Monophona: “Thumb”

Monophona, you’ve impressed me. “Thumb” sticks out like a sore one in the best way possible – it’s madly unique with acoustic instrumentation, sampled backgrounds, and dark/edgy atmospherics. All in all, it adds up to an odd assortment of beautiful sounds and a track that I’m finding tricky to get out of my […]

New Letting Up Despite Great Faults: “Wrapped”

It’s taken me way too long to post the new Letting Up Despite Great Faults material, and for that I apologize. This crew has been one of my favorites over my blogging (and pre-blogging) years, in both personality and musicianship. I adore everything they put it out. Frankly, it’s hard not to. Not […]

Arcade Fire’s ‘Reflektor’ Lyric Video is Live!

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There you have it, it’s live. We don’t usually post newsy news, but this one is…uniquely grand. After months of teaser videos and guerrilla marketing maneuvers that annoyed even their most die-hard fans; Arcade Fire’s fourth full-length studio album Reflektor is streaming on YouTube. It’s live, and well, it’s a lyric video of epic proportions.

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This is all happening five days ahead of release, and the entire record (85-minutes in length) is streaming on YouTube to the a classic Brazilian movie “Black Orpheus.”  Watching this reminds me of the classic Wizard of Oz film to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. And yes, there are occasional moments of synchronicity in “Black Orpheus” that seem to match the music in Reflekor. It’s a trip man, and worth spending 85-minutes watching a Brazilian film you probably haven’t heard of.

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TRAAMS

“That’s it, right there,” I said to myself, “right when the bass line hits, 40-seconds in, the sound grabs you like a hungry beast looking for satisfaction. ” The crunching guitars and driving drums on “Swimming Pool,” the opening track on the FatCat debut of West Sussex trio TRAAMS, is a bodacious opener […]

Podcast Painkillers

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Editor’s NotePlease welcome new Knox Road contributor, Art Tavana. Art is based in L.A. and will be writing long-form, short-form and everything in between. Enjoy his first piece about our favorite kind of people. [Image via Lovato Design, photo by Joslyn Baker.]

Music snobbery is rooted in the blind pursuit of a transient experience; a temporary fix predicated on unearthing new music during the incubation phase of an artist’s career. But unless you’re Lester Bangs discovering Astral Weeks for the first time, it usually amounts to wasted hours on SoundCloud listening to bands that sound like shit Robin Pecknold wrote during a moonshine-induced bath in the backwoods of some mountainous terrain in the Pacific Northwest. While the archeologist (i.e. Indiana Jones) is rewarded with recognition in ’80s adventure movies and gooey diary entries from starry-eyed college girls who have a thing for bull-whips — the music snob is fulfilled with the momentary experience of listening to a band with 12 ‘Likes’ on Facebook that some tattooed baristas might find ‘interesting.’ It’s the experience of downloading a mixtape by a rapper named Jonwayne, who takes you back to a Brian Eno record during a daytime nap, followed by wondering why you’re listening to Beethoven’s Ninth, drunk, and writing about a band that sounds like the Savages, but looks like the Bangles. Coffee with condensed milk and a side of KCRW’s Morning Become Eclectic is routine. The need to break through the doors of perception and find something different becomes habitual.

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Faces Together

This one is special on a personal level. Good friend Aaron Leeder, he of Exit Clov, Drunken Sufis, Sri and more, took on the moniker Faces Together for his newest work. The project is meant to be a “visual soundtrack” of sorts, with Leeder doing nearly everything alone, including all instruments, arrangements and […]

Fossil Collective: “Boy With Blackbird Kite”

The hot water didn’t work in my apartment this morning, and the shower was ice-cold. So, I didn’t shower and now I’m having an overall “whatever, man” day. I know I can rely on music to keep my head on straight during times like these, and I thank the heavens for blessing me […]

Seeland Offers New mp3

UK Space-Pop collaboration Seeland is releasing an mp3 of a song off their newest album “Tomorrow Today.” The song is called “Call The Incredible.” So If you are down with futuristic indie-pop, check this out.

Seeland – “Call The Incredible” [MP3] (left […]

Apple’s new indie sampler: Dance and Electronic

Apple came out with one of their sporadic installments of free indie spotlight samplers yesterday for all to redeem and download. This mix is slightly surprising considering they usually spotlight singer/songwriters and more accessible stuff to the “common folk” (thought that’s not the case for their recently launched indie spotlight section in the […]

Jaren Love, Of The Lampshades!

Right now, Jaren Love (The lead singer and lead guitarist of the band “The Lampshades“) is just about to leave my room to go do his radio show. We just talked about a whole bunch of music, and things pertaining to music. Somewhere in that conversation he did an interview for me in which […]