Playing us into the weekend—the driving, oddly addictive track “Sherman (Animals in the Jungle)” from London’s Tom Vek.

Though the self-taught multi-instrumalist—née Thomas Timothy Vernon-Kell—has more than decade long career, he’s new to us…despite evidently guest starring as himself in an episode of The OC, playing a show at The Bait Shop. It was season three, though, and, as we all know, the show went south after the stellar season two.

Oh, The OC. We loved you so.

Back on track!

Give the lead single from Vek’s most recent full-length, Luck, a listen. The driving, deadpan song will likely worm its way into your brain much the way it did ours.

If you like it, check out another, more relaxed and glitched-out track from Luck, “Broke”—also awesome in a totally different way. These two songs have quickly brought Luck to the top of my personal list of full-length’s to buy ASAP.

You can get it physically + digitally via Vek’s Web site.

Photo by Emma Swann.

I bet you didn’t even know you were in need of retro-tinged Spanish language summer jam! Well, you were. Until now.

We give you “Adios!” by Natalia Clavier and featuring The Echocentrics. It is quickly becoming my favorite song to play whilst driving the streets of LA.

Buenos-Aires-born, Brooklyn-based Clavier belts out a catchy, driving melody over 60’s-inspired organ + guitar lines and a rhythm section that’s absolutely killing it. Give it a listen to see what I mean.

The song’s from Natalia’s 2013 full-length, Lumen, which you can buy over at iTunes.

Plus, looks like she’s an outspoken vegan, so let’s show her some love. You go, girl!

A Better LA is a non-profit that promotes community safety + provides support services to marginalized populations across Greater Los Angeles. Concerned by the all-too-frequently heard news of violence among the youth on the streets of LA, then-USC football coach, now Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll invited community leaders to address the problem head-on. Rather than go in as outsiders, the group works through the existing local community, training and empowering outreach workers—many of whom are former gang members who have turned their lives around—to work with at-risk youths and families in disadvantaged areas across Los Angeles.

And it seems to be working.

Ten years after that first meeting, A Better LA is credited with helping to bring down crime rates and stave off violence in Angeleno communities. From Chief of Police Charlie Beck:

“We are at 40 year lows in Los Angeles in homicides. And a large part of that success is outreach work through groups like A Better LA. We have tried everything else over my career as a police officer—arresting everyone, hard-nosed suppression. It failed. Outreach work has helped transform the way we police.”

ABLA approached us about creating the concept and design for their yearly fund-raising gala’s event materials, including an event deck, an invite package, a journal, and event signage. You can see a full write on what we did for the materials in our design portfolio.

And good tidings to Pete Carroll and everyone at A Better LA on the eve of their celebration—you all do wonderful work and are well-worth celebrating!

If  you’re wondering what we’ve been listening to int he studio lately, it’s this:

Brooklyn’s LEGS bills itself as “a band that makes music for the body”. So you can drop that primary care physician that isn’t working out for you.

Their white boy soul does keep the body moving though, so maybe there’s something to be said for that. They elaborate though:

“LEGS is 100% Guaranteed to make you feel Athletic, Kinetic, Sexy, Benevolent, Cosmopolitan, Declamatory, Exotic, Extroverted, Hungry, Naive, Nocturnal, and Possibly Wry. LEGS is Considered Highly Absorbent, Effervescent, Warm And Slightly Funky. LEGS Comes on Strong And Always Leaves you Satisfied.”

Hm. Those guys like title case.

Formed just last year by two brothers and a childhood friend and rounded out with a pair of Ecuadorian brothers for good measure, the band’s just getting started, it seems, and we’re excited by what we’re hearing so far. Their lead single, “High Time”, starts of with a smoothly building organ line that (spoiler alert) pops into tightly grooving pop gem that we’re literally ending every work day with of late. Maybe it’s the Pavlovian dogs in us, but we’ve started to crave salty snacks and festive libations as soon as we hear those first opening notes.

See if you can set up as positive a psychological pairing as we have: Give their American-Apparel-looking EP a listen above and, if you like it, download it for free via the band’s site (upper right) or on their SoundCloud page. Follow the band via Facebook to catch them live. You can also check out their video for “High Time”—directed by Javier Andrade—below.

Photo – Catalina Kulczar-Marin.

Superb NYC-based duo MS MR has been doing their part to promote fellow independent musicians ever since their success with last year’s debut full-length, Secondhand Rapture.

