The Occurrence

  Photo courtesy USEFP Hailing from Lahore, Pakistan, Poor Rich Boy sounds like a Merge Records mainstay. The group’s crystalline acoustic guitars and syncopated, airy percussion suggest a Middle Eastern-South Asian Bon Iver or Iron and Wine. The...

Sometimes the bravest, brashest thing a rock band can do is scale it back. England’s Band of Skulls did just that to great success at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery on May 21, trading their rambunctious style...

Album cover courtesy ATO Talk is cheap. Sometimes the most powerful way to say something is with music. Guitar gurus Rodrigo y Gabriela having been speaking volumes with their jaw-dropping albums for years, and the recently...

Photo by Shervin Lainez   It’s awkward when you lose half your band to BuzzFeed. But if you’re the Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s Kip Berman, you soldier on. You call on old pals, like once...

Following up on her amazing debut entitled See.SZA.Run, alternative R&B songstress SZA hits us with eight tracks of dark, dreamy, spacy production and harmonies in the form of the S EP. Now, I could say...

We all wish that the savoir-faire of pop stars could rub off on us. But that blind desire has turned into a sickening entitlement. With rapper Iggy Azalea having to cease crowd-surfing at her shows because...

The Troubadour is a place of legend. Elton John, Carole King and so many others spring-boarded their historic careers there, amid the oaken acoustics and barroom regulars. They went on to astronomical heights, and it...

My apologies on this post as it's several months late, but better late than never! Here are my favorite acts from Iceland Airwaves 2013: Lescop Pourquoi? Parce que j'aime merde français! I'm not a huge punk fan,...