The bad news out of western China just gets worse after Monday’s earthquake in the Sichuan province. So, with a bit of a heavy heart, we offer this new track from the bluegrass singer-songwriter Abigail Washburn, who frequently writes and performs in Mandarin. “Great Big Wall in China” is off her forthcoming self-titled album with the Sparrow Quartet (when Bela Fleck is your sideman, you know you’re doing something right), and it’s a lovely, restless and occasionally sinister elaboration on the genre of banjo-driven Sino-folk she all but invented on her album “Song of the Traveling Daughter.” Her set at last year’s Stagecoach Festival was an absolute joy to watch, but recent events just make this sad song hit even harder.
Obsessive “Donnie Darko”-philes (or, we suppose, fans of “Southland Tales” too) who keep up with writer/director Richard Kelly’s blog saw this little update on production of his new Cameron Diaz-James Marsden nail-biter “The Box“:
“The last few months have been an amazing time for us on the editing of
‘The Box.’ We’re starting to work with a very famous band who is honoring us with
being the first filmmakers they’ve ever scored a film with. Hopefully there will be an announcement soon about who it is!”
If you’re inclined to trust the website of noted producer whiz Markus Dravs (which we are), that band is none other than Canada’s favorite apocalypse-minded hurdy-gurdy purveyors, Arcade Fire. It would be the first film collaboration for the band, and odds are fairly high that Win Butler’s less-than-optimistic worldview (and Eli Sunday-inspired wardrobe) will be a prefect fit for Kelly’s affection for prophetic outsiders.
Rarely has a debut album sounded so fresh and endearing — without your suspecting the writer copped somebody’s songbook — as the Morning Benders’ “Talking Through Tin Cans.”
The Berkeley-based quartet metes out three-minute dollops of youthful pining as if love songs were something they just sprang on the Internet. “We’re just looking to do something that sounds authentic,” says frontman Chris Chu, an unabashed fan of classic pop who, at 21, appears years away from his first encounter with a razor. “Most of the music I look back on [fondly] has an honest emotion.”
The Benders’ formula of scratchy-but-tasteful guitars, agile melodies and wizened-not-whiny sentiment evolved as if by fate. Chu, a Santa Monica native (in fact, three of the four Benders have SoCal roots), “picked up a friend’s guitar when I was home sick from school one day and started playing,” he says.
Off he went to Cal, where he eventually found Joe Ferrell (guitars, keyboards), Julian Harmon (drums) and, now, Tim Or (who has replaced original bassist David Perales). “After I moved up to Berkeley, I just started writing songs — yeah, I had some girl troubles, but I had some good things happen too,” Chu says. “All the songs are kind of a snapshot of what was going on at the time.”
And to gauge from Chu’s enthusiasm, the album, released this week by fledgling label +1 Records, is just the start. “We love playing music, and so far everything about it is exactly how I wanted it to be,” he says. “We want to make another album already.”
||| Live: The Morning Benders play their album-release show Thursday night at the Echo (free to those who buy the album at Virgin Megastore or at the label’s website). (They will also be back in L.A. on May 19, opening for the Kooks at the Wiltern.)
||| Watch: The Morning Benders’ new video for “Boarded Doors” is the brainchild of Daniel Stessen, creative director of the L.A. art-film-music collective People Food. Given Chu’s boyish looks, it’s, um, a perfect fit.
Upcoming in L.A.
Speaking of Stessen, he and his People Food cohorts (including the Gray Kid) will perform Saturday night at downtown’s Redwood Bar. … Local psych-poppers the Parson Red Heads celebrate the release of their new EP, “Owl & Timber,” with a show Friday at Spaceland. … And Saturday at Spaceland, Sky Parade marks the release of its new EP, ”High on Desire,” with a show supporting impressive U.K. newcomers Air Traffic. … The Donnas’ 15th anniversary show Friday at the Viper Room is sold out — as is Saturday’s show at the Troubadour featuring the Duke Spirit, whose new album, “Neptune,” measures up as one of the most solid rock records so far this year. … Electro-poppers Casxio just released a free four-song digital EP (go to their website for the goods) and have a show tonight at UC Riverside (and May 15 at the Continental Room in Fullerton). … With its second EP, “Bloomsbury,” just out, Princeton plays a support slot for Le Switch’s residency on Monday at the Echo. … And it’s a big night in store Monday at Indie 103.1’s weekly shindig at the Viper Room — Everest (its debut “Ghost Notes” just out) and Film School are on the bill.
