down for my wedding, we said, ‘You know, we’ve got to get Beachwood Sparks started again.’ ”
According to the festival’s website, Cold War Kids, Broken Social Scene, the Black Keys and Kinky are acts confirmed so far to play Sunset Junction, the annual street fair on Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake. This year’s dates are Aug. 23-24.
Beachwood Sparks never actually broke up, but the band has been idle since 2003. It released two albums and an EP on Sub Pop, which announced last spring that the group would reunite to play July 13 in Seattle in honor of the label’s 20th birthday. It turns out — and Rademaker acknowledged the band wasn’t quite certain of this — that Beachwood Sparks is still under contract to Sub Pop for a third album. Now he says the band is aiming to hit the studio this winter — somewhere around an Australian tour, the details of which have not yet been announced.
During Beachwood Sparks’ down time, its members have been involved, variously, with bands such as Mystic Chords of Memory, the Tyde, Frausdots and All Night Radio, among others. The reunion shows will likely go off without key member Farmer Dave Scher, who is working as the touring keyboardist for Interpol. The lineup will look something like this: Rademaker (vocals/bass), Gunst (vocals/guitar), Aaron Sperske (drums), Jen Cohen Gunst (Gunst’s wife and collaborator in Mystic Chords, on keys), Ben Knight (guitar) and Dan Horne (pedal steel).
No word yet on which night Beachwood Sparks will play. Stay tuned for lineup updates.
||| Download: Beachwood Sparks’ “Confusion Is Nothing.”
– Kevin Bronson
Photo courtesy of Sub Pop
Legendary Bay Area rock band Metallica has just announced a special concert benefiting Red Hot Chili Pepper bassist Flea’s Silverlake Conservatory of Music, taking place Wednesday, May 14, at the 2,200-person-capacity Wiltern in Los Angeles. Tickets for the gig go on sale tomorrow (Sunday) at 10 a.m. via Ticketmaster and will set you back $200 (plus handling fees) — an arguably small price to pay to see the metal gods in such an intimate setting.
Metallica will headline the show, with Scars on Broadway (featuring members of System of a Down), opening.
VIP packages at $500 are also available; these will include a gift bag and admission to the after-party. For more information on how to purchase VIP tickets for the event, contract Jennifer Rey at the Silverlake Conservatory of Music.
Update: As of Monday at 12:30 p.m., $200 tickets are still available for the show via Ticketmaster’s website.
– Charlie Amter
Photo of frontman James Hetfield in 2003 by Stefano Paltera / For the Times
The critical information inquiring minds want to know about the giant stage prop that disappeared during Roger Waters’ closing performance Sunday night at Coachella isn’t so much where it is now but exactly how a two-story inflatable pig masterminds a daring escape in front of tens of thousands of fans in the first place.
Festival organizers are mum, except for offering a $10,000 reward plus four lifetime passes to Coachella to whoever can bring about the safe return of the plastic porker. Contact them at lostpig@coachella.com.
Conspiracy can’t be ruled out, considering this isn’t the first pig to float off into the night sky in recent times. On Waters’ 2006 tour centered around complete performances of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon,” the graffiti-inscribed oinker was allowed to drift away on several occasions, including the opening show of his three-night stint at the Hollywood Bowl. Local authorities said Waters would face charges if it happened again, and, to no one’s surprise, Porky remained contentedly tethered during the other two L.A. shows.
But what of those that did break the bonds of their terrestrial masters? Did they just fly off in search of bluer pastures? Or is it something more sinister, perhaps a protest against the wanton disregard of the inalienable right of synthetic gaseous critters to life, liberty and the pursuit of inflatable corn husks? Perhaps Waters needs a less-feisty breed of helium-filled animal. How about a nice, loyal inflatable Holstein? He could call it the Dark Side of the Moo.
–Randy Lewis
Photo: Steve C. Mitchell/EPA
Setting the stage for the arrival of Coldplay’s new album, “Viva la Vida,” the British group is making the first single, “Violet Hill,” available for free download for one week starting today, and has announced free concerts in London and New York City around the time the album comes out June 17.
