As a long-time fan and friend of San Francisco’s The Court & Spark, hearing the possibility of them calling it quits kind of made my heart hurt a little bit. The drummer, James Kim, and I have been friends since 1984 and I was there when he bought his first drum kit. After short stints in several bands in high school and college, he made his way up to San Francisco with some pals from UCSB and while visiting him...

The National have decided to stay out super late this fall, spending five weeks in September and October touring the states before heading over to Ireland on Halloween to kick off a European jaunt. It's a sad fact that cloning technology is still in the rudimentary stages. Otherwise, we could have one set of The National continuously on tour and one set always in the studio pumping out album after album. Of course then we'd probably have to have a...

Full capacity at the El Rey Theater and only one measly glow stick was in sight. Disappointing really what with the ad nauseam hype that seemed to besiege the men of Klaxons. Publicity that may have gotten too ridiculous in fact, as to this day no one really has the faintest idea what “New Rave” really is and who knows, we’re possibly just one click away until we’ve logged onto simontaylordavishaircut.blogspot.com...

It has been almost three years since Interpol released Antics, their defense to the darts of preconceived "sophomoric slump" criticism. In response to the praise of their debut Turn On The Bright Lights, the group insisted that merely improvement was not an option, and that allof their future musical efforts would contribute to creating "different" albums rather than simply "better" ones. With all this talk about different musical directions and new changes, they certainly weren’t kidding. Antics offered...

The ever-hip kids over at Stereogum just announced some radness: the online-only release of OKX: A Tribute to OK Computer. The album, corresponding with the ten year anniversary of Radiohead's groundbreaking album–you remember the one everyone hated at the beginning, and then decided it was the future of music? Yeah, that one–includes covers from Mobius Band, Cold War Kids, John Vanderslice and David Bazan (of Pedro the Lion). Along with notes on each track from the performers, Stereogum is offering...

Spaceland has a star, and his name is Finn Andrews, front man and innovator of the British pop-noir band, the Veils. If the road to art is hard and winding (which it couldn’t be for the progeny of XTC keyboardist Barry Andrews), then Finn is irked by every moment of it. With a series of spectacles including unyielding photographic flashes, Blackberries, and iPhones galore, and a crowd of bar-hanging PRs throughout the Veils’ set, the venue seemed like it could...

Let’s get it out of the way: what is Simian Mobile Disco? It’s undoubtedly one of the more unusual names in music today. But doing some investigative sleuthing, or really just putting two and two together, the name itself isn’t much of a conundrum. Going on just the facts alone, Simian draws itself from the pysch-rock English act whose former members, the two James’—James Shaw and James Ford—now make up this Simian version 2.0, which to take a page of...

With certain bands, the fanboy tendencies that writers try to suppress go right out the window, along with any sort of journalistic objectivity. Luckily, we don't have to be all that objective, since criticism is by nature subjective. That being said, we love The National. In fact, they would find it very difficult to do wrong in our eyes. So when they stop by Daytrotter to lay down some tracks, of course we are going to lose our shit and...

I’m not sure why, but every time I had Made Out of Babies’ 2006 release Coward playing in my car, I usually just ended up getting stared at with a look that said, “dude?!” Well, I thought the New York band rocked hard and the chick lead singer, Julie Christmas, was pretty intense, but pulled off that harsh, grip-you-by-the-throat vocal performance that lives of to the band’s name. When you’re called Made Out of Babies, you’re not allowed to sound...

Joining a roster that tugs between roots-based music and reeling noise punk on Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace Records, the newly inducted James Toth has taken sides and forged ahead without a look back over his shoulder. Dropping the ever-changing latter half of his moniker (be it "the Vanishing Voice" or "the Sky High Band") and prefaced by a self-reflexive nod to Toth's own exploration of understatement, the thusly entitled Wooden Wand's James and the Quiet bears itself unembellished in every...