Since 2013, singer Lizzy Plapinger + producer Max Hershenow have been regularly releasing digital mix tapes that feature bands they’ve played with on tour and songs that keep them going during their seemingly non-stop touring around the world. Obviously, being in an active touring band is a great way to be exposed to music you might otherwise never hear, but it helps too that Plapinger co-founded Neon Gold Records, a boutique label with a history of tapping future pop geniuses like Passion Pit, Gotye, Magic Man, Ellie Goulding, and Mr. Little Jeans, to name a few.

Indeed, there are many a band that this writer’d previously never heard of before that I now count among some of my favorite independent musicians.

So what better way to start off your summer than with MS MR’s most recent mix tape, Track Addict Vol. IV. Stream the whole thing below; head to the band’s site for free download. You can find previous Track Addict editions there too.

Original art by Cornwall-based artist, Laurie McCall.

There are a few New York bands that I feel lived parallel lives to our own, musically growing in fits and starts as we did in that same city at that same time. It’s adding cliché to cliché, but they wrote a kind of interactive soundtrack to our mid-twenties to thirties that gave us great music to listen to as we figured all our shit out and quit terrible jobs for slightly less terrible jobs and stayed out far too late and tried desperately in vain to figure out that magical, unattainable ratio of food-to-alcohol. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart is definitely one of those bands.

The band grew into their own distinct sound from solid roots in the 80s + 90s and, with their most recent full-length, Days of Abandon, are sounding more polished, confident, and—most importantly—beautifully and unabashedly poppy than ever.  We got a chance to catch up with band frontman, Kip Berman (second from the left, above), just before embarking on a European tour to talk over their days on the road, how he went into writing the songs for Abandon, and his thoughts on the chaining New York scene.

raven + crow: So, first off, Kip, thanks for taking some time to talk. I know you all are in the midst of an almost three-month tour. How’s it going so far?

Kip Berman: Fantastic, thanks! We’ve had a wonderful tour with Fear of Men and Ablebody, who are both awesome groups and a lot of fun to be around. All three bands are sharing a van and gear, so it’s been a pretty great way to tour. Fear of Men are from the UK, so it’s been a particular thrill to show off America to them. We’ve done a lot of tourist kind of stuff together. You can see lots of pics on our band instagrams: thepainsofbeingpureatheart + fearofmen + able body.

My snap assessment after a quick perusal of your respective Instagram feeds—Jess likes giant bottles of Champagne and Katy Perry picture disks. You all are clearly having too much fun. So, after so much playing together at this point, are you all trying anything new with the live show…besides the new material, obviously?

We play a mix of old songs and new songs, but we’re really excited to be sharing a lot of Days of Abandon. Tracks like “Kelly,” “Simple and Sure,” “Eurydice” and “Life After Life” seem to be going over really well.

All stellar stand-alone songs. We really do love the new album. I’ve seen quotes from you talking about it as a stepping back of sorts in terms of returning to what was important you initially in song-writing. Can you speak to that a little bit?

Maybe that was the wrong choice of words. It’s more “song” focussed than “sound” focussed, if that makes sense. We just wanted to stay focussed on making 10 great songs, rather than getting pre-occupied on the studio side of things.

Did you go into writing it with anything in mind or any particular goals?

Not really. I’m sort of an accidental person. The best songs happen on their own, intellectual posturing or “struggling” over a song rarely makes for great pop music. I know bands like to say how tortured they are, or flaunt their self-destructive tendencies, but everyone has problems, you know? It’s conceited to think that “artists” somehow are any different than people that don’t get to ride around in a van and play music every night. I can play the G chord and then the D chord without killing myself…hopefully.

Extremely awesomely put. Where does the album title—Days of Abandon—come from? …from where does the…eh, never mind. You get the drift.

The title of the album is partially inspired by Elena Ferrante’s novel, The Days of Abandonment. But “Abandon” seemed to capture a fuller range of semantic possibility—both being left behind, as well as freedom and exhilaration. Besides, Days of Thunder was already taken.

Okay, I have to push back a bit there—if you guys put out an album called Days of Thunder, I think it may well implode the universe. Please do this. The non-Tom-Cruise-y album artwork, though—we love it. We’d never heard of Lee Jinju before but the work seems oddly familiar. Are you all long-time fans?

I’ve been familiar with her work since about 2011 or so. I was deeply grateful that she allowed us to use one of her paintings as the art for our record as I think it compliments the music in the right way. I don’t know if we would have even released the record had we been unable to use her work as the cover.

Wow. Strong, artistically appreciative words. No, it is weirdly, fittingly beautiful though, I totally agree. Back to names—I’ve long admired you all for choosing an undisputedly unwieldy and hard-to-remember name but sticking with it. Were you all ever encouraged to change or shorten the name early on?

No. But we usually just say “Pains.” I don’t like it when it’s spelled POBPAH.