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.
Just think of the Ruby Suns’ sound — an arrestingly wide-ranging palette of psych-pop, island flavors, Asian exotica and traditional African music — as influenced mostly by frontman Ryan McPhun’s dual citizenship.
McPhun, 25, was reared in Ventura, the son of a Kiwi father and an American mother, a fan of bands such as the Beatles, Sloan, Jason Falkner, obsessive about the Beach Boys and Nirvana, “and a little bit too shy for a lot of the emo and hard-core stuff” that was popular with his friends, he says.
Off McPhun went to New Zealand, where after a short stint at university, he traveled the world and settled in Auckland. He fell in with pop artists on Kiwi indie label Lil’ Chief and played with the Brunettes and the Tokey Tones while finishing up his own album, a 2005 Beach Boys paean released under the rhyme-alicious name Ryan McPhun & the Ruby Suns.
“Some of the songs I had written before I moved, but I was changing very quickly,” he says. “I started getting into less straightforward stuff … other music from all over the globe. I became less worried about style and more concerned with rhythms and earth sounds.”
That’s reflected on the Ruby Suns’ sophomore album, “Sea Lion” (a March release in the U.S. on Sub Pop), whose miasma of instrumentation, sweet melodies and sounds found in places like New Zealand’s South Island, southern Africa and Thailand make for meditations that border on hallucinations.
“It’s a very broad album,” McPhun says. “Geographically speaking.”
||| Live: The Ruby Suns perform with Le Loup and Princeton on Saturday at the Echo.
Her name is Katie White. Not Stacey, not Jane, not “her” or any of that other stuff she rap-sings in the wonderfully addictive single “That’s Not My Name.” White is blond, stylish, and when she’s not rockin the mic, she straps on a guitar and fronts the Ting Tings, the critically acclaimed duo straight outta Salford, U.K.
Her dashing drummer, Jules De Martino, supplies backing vocals. Together, the Ting Tings have created a dynamic, fresh sound evoking ’80s hooks at the right moments, all of which earned them a rightful place on year-end Top 10 critics’ lists all over England in 2007.
Only problem is, unless you live in the U.K., you won’t (for now) be able to buy any Ting Tings off iTunes, including “That’s Not My Name.” (But if you make it after the jump, there might be something special awaiting you.)
Speaking of names, in a recent interview with NME — which recently praised the duo as being “by far the best pop band the UK has produced in years” — White explained that the band name comes from an actual person. “I used to work for a girl called Ting Ting. We didn’t really decide to be a band but everybody said they liked us so we decided to pick a name and Ting Ting was it. Then we Googled it and found out that it meant ‘the sound of innovation on an open mind’, so we just thought screw it let’s call us that!”
After last year’s debut album sounded like it was recorded in some pub’s snug on a failing 20-year-old cassette recorder, Scottish trio Frightened Rabbit made the leap into “good production” for its second release, “The Midnight Organ Fight” (fatcat records, April 15). This is the band’s “big move,” but don’t look for brokered compromises in the songs that combine a hardened Glaswegian outlook tempered by a soft core that “dissolves in Scottish rain.”
Presidential candidate John Edwards wasn’t the only person moved by the story of Nataline Sarkisyan, the 17-year-old from Northridge who died in December of complications from leukemia and whose family’s battles with its insurance carrier became headline news. Two local musicians, producer-beatmaker-lyricist ailment (Tony Barkodarian) and rapper-lyricist eye2eye (Mike Chakrian), were touched too.
