HIJK

The Mallard

Whispering Pines
"LA's Whispering Pines' 'Family Tree,' reaching back to twang's glorious midcentury of pioneering fusions to fetch sounds for envisioning the near-future, is surely as much of an aesthetic atlas for country's current progression as Brother Johnson's stunning commingled pathos and mirth on "Mowin' Down the Roses" or "Women." Of course, the long-haired and denim-clad quintet of Brian Filosa (bass, vocals), Joe Bourdet (guitar, vocals), Dave Baine (keys, guitar, vocals), Joe Zabielski (drums, percussion), and David Burden (harmonica, percussion, vocals) abide and create in a vastly different space than Music Row or the plains and Rust Belt enclaves of Midwestern alt-country. This is reflected in the sunny clarity of their sound and sometimes mellower lyrical concerns. Silver Lake's Whispering Pines is part of a loose, freewheeling confederacy of young SoCal-based solo artists and groups who purvey what some used to call "wooden music" and my friend Zach a.k.a. DJ Turquoise Wisdom has taken to terming 'bootcut.'" - SF Bay Guardian

Porchlight Open Door presents: SPRING CLEANING
Come early, and sign up to tell a 5-minute story on this month's theme: "SPRING CLEANING". The evening's top storyteller, as chosen by a random audience member, receives $50 in cold, hard, United States greenbacks. Spend it at the bar, or on a bag of the Hemlock's award-winning hot nuts.

Punk Rock Sideshow w/DJ Tragic & the Duchess of Hazard, every Monday

Tempo No Tempo

Dinowalrus
Brooklyn's DINOWALRUS: "It’s fractured, but that term doesn’t do justice to some of the gorgeous swathes in its back half, the surprises that don’t explode in your face. It’s psychedelic, but often with a perplexing disregard for sound; the electronics aren’t furnished or highfalutin, and even the gauziest synths come off as impulsive, biological, like they just came out of the musicians. Somewhere in there, it occurred to me that the album captures, in seamy spirit, the sort of mind-blowing underground live show that New York was famous for in the early 80s." - Tiny Mix Tapes

Ingot Rot

Japanther

The Reaction

Street Eaters

Emily Jane White
"A solemn trek down familiar roads, its hushed, dusky style of storytelling recalling the subdued side of PJ Harvey, with lyrical roots stemming from a common pool of reconstituted American gothic. White's presentation may be mundane, starkly serious treatments of gloomy stories about violent death and love gone wrong, but she's saved from bargain-bin neo-folk by her voice, its intimate, entrancing quality, and the overall subtlety of presentation." - Slant Magazine

Helene Renaut
"The voice of Hélène is as lithe as a slowly moving cloud in the bright blue sky and her acoustic guitar play is lulling and pure." - Common Folk Meadow

Clipd Beaks
"Mangled analog-synth whoop, feral vocal, and pick-stabbed bassline entered the mix as abruptly as a set of tire spikes. The band makes these and many other elements coalesce into one constantly mutating parachute." - The Onion AV Club

Sightings
"Sightings are a New York band that every time I see them, they've moved forward into some new, weird realm. They definitely are a rock band, but possibly the most outer-limit existing rock band out there." - Brian Turner, WFMU music director

"Grinding, guttural waves of splintered guitars swerve and stammer like a drunk weaving through traffic — if not for singer Mark Morgan’s laconic, drawling talk-singing, there might not be many familiar signposts at all." - Boston Phoenix

Bill Orcutt
"They may seem poles apart, but the guitar deconstructions of former Harry Pussy member Bill Orcutt on “A New Way To Pay Old Debts” place him alongside the likes of John Fahey. During the latter years of his life, Fahey deliberately turned his back on his earlier fingerpicking style to explore other ways of how to play solo guitar. To do this he allowed himself to slip into a state of altered consciousness - his fingers instinctively found the notes on the fretboard, but his imagination was unleashed from the routine of chord changing to discover new sounds. Meanwhile Orcutt, on “A New Way To Pay Old Debts”, has absorbed himself in the work of blues legends “Mississippi” Fred McDowell and Lightnin’ Hopkins, flamenco guitarist Ramon Montoya, Bahamian guitar master Joseph Spence and British improvisor Derek Bailey, whose influence echoes loudest here, and crashes these styles together with such enefgy that his guitar sounds in danger of splintering into matchwood.

Orcutt emerged from the ripped and torn environs of the early 1990’s US punk rock/hardcore scene as the guitarist for Harry Pussy, the group he co-founded in 1992 in Miami, Florida with Adris Hoyos on drums and vocals and himself on guitar. Up until their demise in 1997, Harry Pussy performed and recorded an extreme version of hardcore that was stripped bare of melody, rhythm or chorus, leaving only the aftershock of Hoyos’s piercing vocal and Orcutt’s tangle of broken guitar music dangling dangerously in the air." - The Wire

Laudanum
"LAUDANUM returns after belting out a thunderous split with STORMCROW and the criminally underrated debut CD, THE APOTHEKER. THE CORONATION is a 40+ minute hellride into a bleak and vast forest of doom and despair, a serenade of blistering guitars, steamrolling distorted bass, vocals tainted with battery acid and a landscape of crushing electronic sine waves. "Corrosive doom nihilism and industrial noise wasteland, ambient texture and punishing sludge from Oakland" - 20 Buck Spin. Founding members Becky and Judd Hawk are now joined with Life is Abuse veteranos Greg Wilkenson (BRAINOIL) and Nathan Misterek (GRAVES AT SEA) to unleash this blackened opus of OSCILLOSCOPE DOOM." Life is Abuse

Worm Ouroborus
Worm Ouroboros is Lorraine Rath (Amber Asylum, The Gault) on bass and vocals, Jessica Way (World Eater) on guitar and vocals, and Justin Green (World Eater, Population Reduction, War Trash) on drums. Drawing inspiration from metal, doom, folk, progressive, and dark ambient genres, Worm Ouroboros creates a creeping, dark landscape full of murky dreams and emotions. (bio)