No, yeah, that’s awful. Where does it come from though, the name? Seems like a line from Dead Poets Society or some such thing.

It’s the title of an unpublished short story written by someone I knew in Portland, OR.

Oh. Man. That’s kind of the most succinct, best answer to that question I’ve ever gotten. So, I feel like you all hit the scene pretty hard straight out of the gate so many years back, at least from the persecutive of someone who lived in New York at the time. As soon as we heard of you, you were ‘the next big thing’ and there was just tons of buzz about the Pains. That seems like the best and worst of possible starts for a band. Has it been difficult to keep up the momentum and not constantly second guess yourselves in terms of direction?

We were around for a couple years before our first record came out in 2009. We self-released an EP and did two or three 7″ singles for Atomic Beat and Slumberland Records. Maybe someday we actually will become “the big thing”, but until then, I’m just going to keep trying to write the best songs I can.

I like it. Where do you look for inspiration in your song-writing, either musically or…otherwise?

It’s so dull to say, but it’s really just my life—the people I’ve known and the things that I’ve experienced. There seems never to be a shortage of life to write about. I change names where I can, though who knows if that really works. I don’t want to hurt anyone or traffic on someone else’s tragedy in such an explicit way.

I always felt frightened at the prospect of dating Elizabeth Elmore from Sarge, as she wrote the BEST kiss-off songs. You were undoubtedly signing up for having an awesome song written about how not awesome you were. I guess that was a pretty unnatural fear to have when I was a teenager, as she was an adult. I think there’s been one song written about me—it makes me sad to hear it, so it must be a good song.

I’d ask the song, but I somehow feel like that’d be prying. So, we moved from Brooklyn to LA just last December and were slightly remiss to leave such a great music scene. Don’t get me wrong—LA’s is great. But what have we been missing in NYC? What do you see changing for the better overall or what bands are getting you (re-)excited about music?

I love living in New York. There are some great bands like So So Glos (who are subletting our practice space while we’re on tour—hey guys, pick up your empties, ok?), Beverly, The Hairs, Kurt’s new band The Ice Choir, Weekend, Autre Ne Veut, Wild Nothing, Beach Fossils, Hooray for Earth and a bunch more that I’d go see play anytime they had a show.

But a lot of the bands I really love I only found out about because of the internet or getting to play shows together. Bands like Makthaverskan, Fear of Men, Literature, Flowers, Joanna Gruesome, and Evans the Death. There’s great things happening in music everywhere.

Okay, so, first off, that’s a ton of awesome bands you just mentioned. Second, LOVE Joanna Gruesome—just wrote them up last week. Third, we’re friends with Kevin from The Hairs from way back in early aughts DC—love that guy. Though I’ve had a personal gripe with that band name from day one. Back to NYC though, have you been tracking all this kind of hating on the new rich New York lately? David Byrne’s piece on how the 1%’s killing creativity and the like? Any take on it all?

I admire David Byrne a lot, and I’m sure his arguments are valid and very well thought out. He’s an amazing guy and one of the few artists that has continued to push himself creatively and intellectually as they moved beyond the age of being a pop star. He seems so comfortable being himself—it’s very heartening. I got to see him play on the recent David Byrne + St. Vincent tour, and on top of being an incredible performer, he came out and hung out with fans after the show and seemed just really secure, happy and the kind of person most kids in bands would be lucky to get to be someday, not in terms of success, but in terms of seeming happy with his place in the world.

I can only say that I played music for a long time in a city much more “conducive to artists” (low rent, basements where you could rehearse, etc)—Portland(ia), OR. And yet it wasn’t until I moved to New York where everything seemed a lot harder (the “local bands” were internationally known, you had to rent a rehearsal space, rent was high, you had to work all the time just to get by) that things really started to happen.

So while my personal experience is much the opposite, I can only chalk it up to luck. Obviously, I wish my rent was half of what it was, there were cheap rehearsal rooms, and lots of DIY venues for less commercially minded bands to play.

Again, well-said. Favorite thing about New York?

My friends live there. Also Bagels.

Literally the two things we miss most. And LA? Favorite thing?

I think LA is perfectly great too. I don’t understand the need for a rivalry. The Hochheims (Anton + Christoph) live there now, as well as a bunch of our friends. We always have a great time when we’re there—we have no beef.

We’ll take it—rivalry, OVER. Thanks for talking with us, Kip.

Thank you!

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart play a sold out show tonight at the Bowery Ballroom in New York before heading over for a three-month European tour. You can purchase their new album, Days of Abandon, on vinyl or CD via Amazon + digitally through iTunes. Watch the video for “Simple and Sure” below. It features the most rhythmically awesome dinner party of all time.

