Live reviews

PURO INSTINCT @ SILVERLAKE LOUNGE

The Puro girls are back! Piper and Skylar Kaplan of Puro Instinct made a return to the stage at the Silverlake Lounge—this time without a full band; only the two sisters and a finger drumming/knob twiddler guy.

DEPECHE MODE @ STAPLES CENTER

Saturday night at the Staples Center Depeche Mode managed to reinvest the increasingly irrelevant large-scale rock concert with a magic that made the $50 tees and cattle seating fade away, brought an obscenely large audience together under one collective experience, and clarified again why anyone should care about pop stars.

JULIA HOLTER + NEDELLE TORRISI @ FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH

I felt as though a mischievous sprite were whispering secrets of life and wisdom to me during a deep transcendental meditation session.

ZIG ZAG WANDERER: Spirit Vine + Flamin Groovies + hm157 + Stan & Ollie + Mick Farren RIP

Mick’s conversation was like his prose- spare and energetic as J.G. Ballard with lefthanded swerves into an irresistible stream-of-Kerouac wackiness most writers would give their left parietal lobe to cop. One of those few artists every bit as larger-than-life as the work, Mick had a fabled past as leader of Sixties U.K. flower punks the Deviants; but for me, all that took a far back seat to the rollicking fellow I’d hear jabbering learnedly at parties of space opera and Bukharin as the hash pipe went around.

WIFE’S “THE GREY ONES” @ THE DOWNTOWN INDEPENDENT

WIFE presented us with seven minutes of skillfully choreographed performance complete with projections that synced up with their motions, bounced off their bodies and into the audience like tiny psychic arrows captivating everyone into searching for the fine details of storytelling.

Album reviews

COTILLON: WHITE ROSES EP

This is a good ride for sure, but there’s safer ways to get home.

THE URINALS: 7″ REISSUES

For a band that purportedly debuted as a punk rock parody during a UCLA dorm room talent show, L.A.’s lo-fi trailblazers have certainly gone down in history as seriously seminal members of the West Coast punk pantheon.

RAW GERONIMO: DREAM FEVER

It’s aggressive but not punk, open but still structured with killer riffs and drum beats, experimental but not psychedelic.

N O W: ARE YOU NEW AGE?

The music sounds layered and full of sophisticated studio wizardry to the untrained ear, but if you’ve seen N O W live, you know Litrow can actually summon this kind of ingenuity on demand, live-looping wah-wah keys, rhythms, and guitars into a lush Lego fortress of music all around him that he can then sing and dance over.

LITTLE WINGS: LAST

Little Wings’ LAST LP is a candid and valuable exploration of some of the struggles attendant with being a feeling human in a world full of increasingly uncertain paths.