Chris Ziegler

This summer The Raveonettes went surf — well, more surf than usual — with an out-of-nowhere album called Pe'ahi (after a Hawaiian surf spot nicknamed "Jaws") that's soaked in white-noise wave sounds and bubbling with knowing references to Davie Allan and The Beach Boys. The "classic" Raveonettes are still in......

The Buzzcocks are back again and maybe you helped, since the famous very-first-wave British punk band decided to crowd-fund their ninth and newest studio album, The Way. It's also up to you whether you file that as a symptom of a collapsing music industry (who doesn't wanna put out a......

Soul singer Charles Bradley has had some kind of life. In fact, it's the kind of life people write songs about, and not always happy songs, either. After decades of touch-and-go living, including a near-death penicillin reaction, sleeping on subway trains and a long stint as a James Brown impersonator,......

Each summer, the Long Beach Funk Fest lands in the heart of the city and unloads several decades of funk founders and fundamentalists — recently including Shuggie Otis, Charles Watt, Bernie Worrell, Dennis Coffey, Steve Arrington, Fred Wesley and more. But for its fifth anniversary this year, the festival has......

Leaving Records' new signees Trance Farmers are gonna be right at home in the L.A. freak scene. If you've already signed on for the lo-fi postpunk-as–hip-hop of Vex Ruffin, the overcranked Hasil Adkins–isms of Restavrant, or that first beautifully indistinct White Fence LP, you'll enjoy plenty of, "Dude, do we......

Fucked Up's newest album, Glass Boys, is a long way from the Wipers/Jawbreaker alien-core they've done before. Vocalist Damien Abraham still has that wrecked, Schwarzenbach-via-'82-Rollins roar of a voice — but now it's chopping through some quintessential Amerindie guitar rock à la Dinosaur Jr. or Hüsker Dü's Warehouse era instead......

Foxygen make magic as much as they make music, a phenomenon captured on their ferociously charismatic (and aptly titled) 2013 album We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic. Somehow, they'd come up with their own take on the Stones' Their Satanic Majesties Request, but via Os Mutantes......

Now that his breakout band Girls is over and behind him, frontman Christopher Owens is finding and refining an ambitious new personal sound. On upcoming solo album A New Testament — a title bristling with meaning, given Owens' history growing up in a traveling Christian commune — he has U-turned......

Some bands wear their influences on their sleeves, but L.A.'s Washing Machines helpfully put them in their song titles: "Sonic Fuck" ain't so far from Sonic Youth, and "Vaseline" ain't so far from one of The Vaselines' sarcasto-pop tracks. (Alt. title: "Urinal Vaseline," just to rep for local noiseniks The......

Maybe you thought Live in San Francisco was the White Fence album you'd been waiting for, and maybe that was because you were one of the many awestruck people who end up flattened against the back wall when Fence mainman Tim Presley and pals seize the stage. But now Presley......