We’ve been enjoying the high-energy, politically charged noise pop of the Welsh band, Joanna Gruesome since we first heard them last summer. Just off enough to not be totally derivative of a strange riot grrrl-noisepop mashup of old-time favorites Huggybear + early My Bloody Valentine or Medicine, the youthful band crunches out songs that dive from boisterous, guitar-washy pop and screamy punk.

Give a listen to their track “Sugarcrush”, from the full-length, Weird Sister, below.

It seems the band has a less than average origin story too. From the band’s bio:

“They all met in an anger management counseling group. During the course they were told that writing, making music, dancing or painting could relieve tension and help reduce feelings of anger. One initiative involved a project where they were assigned a group to compose and perform a song in front of other members. Initially they found each other infuriating but gradually acknowledged their musical chemistry and decided to continue with the band outside the therapy group.”

The Cardiff-based band is set to revisit our shores for a short tour, dates below. They’ll also be part of the literally just announced lineup for FYF in LA this August. You can also stream the album via their Bandcamp page below to see what you think. It’s available in physical form via their label, Slumberland, and digitally via iTunes.

8/21 San Francisco, CA – Rickshaw Stop *
8/27 Cambridge, MA – The Sinclair #
8/28 Philadelphia, PA – First Unitarian Church #
8/29 New York, NY – South Street Seaport ^
8/30 Washington, DC – Rock & Roll Hotel #

* = w/ Manatees & Popscene Resident DJs
# = w/ Perfect Pussy & Love of Everything
^ = w/ Big Ups

weird sister LP by joanna gruesome

As you may have guessed from the subtitle above, this may well be the best cover song of all time—”Sexual Healing”, by the late, great Marvin Gaye, of course, as covered by New Orleans’ Grammy-nominated Hot 8 Brass Band.

Give it a listen and tell me a better take on someone else song, I dare you.

It’s featured on the soundtrack for the highly anticipated Jon Favreau film, Chef: “Chef Carl Casper (Jon Favreau) suddenly quits his job at a prominent Los Angeles restaurant after refusing to compromise his creative integrity for its controlling owner (Dustin Hoffman), he is left to figure out what’s next. Finding himself in Miami, he teams up with his ex-wife (Sofia Vergara), his friend (John Leguizamo) and his son to launch a food truck. Taking to the road, Chef Carl goes back to his roots to reignite his passion for the kitchen—and zest for life and love.”

Probably not the most vegan-friendly movie in the world, but, with a cast boasting roughly everyone in any good movie ever and a lot of hype, it’ll likely be worth a watch. Plus the soundtrack’s curated KCRW’s Mathieu Schreyer, meant to mirror the road trip taken by Favreau + co. in the movie.

If this track’s any indication as to the worth of the rest of the songs, it’s going to be a pretty stellar collection of songs. Listen to the Hot 8 Brass Band’s take on the classic below and then give the movie trailer a watch. Chef opens in select theaters today and the movie’s soundtrack is available on iTunes now; Hot 8 is in the midst of a summer tour now and soon to head across the pond—full tour dates on their site.

Someone once said that it’s highly egotistical to quote oneself. But I’m not sure who said that because they failed to quote themselves, so I’ll proceed—on first hearing the music of Kishi Bashi last year, we wrote:

“Kishi Bashi creates beautifully complex, layered, orchestral pop that sounds like it comes straight out of the beak of some magical bird you’re happy to be near but fear looking at straight-on. Or it comes from some really talented guy. One or the other.”

We stand by that statement—to this day, Kishi Bashi (the pen name for Kaoru Ishibashi’s solo work) continues to entice us with his deeply textured, highly accessible, inventively soaring music. So we were thrilled to speak with him yesterday as he embarked on a five week tour supporting his coming sophomore release, Lighght, out next Tuesday.

As the former member of Athens-based Elephant Six giants, Of Montreal drove through the bayou on his way to the first show of the tour in Baton Rouge, we talked about the new album, his many-layered writing process, and our mutual abandonment of New York City.

Read on and listen to the first single from the album, “Philosophize In It! Chemicalize With It!”, below

“I guess there’s a lot of pressure—my first album did pretty well, you know, in an “indie” kinda way, and a lot of people really like it,” Kaoru told me regarding his second solo album. “So there’s a lot of pressure to kinda recreate it…. I went a different direction. It’s still a lot of the same creativity, but I think it’s a little more aggressive—there’s a lot more experimentation going on, I tried to feature a lot of musicianship, and I focused on the song-writing and the lyrics.”

