Ever since he burst out of an Orange County garage in the early part of this decade, power-pop whiz Wyatt Blair has surrounded himself with the music of youthful glee. Diving in to his releases — either his own or the ones from the label he founded, Lolipop Records — has been like opening a fresh, slightly different-flavored bag of candy. Along with like-minded Burger Records, Blair and his label turned revivalism into religion. READ MORE…
If you do a deep dive into the resumés of the members of Grand Canyon, the L.A. folk-rockers qualify as a supergroup, even if not one of them is a household name. They have been side players and/or session musicians for a freeway full of artists in a wide array of genres, and on the sextet’s debut album, “Le Grand Cañon,” they find a sweet spot in harmony-rich and richly narrative classic rock, 1970s style.
The touchstones here are the likes of Tom Petty, John Mellencamp, Fleetwood Mac and even Warren Zevon, but Grand Canyon’s style is not so much a nostalgia trip as it is a natural vehicle for their big-hearted stories. The band, fronted by singer-guitarist Casey Shea and vocalist Amy Wilcox and featuring songwriting by Shea and guitarist Joe Guese, finds plenty of topical currency on “Le Grand Cañon,” whether in “Lucinda” and “Theory of Everything” (the emotional ballads that bookend the album), “Made in LA” (a tale of drugs and the Valley) or the Petty-esque open-road rocker “Standing in the Shadows.”
Life can be a winding road yet sometimes one has to get through those twists and turns before arriving where one needs to be. Singer-songwriter Tom Freund considers this in his latest single, “Runaround,” off his latest album, “East of Lincoln,” self-released last year via his Surf Road Records imprint.
Freund cut his musical teeth in his teen and early adult years on jazz bass, guitar and vocals on New York City’s theater and club circuit while attending Columbia University and doing TV music work on the side. The wunderkind then followed the winds to fairer weather and soon after arriving at Pitzer College on the very east end of Los Angeles County, met his first songwriting soulmate Ben Harper and adjusted his meter to alt folk Americana, later joining up with roots rockers the Silos, then picking up a few side gigs (with Brit pub rocker Graham Parker and soul artist Bret Dennen), collaborations (with Elvis Costello, Jackson Browne, Victoria Williams, KT Tunstall, Diana Krall, Dave Matthews, Mandy Moore and Rachael Yamagata, among others) and more TV and film work.
Political punk-rock never really goes out of style, because there’s never any shortage of topical matter. The latest to jump into the fray are the new L.A. quartet SP’s, who show ample piss and vinegar on “Rise/Fall,” the title track to their debut EP. READ MORE…
The daughter of musical parents — her father Larry Brown played in The Association, Smothers Brothers and Engelbert Humperdinck, when he met her mother, singer Anne-Marie Brown — Dominique Pruitt loves a good old-timey song, and she’s put her predilection for music of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s into “High In The Valley,” her first new single in five years. “I had written down that song title a few years ago,” she says of the song. “It was such a part of me at one point to feel like I was trapped in this hopelessness of being so close to what you want in a way but so far away.” Perhaps that has something to do with her musical trajectory getting interrupted.
In 2009, Pruitt recorded three demos of her father’s old songs, which in 2011 got her attention from Merovee Records. Her Dave Darling-produced EP, “To Win Your Love” was released in 2013 and though she completed a full-length, she decided to shelve it and the label ultimately folded. From there she did some wandering and creative soul searching, mining her love for Wanda Jackson, the movies “Cry Baby” and “Gypsy,” with burlesque, vintage show girls and Americana, which completes her vision that encompasses both the auditory and visual experience. “That’s something important. I want to put on a show with a spectacle,” she says.
“High In The Valley” was written in collaboration with Jasmine Ash, Joseph Holiday and Kenny Fleetwood. With a little growl in her voice, it opens on the evocative line, “Closest that I’ve ever been to God is a Bible on a nightstand at an old roadside motel” and follows with musings on being broke, “getting high,” being close but yet so far from the glitz of Hollywood stardom, and feeling sad and lost, but the combination of all these elements stirred together makes for a rather glamorous cocktail….READ MORE
John Isaac Watters has long been among the most cerebral, although underappeciated, purveyors of folk music in Los Angeles, his spare meditations fraught with the fragility of his own humanity (and yours). During his 2016 residency at the Hi Hat, Watters unveiled the new collaboration Rainstorm Brother, which finds the singer-songwriter (and former architect) working with keyboardist-producer Tyler Chester to achieve a sound that might be described as cinematic freak-folk … or, at least, experimental and extraordinary.
In November, the duo will release their first EP, “Pt. 1,” a combination of Watters’ quavering, gravitas-laden ruminations with Chester’s synthesizers, strings, various electronics, drums and electric guitar — imagine the marriage of Sparklehorse and the National, folk music for the big screen. (Watters has proven very good at that.). The EP’s first track, “Drivin’,” was released back in 2016, originally under Watters’ name before the collaboration took on an identity of its down. READ MORE…
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