Room 5 is a tiny, intimate venue, which is why it was quite a surprise when Friday’s show began with Carla Hassett and her band soul training and clapping to a samba beat as they waltzed onto the stage. “Welcome to Carnival!” Carla exclaimed. Her goal that evening was to bring the Brazilian tradition of Carnival to Los Angeles, and that she did.
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Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel have done it again. The duo better known as Air has written a spectacular film score, one so great it is highly enjoyable even outside of the theater. The film they were commissioned to write for was the first science fiction silent film, 1902′s Le Voyage Dans La Lune. The duo wrote the score for the restored version, which debuted in May at the Cannes Festival. I haven’t yet had a chance to watch the new version, but just listening to the album already paints a moving picture in my mind.
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OK- I have a confession to make. I’m not a big fan of tribute bands. My thinking used to be, they’re gone, they left us records to listen to, and that’s good enough. That is until I stumbled upon Europa at the House of Blues on Wednesday night.
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From the downbeat of The New City’s performance at The Viper Room February 2nd, the audience knew they were in for a spectacle. Lead singer, David Brown, came out of the gate dancing himself into a heart attack with the other members of this six-piece band only slightly less mobile under the weight of their instruments. While one keyboardist whipped out the keytar, the other performed skater-like tricks on his keyboard stand. The drummer beat out up-tempo dance/punk infused rock beats, and the bass and lead guitar players boogied to the rhythm and backed Brown on vocals. The entire production wreaked of booze-infused mania – and in the best way possible. By the third number, the audience was fully engaged and dancing in step.
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Tramp is not the first release of Sharon Van Etten’s career, but the album does mark an entirely new phase in her budding catalog. It is her first album with Jagjaguwar; it features members of Beirut, the Walkmen, and the National either guesting or on production duties (indie royalty, indeed); and it is quite clearly the work of a bigger budget and a larger scope. Yet at no point does the album’s occasionally widescreen production obscure the fact that this a highly personal and powerful work, one from a young Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter with a distinctive voice. Continue reading…

I walked into El Rey Theatre Saturday night to find Emilie Autumn, adorned in white makeup and a large mohawk, in a wheelchair singing “Get back in line!” and “Take the pill!” to the crowd while one of her dancers was hanging on a curtain and swinging around Cirque du Soleil style. Her posse, aka The Bloody Crumpets, then restrained the artist as she tried to escape her wheelchair. Welcome to “The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls” or better yet, the “The Emilie Autumn Burlesque Vaudeville Show Gone Wrong.”
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There’s been a lot of ’90s revisiting lately, mostly because it’s been 20-some years since Nirvana’s Nevermind exploded onto the scene. But simply reminiscing while playing these “old” records isn’t enough for some artists, particularly those whose bands’ shelf lives rely on these influences to bring out their sounds. Take Cloud Nothings and their latest LP, Attack On Memory, for example. The title itself can allude to the band’s ability to bring out these almost eerie, ghost-like memories of sounds from bands that struck the early-to-mid-90s alternative era with fervent aggression.
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Thursday night at The Troubadour started off a little something like this: First, a kick-ass set by emcee 2mex, a spontaneous lyricist that wove together intricate phrases almost as easily as he was breathing. 2mex playfully created his set as he went along, dropping fresh beats and placing his old verses over them, once even to Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So.” Then came the two-hour rap party: enter Doomtree. Continue reading…