“We didn’t know Nataline personally, but I grew up in the same area and the whole story hit very close to home,” says Barkodarian, a Northridge native who now lives in Glendale. “The best catchphrase I heard was ‘murder by spreadsheet’ — that’s exactly what it was.”
After Sarkisyan’s death, Chakrian posted some lyrics on MySpace; upon seeing them, Barkodarian was inspired to write a beat. The pair got together and recorded a song, “Nataline,” and have made it available for download. Proceeds from the download ($1.99) go to the Sarkisyan family.
Shane Alexander’s album release show goes off at the Troubadour. … Halestorm rocks the Viper Room. … And the Minor Canon and the Snow perform at Club NME at Spaceland.
[Be still your indie-rock hearts for a minute — this local-music installment groups three veterans of the L.A. scene with new albums, hosts of collaborators and upcoming shows:]
Jim Bianco
One of the originals on the Hotel Cafe scene, Jim Bianco comes as close as anybody I’ve heard to filling the long shadow of Randy Newman. On his new album, “Sing” (March 4, Hotel Cafe Records), Bianco’s nifty horn-, accordion- and piano-flavored arrangements and (occasionally) smilingly bawdy vignettes are as fit for smoky dives as swanky lounges. And the singer’s vaguely Waits-ian rasp is made for couplets like “To hell with the devil / I’m sellin’ my soul to you,” not to mention elastic enough to sell piano ballads (”Painkiller”) and groovy excursions (”If Your Mama Knew,” which sprinkles in “Rhapsody in Blue”). “Sing,” the Brooklyn native’s third album, is the first release on a new label spun off the Cahuenga Boulevard venue and includes cameos by Gary Jules and Cary Brothers.
||| Live: Bianco plays his album-release show at the Hotel Cafe on March 4, and a free in-store at Amoeba Music at 7 p.m. March 5. He also performs on the Hotel Cafe Tour (March 8 at the House of Blues Anaheim and April 12 at the Music Box @ Fonda).
The frontman of the longtime L.A. band Damone — before they sold the name to these people — Shane Alexander has stretched out incrementally on each of three solo albums, and his latest, “The Sky Below” (out today on BuddhaLand Records), muscles up considerably. Alexander, whose vocals might remind you of the Gin Blossoms’ Robin Wilson (or a couple other ’90s radio mainstays), remains an effective acoustic troubadour (especially on the title track), but with the help of backing players Chad Crawford, Charlie Paxson, Billy Mohler and Kim Bullard, he has created a catchy slice of meticulously produced mid-tempo rock.
||| Live: Alexander (co-billed with the bluesy Chris Pierce) plays the Troubadour on Wednesday.
James Combs get a lot of mileage out of choked notes, sprightly orchestration and a sprinkling of synths on his third album, “To Know You Is to Save You.” His filmy vocals are best when paired with collaborators Kelly De Martino and Erin Shawn Hawkins, but even alone they are ripe for his wry storytelling, amplified by a host of backing players that includes Nik Freitas (whose own album, “Sun Down,” is coming April 8). These are the tunes of vivid, waking dreams, and, every so often, realization.
||| Live: Combs, joined by Wisely and Buddy, plays El Cid on Friday.
A bevy of upcoming albums demonstrates that inspirational arrangements and unconventional productions are not moribund in the world of pop and rock. The unifying key to the following bands is their use of dynamics — something notably lacking in the Grammy Award winners earlier this week — and the distinguishing factor is their judicious employment of the prismatic history of pop tones.
Cloud Cult
Following the unexpected death of his 2-year-old son in 2002, northern Minnesota singer-songwriter Craig Minowa, lead Cloud of Cloud Cult, began a difficult self-examination and exorcism in song. This has resulted in several critically acclaimed albums, the next and most startling of which, “Feel Good Ghosts (Tea-Partying Through Tornadoes),” is due April 8.
