Kevin Bronson

Chief are four guys from southern California who got together in New York City and make music that sounds as if it came from the remote woods. Well, where there is a very good recording studio, of course. Chief's pristine folk-rock is the stuff of sparkling guitars, twinkling keyboards and......

Even if the only ink you sweat is your printer cartridge and your idea of iron comes in your vitamin supplements, there's a lot to recommend at this weekend's Ink-N-Iron Festival: the tunes. Among the the tatted masses, meticulously coiffed pompadours, corseted pin-up girls and acres of machines with eye-dazzling......

Foo Fighters guitarist Chris Shiflett has taken a detour off the radio rock superhighway and found himself on a country road. His side project Chris Shiflett & the Dead Peasants -- inspired by a trip a couple years ago to rockabilly's answer to Coachella, the Hootenanny in Orange County --......

If you can get past Karen Elson's flaming red hair, if you can get past her unblemished skin, if you can get past her supermodel comportment, if you can get past the fact she's Mrs. Jack White ... well, you should. The 31-year-old singer plays Southern gothic chanteuse pretty convincingly......

The Henry Clay People's jagged, college-educated barroom rock has wormed its way into a lot of Angeleno hearts the past couple of years, its classic riff-slinging and manic shout-singing somehow turning the high anxiety of "Working Part Time" into catharsis. The quintet's third album, "Somewhere on the Golden Coast," arrives......

Bay Area-based indie-folk songstresses Thao Nguyen and Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn each has built estimable catalogs over the past several years, Nguyen under her tongue-twisting moniker Thao With the Get Down Stay Down and Mirah as, well, Mirah. They teamed up at a performance at San Francisco's Noise Pop in......

Hope you don't feel slighted, Los Angeles. Two weekends ago on That Other Coast, LCD Soundsystem brought the house -- or, rather, Terminal 5 -- down with an eye-popping, ear-decimating, 2 1/2-hour show that wound up with "New York I Love You" and a cover of Alicia Keys' "Empire State......

Mumford & Sons don't add up. Four tidy West London boys doing achy, dusty Americana -- why, that's almost as suspect as four preppies from Columbia University embracing world beats in their pop music, isn't it? Indeed, Marcus Mumford and compatriots Ben Lovett, Country (!) Winston and Ted Dwane are......

Benjamin Curtis became every wannabe-shoegazer's idol in 2008, when School of Seven Bells unleashed its floating-through-the-stratosphere fuzz-pop on the world -- finding the ex-Secret Machines guitarist situated squarely in between fetching identical twins Alejandra and Claudia Deheza (whose harmonies were equally fetching). Their album "Alpinisms" sounded like the Cocteau Twins......

Can L.A. City Councilman Jose Huizar rock a dancefloor? Will he take home a free set of headphones? Will anybody be able tell Proposition 15 from Questions 67 & 68 (sorry, bad classic rock reference) after DJ Jeremy Dawson's set tonight? Answers to these questions and more at the Echo,......