The shows will be June 17 at Brixton Academy in London and June 23 at Madison Square Garden. Tickets will be available through a contest on the band’s website, which also will be the platform for downloading the single before it’s available from digital retailers on May 6.
The new album, the follow-up to Coldplay’s multi-platinum 2005 collection, “X&Y,” is widely considered one of the year’s biggest releases and was produced by Brian Eno and Markus Dravs.
- Randy Lewis
A case of swollen vocal cords has prompted Alicia Keys to cancel a second date on her current tour. She missed Tuesday night’s show in Pittsburgh, and now the 11-time Grammy winner is also begging off her scheduled performance Thursday in Cleveland.
A statement issued by her record company on Wednesday said that she is expected to be sufficiently recovered to make the next tour stop on Saturday in Columbus.
It’s been a tough week on Keys’ U.S. tour, which opened Saturday in Hampton, Va.: opening act Jordin Sparks dropped out on Monday because of throat problems that caused her to curtail all singing engagements in April.
–Randy Lewis
To listen to the mix in its entirety, click here!
LA Riots don’t do nuance. The Riots’ remixes for A-list electro acts such as Justice, Hot Chip, VHS or Beta and Kid Sister break the faders on every ingredient that matters to a packed dance floor: crunching bass, anthemic hooks and jittery edits that have come to define crossover dance music in the last year.The duo recently signed on with MSTRKRFT’s management and got a record deal with Fools Gold, the label co-owned by Kanye West’s longtime DJ, A-Trak, which has been running the table on flinty hip-hop and electronica. But the Riots made time to craft an L.A. Times-exclusive DJ mix of artists performing at Coachella that they feel define the electro scene this year. It’s 20 minutes of relentless party-starting cuts from France, England, Australia, Brazil and exotic Canada that you can expect to hear in this year’s dance tent, and features several of their own hotly tipped remixes of Coachella artists. Here’s what the Riots had to say about what went into this mix:
“We chose artists that we feel directly relate to what’s going on in electronic music today. It was pretty easy with the lineup at this year’s Coachella because so many of the artists are staples in our sets. Every single song we used in this mix we’ve played in the clubs recently.”
Polish your Wayfarers, don your gold-lamé swimsuit and remember that Paris doesn’t have a lockdown on sweat, sex and techno. We do just fine on our own here.
Hot Chip — “Ready for the Floor (LA Riots Remix)” Buy it here.
Kavinsky — “Testarossa Autodrive (sebastiAn Remix)” Buy it here.
Justice — “DVNO (LA Riots Remix)” Buy it here.
Bonde Do Role — “Gasolina (Radioclit remix)” Buy it here.
Uffie — “Hot Chick” Buy it here.
M.I.A — “Bamboo Banga” Buy it here.
Kid Sister — “Control (LA Riots Remix)” Buy it here.
Cut Copy — “Saturdays” Buy it here.
Chromeo — “Needy Girl (Vandalism Remix)” Buy it here.
Boys Noize — “oh! (A-Trak Remix)” Buy it here.
Justice — “The Party (LA Riots Remix)” Buy it here.
Yelle — “A Cause des Garcons” Buy it here.
Tegan and Sara — “Back in Your Head (Morgan Page Remix)” Buy it here.
Photo: ronysphotobooth
If you’re a fan of Avenged Sevenfold and you’re headed to the show tonight at the Long Beach Arena, you might get a chance to smile (or is it scowl?) for the camera. The thunderous metalcore band from Huntington will be filming the show for a live DVD that Warner Bros. Records will release later this year. There are also plans to use footage from the show in the music video for “Dear God,” the cheery third single from the band’s self-titled album, which has been a strong performer since its release in October.
The DVD will be directed by Core Entertainment’s Rafa Alcantara, who also worked on the band’s 2007 tour documentary, “All Excess.” The plan is for the DVD package to also include a CD of seven unreleased B-sides that were recorded during the making of the “Avenged Sevenfold” album. “We’re coming with a video show, even more pyro and other surprises for our hometown crowd,” singer M. Shadows said. “What better place to shoot a DVD than where it all began?”
– Geoff Boucher
Photo by Stefano Paltera/For The Times
