Falling James

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Shpongle

Falling James
Psychedelic music has taken on many forms over the years, from the classic acid-rock excesses of the late 1960s to the less literal, but no less engrossing, passages of world-music bands like Tinariwen. British duo Shpongle, featuring Simon Posford and Raja Ram, takes the old trippy traditions and gooses them......
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Mark Kozelek

Falling James
From his early days with San Francisco band Red House Painters to his more recent solo albums and work with Sun Kil Moon, Mark Kozelek has always been an unpredictable musician, crooning his tales of tragic boxers in a distinctively wounded baritone. This is the man, after all, who once......
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Nick Waterhouse

Falling James
Nick Waterhouse is more retro-minded than many musicians, but the singer-guitarist has turned his love of the past into a way of discovering who he is in the here and now. "You become something on the way there," he says about the various ways he's incorporated the influence of idols......
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Anny Celsi

Falling James
Anny Celsi is one of this city's smartest and catchiest pop songwriters but, as is the case with so many talented musicians, she's far more popular in Europe than in her hometown. She might even be too clever for her own good, adapting the lyrics of such early songs as......
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Nicole Atkins

Falling James
Dream pop was never any dreamier than on Nicole Atkins' 2007 debut album, Neptune City, an ambivalent Valentine to her fading Neptune, N.J., hometown. Her voice soared grandly over the ruined seascape like a reincarnated Cass Elliot's, and she neatly positioned herself to be the next great modern '60s-pop diva......
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The Haden Triplets

Falling James
As if it weren't already ridiculously obvious by now, The Haden Triplets - Rachel, Petra and Tanya - come from an unusually talented family. Their brother Josh Haden leads the alt-rock band Spain, intoning moody blue ballads that have been covered by Johnny Cash, while their dad, Charlie Haden, is,......
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Angel Olsen

Falling James
Like many pop songwriters, Angel Olsen has a pretty voice, but she uses her sweetly melodic delivery to cast unusual, moodily hypnotic spells like "White Fire," an ethereal incantation that slowly and subtly builds emotional power over its seven somberly strummed minutes. But the Chicago singer-guitarist is far more than......
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The Eagle Rock Gospel Singers

Falling James
Cynics should be forgiven, so to speak, if they're initially suspicious of a band calling itself The Eagle Rock Gospel Singers. Surely such a group of musicians must be trying to be hip or ironic or funny with a name like that, but the local coed octet is going for......
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Dr. Dog

Falling James
"Which way to the infinite road that unwinds from within?" is the trippy musical question Dr. Dog raise on their latest album, B-Room. A jaunty piano and a faux-gospel chorus reply, "Follow the distant light," as circus-y keyboards and a hint of snarling guitar cycle around in a swirling coda......
Wanda Coleman at the Van Nuys Multi-Purpose Center

Wanda Coleman, 1946-2013

Falling James
Back in 1983, the iconic local poet Wanda Coleman anticipated her own death, which she envisioned as "a door thru which i escape/another world." Far from being in fear of this inevitability, the Watts native and lifelong Angeleno embraced it. "When my time comes/i will speak to the night," she......