Friends, on Tuesday, I’ll be hosting the premiere of Rawkblog Live, a new web show on Yowie.com at 7 p.m. Pacific (10 p.m. Eastern). The show, a live discussion with a musical guest that you can join on your own webcam, will (hopefully!) run every week with all our favorite indie-rockers. On Tuesday, I’ll be joined by Todd Goldstein of ARMS, who’ll be taking my questions and yours and hopefully playing a song or two. See you then!

There is enough charisma in this video to power the eastern seaboard. Also, still can’t stand Bon Iver bro, but credit to him for somehow becoming a part of this. (Via Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands)

Kisses – Kisses from Kisses on Vimeo.

Low-budget + astronauts = dance-pop in spaaaaaaace! Or, uh, in California. I don’t think we’ve actually talked about this record yet — it’s a pretty solid slab of nu-Balearic and even better live. Get your slow dance on.

Photo by David Greenwald

Have Women let themselves go? With all due respect to, ahem, actual women, the Calgarian band’s Public Strain initially seems like a plump, comfortable effort compared to 2008′s self-titled debut, a release tighter than Taylor Lautner’s abs and considerably more charismatic. At 11 tracks and 42 minutes, Public Strain is 12 minutes and one song longer than its predecessor; instead of the Television-like guitar lightning bolts that dueled their way across Women, we have feedback and stretch marks.

But that’s just the first song. Keep listening, delete-key fumblers: second track “Heat Distraction” once again offers the quartet’s trademark treble-heavy guitar scribbling, colored across an epic four minutes (a lifetime by previous Women standards). The elegant melody of “Penal Colony,” the set’s lone ballad, plays like the Velvet Underground covering “My Way.” “Bells,” an instrumental three minutes of droning keyboards and amplifier feedback, recalls the meditative, repetitive soundscapes of ambient masters such as Eluvium or Growing, but as the album eases into its second half, its convincing gentleness takes a knife to the gut. Read the rest of this entry »

As a Jon Brionphile, it’s easy to over-credit the Los Angeles mainstay: his Beatles-meets-Bacharach songwriting and Enoian sense of mid-fi production ambition make for a complex but unmistakable sound evident in the work of artists from Fiona Apple to The Bird and the Bee. Brion, of course, has friends, from Apple to Aimee Mann — all frequent visitors to his homebase, West Hollywood club Largo.

While the Largo brand of unpopular pop had its heyday a decade ago with the release of albums by Brion, Apple, Aimee Mann, Elliott Smith, Badly Drawn Boy, Rufus Wainwright and others, the sound has spawned a few new practitioners over the years, perhaps through incestuous links in the comedy scene: Brion has been musically involved with Judd Apatow’s Funny People and the Adam McKay/Will Ferrell camp on Step Brothers and The Other Guys; Step Brothers star John C. Reilly is a Largo regular and appeared, too, in the Mann-soundtracked Magnolia. Which brings us, in this surreal Six Degrees of Charlie Wadhams, to Reilly’s Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, a supremely funny movie satirizing Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line. Wadhams co-wrote “Let’s Duet” and “Guilty as Charged” for the film and had another of his songs in Reilly’s Cyrus, showcasing a style both clever and heartfelt.

He is those things once again on his own Upside Down EP, a follow-up to 2009′s similarly excellent In a Goldmine. Read the rest of this entry »

THE REST – John Huston from Mitch Fillion (southernsouls.ca) on Vimeo.

A really lovely acoustic performance of the emotionally upfront chamber-rock band’s “John Huston,” the first single from the Rest’s 2011-due sophomore album. Chorus still sounds like “All My Friends,” not a bad thing. (Via the fine folks at Southern Souls)

Previously: New Music: The Rest – “John Huston”

Real Estate’s Out of Tune 7″ offers higher fidelity than its precessors and melodies as familiar as a best friend. As good as the band’s debut album was (really good!), this is even better, the band’s tuneful guitar meanderings soaking across the rhythm section’s sturdy canvases like Cezanne watercolors. “Out of Tune” and b-side “Reservoir #3″ are brisk but beautiful, urgent without sinking into desperation — eight minutes of bitter and sweet married on a windy beach. Read the rest of this entry »

I missed the band’s Echo homecoming last night, but the psych-folk duo may be heading your way in the coming weeks. They’ll be back in L.A. (at the Palladium!) on Dec. 7. Full dates after the jump and more Pepper Rabbit posts here. Read the rest of this entry »