Listening to his first album, 151a, though, you’d never guess that he’d never not focused on the song-writing. Ishibashi’s music is highly orchestral, extremely layered, and musically complicated while still presenting itself as extremely accessible pop music.

“I think the approach, I think I got it from Of Montreal—(founder) Kevin Barnes is a good friend of mine and my neighbor and he’s a real inspiration. But I take an approach where I layer as much as I can on top of each other…when I’m writing a song, I put so much on there…like, any idea I have, I just put it on there to the point where it’s too much. And then, when I’m editing it, I’ll leave things and I’ll take things out; I really see what work.”

And the seemingly enigmatic title of the album—Lighght—comes from a poem that proved inspirational to the classically trained violinist. “The poem’s by Aram Saroyan,” Ishibashi explains. “He’s a minimalist poet. I studied minimilist composition—like Philip Glass, Terry Riley—and I didn’t realize there’s a parallel movement to minimalism in poetry…. Like, you don’t read it, it’s more like an instance. You just kinda see it and experience it…. That poem was really profound—it’s one word—”Lighght”; just how it felt, in the middle of the page. It was a pretty profound poem at the time in that it kind of broke a lot of conventions and inspired you to really think about words and the functionality of words. But the whole idea was that it breaks conventions and that’s something I can truly relate to. And that’s why I used it for my title. It’s a one-word experience…. I see the album as a burst of a general idea of being in one point in time…. I found out about his work, like, a year ago, and I was really excited about it. And I looked really hard for another word because I didn’t want to steal it—I thought maybe I could find another word with a silent ‘GH’ which I could double…but I couldn’t—this was the perfect one.”

In the past, Ishibashi performed solo, singing and playing violin live over drum loops and pedal-looped vocals to support his first release. He’s now recruited a full band to support Lighght for the next five weeks, enhancing live shows with performance visuals created by Athens-based artist, Dana Jo Cooley.

On what brought Ishibashi from New York to Athens, Georgia in the first place—”Of Montreal, I guess. I used to play them and I rehearsed with them and I really fell in love with the town. It’s a small city, but it’s got a lot pop culture, really lovely people, and it’s got a very vibrant live music scene. For the size of the city, it’s best I’ve seen on the east coast. There’s always a band playing and people will come to see you.”

And it sounds like there’s no looking back or romanticizing the ten years he and his wife spent in New York City. “We started okay, before we had kids,” Ishibashi says “We were in Brooklyn, in Park Slope…and then we were in Queens…and then we ended up in Jersey. And we were just like ‘What are we doing here?’…I’m so glad I don’t live there any more…the quality of living was just getting really bad.” What to do with all that newly discovered disposable income? “I live in Athens, which is like, the middle of nowhere, so I got a lot,” he say with a laugh. “You know, I bought a house. I have a grill.”

Living the dream.

You can listen to the rest of Kishi Bashi’s new album below and pre-order it on yellow or black vinyl, CD, and/or digitally via Ishibashi’s label, Joyful Noise, and directly from Kishi Bashi’s bandcamp page. You can also get it via iTunes. Catch the band on tour too—they hit New Orleans tonight, Austin tomorrow, and will be in LA next Friday as they play the Fonda. Full tour dates on Kishi Bahsi’s Web site.

To the right, the album cover for Lighght and the two winning designs from Kishi Bashi’s recent t-shirt design contest, created by Yiming Qin + Paige Bowman, respectively.

Lighght by Kishi Bashi

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A happy Cinco de Mayo to everyone today. We suggest celebrating this holiday in any of these three ways:

1. Listening to the excellent mariachi covers of Mexico’s Mariachi Rock-O, like their take on Morrissey’s “Everyday is Like Sunday” or Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry”, both below;

2. Traveling back in time a few days and making this habenero-infused tequila from our 2009 recipe—it makes for some of the best, most adventurous margarita-drinking ever; and

3. Actually learning what we’re celebrating with Cinco de Mayo. Not to talk down to anyone—we’d barely known ourselves until recent years—but we are not, in fact, celebrating Mexican Independence Day; that’s in September.

What’s actually being commemorated is the May 5th Battle of Puebla, during the French “Intervention” in Mexico, when Mexican forces very unexpectedly defeated a much larger, better-equipped French Army. The French eventually went on to overpower the Mexican people in subsequent battles, but that little glimmer of hope—the underdog in the fight—that’s what we’re celebrating. That and, more importantly and broadly, Mexican heritage and how it plays into our lives here in LA and elsewhere.

Who can’t get behind that?

I guess the French, maybe. Everyone else—happy Cinco de Mayo to you!

Art by Danny Martin.