Quit Mumbling

It’s been a little while since we’ve gotten new material from QM friends PAPA. The Los Angeles band who played one of our shows earlier this year have been hard at work on their upcoming album, and the first of it hit “The Web” today (the internet, I mean the internet). “Put Me To Work” [...]

You know a video for a song is good when you can no longer separate rolling image from melody after exposure. Like an outbreak (not the scary monkeys) of musical disease, it infests every future connotation of the tune in your head, expanding a context beyond the sound. An already memorable track, UK production duo [...]

MØ is 23-year-old Copenhagen native who makes punchy electropop that’s already been compared to Grimes, and fellow Scandinavian Lykke Li. “Pilgrim” is brooding and unapologetic, carried by well-placed horns and supportive synths that can’t overshadow her deep-belly vocals that feel like they’re burning a hole through your back pockets. It has some ominous progressions, but any dark [...]

We’ve been fans of Rhye since their mysterious debut track “Open” came out of nowhere early this year. Well we now know a little bit more about the Los Angeles by way of Berlin duo Robin Hannibal and Mike Milosh, but it’s almost better keeping their shroud of mystery in tact behind the fleeting moods their [...]

Last night, Frank Ocean released (“dropped”) a non-album track via his Tumblr page that acts both lyrically and sonically as an epilogue to his recently praised album Channel Orange. Though Ocean’s signature falsetto is nowhere to be found on “Blue Whale,” a song he raps instead of sings on, it’s still full of his corner-of-the-room thoughts, [...]

“NYC” is the debut single from UK bedroom producer Brolin, who sounds like the urban, streetwise counterpart to San Diego’s Youth Lagoon. Water treading vocals will quickly bring to mind the way Trevor Powers builds tension through muffled secrets before a well-timed outburst of clarity, but trades in an environment of floating space for the grounding [...]

Certain music lends itself to a heightened form of driving, that makes the entire experience, even here in good ol’ Los Angeles “melt outside the lines.” What may be our subconscious admiration for cinematic moodiness inclines us towards the slow-motion vision that kicks in once the right song soundtracks our automotive voyage (because that’s what [...]

Our current generation of “alternative” music revels in the re-appropriation and blending of past genres. It is not uncommon for bands emerging from Brooklyn or Echo Park to pull from a long list of historical musical adjectives to construct their post-punk shoegaze dreampop electro-funk fusions. While less successful ventures skate dangerously close to the edge [...]

Los Angeles band and QM friends Harriet have been recording a new album and releasing cover videos while they’re doing it. They put up the first session on YouTube the other day, and it’s a split of John Hiatt’s 1988 “Have A Little Faith in Me” and Frank Ocean’s recent “Lost.” In the days before [...]