The Transplants - Tall Cans in the Air

"Tall Cans in the Air" is the 2nd track off of The Transplant's self-titled debut album released on Hellcat Records in 2002. The Transplants is the quintessential hip-hop/punk rock super group of the previous decade--exemplifying everything that the southern california, low-rider, punk rock mentality is. The Transplants are: Tim Armstrong (Rancid, Operation Ivy // guitar, bass, vocals, synth, production), Rob "Skinhead Rob" Aston (Expensive Taste // vocals, scratching), and Travis Barker (Blink 182, Box Car Racer, TRV$DJAM, Expensive Taste // percussion).

Into the Hole

Into the Hole (2/02/2011)

Yume Bitsu - Into the Hole

Marisa Anderson - Clouds

Why? - Torpedo's or Crohns

Elliot Smith - Waltz #2

Flying Lotus - 1983

Agent Ribbons - I'm Alright

How to Dress Well - My Body

Dirty Projectors - Stillness is the Move

Orange Juice - Felicity

Laura Veirs - July Flame

Simon and Garfunkel - At the Zoo

The Flaming Lips - Abandoned Hospital Ship

John Wesley Coleman - Get High Babe

Stars - Soft Revolution

Leonard Cohen - So Long Marianne

Entrance - Silence on a Crowded Train

Sun Ra - The Sun Myth

Jackson 5 - I Want You Back

iLLy's style

Illy is a female artist in the Etnies Skateboards community. I found this drawing on the Etnies Blog at [http://etnies.com/blog/2006/1/31/meet-ily-the-etnies-girl-of-the-month/]. Pretty dope!

Inside the [HEAD]phones / February 2011

Art Blakey - The Jazz Messengers (1956)

Cold War Kids - Mine is Yours (2011)

A New Found Glory - Nothing Gold Can Stay (1999)

Incubus - Monuments & Melodies (2009)

VA / Wheedle's Groove: Seattle's Finest in Funk & Soul 1965 75 (2004)

Martha & The Vandellas - Live at the 20-GRAND Detroit, Michigan 1967

Kanye West - The College Dropout (2004)

Handsome Boy Modeling School - So... How's Your Girl? (1999)

Sister Saves

Sister Saves: winter 2010

Gomez - See the World (How We Operate, 2006)

Fruit Bats - The Ruminant Band (The Ruminant Band, 2009)

Feist - I Feel it All (The Reminder, 2007)

Jenny Lewis - Next Messiah (Acid Tongue, 2007)

Conor Oberst - Souled Out!!! (Conor Oberst, 2008)

The Dodos - Ashley (Visiter, 2008)

Cold War Kids - Dreams Old Men Dream (Loyalty to Loyalty, 2008)

Cold War Kids - Robbers (Robbers & Cowards, 2006)

Stars - My Favourite Book (In Our Bedroom After the War, 2007)

Birds Fled From Me - Resisted (Deeper Lurking, 2009)

Conor Oberst - Lenders in the Temple (Conor Oberst, 2008)

Cassino - Maddie Bloom (Kingprince, 2009)

Sleepy Sun - Ooh Boy (Fever, 2010)

TV On The Radio - Tonight (Return to Cookie Mountain, 2006)

Aushua - Sister Saves (No Harm Done EP, 2008)

Death Cab For Cutie - Bixby Canyon Bridge (Narrow Stairs, 2009)

"and the silence, it became so very clear"

"Cold War Kids Move Toward the Big Time" -- Los Angeles Times, February 3, 2011

Making peace with a city that they long defined themselves against

A few weeks ago, the members of Cold War Kids did something they felt was long overdue. They moved to Los Angeles.

The quartet had long lived on the outer orbits of L.A.'s cultural life — a studio in Long Beach, a stint based in Whittier, college at Biola. Life on the fringes suited their musical and lyrical interests. Cold War Kids' early songs were an untrendy mix of barroom blues-punk populated by a fictional cast of alcoholic dads, trips to the E.R. and (literal) dirty laundry. Somehow it caught on among L.A's demimonde in the mid-'00s, though not without scorn from snarkier corners of blogland, and made them unlikely KROQ staples and darlings of the respected major-indie Downtown Records.

But the band still seemed purposefully and necessarily set apart from L.A.'s indie elite, geographically and psychologically. But that's changed. Between tours, they'll come home to new Los Feliz and Silver Lake homes, and to an unlikely peace with a city that they long defined themselves against.

"Moving up here was the best thing I've done lately," said bassist Matt Maust over breakfast at Mustard Seed Cafe, an urban-quaint red brick restaurant in Los Feliz. "We used to live on one of the main drags in Long Beach and now I have this back house where I walk out and exhale deeply and it's so, so quiet."

The recent move coincided with a shift in their goals for the band. Its 2006 debut, "Robbers & Cowards," documented life on society's edges, and its cryptic 2008 follow-up, "Loyalty to Loyalty," was a collection of half-remembered fever dreams from the road.

But its new album, "Mine Is Yours," released on Interscope Records last week, is a relatively easygoing and hook-savvy record about the trials and pleasures of domesticity that could introduce Cold War Kids to a very different audience. It will make skeptics feel entirely justified in their scorn, longtime fans impressed with the band's advancement and attention to songcraft, and make new audiences hoist beers and kiss someone.

It also comes after one of the more difficult periods in the band's life. "Robbers & Cowards" had a genuine hit in the minimalist dub vamp "Hang Me Up to Dry," and they enjoyed the wind of a breakout new band at their back. For "Loyalty," the Kids worked quickly in the studio to document the things they believed their band was built on — fussy but precise rhythmic interplay from bassist Maust and drummer Matt Aveiro, Jonathan Russell's echo-laden single-string guitar riffs and Nathan Willett's voice, rooted in classic soul and character-driven lyrical vignettes.

In hindsight, though, the band members say they rushed the record and left many song ideas unrealized. Though their audience grew, they paid for their haste with some poor reviews that chipped at their faith in how their band worked.

"A lot of our good ideas went unfinished. Nobody was there to tell us, 'This is good, but it could be better,'" Willett said. "A song like 'Dreams Old Men Dream' was a great idea that we picked before it was ripe."

For "Mine Is Yours," they made a point of upending that routine by decamping to Nashville for months on end to work with Tom Waits' and Modest Mouse's producer Jacquire King, arriving with dozens of song fragments and their only rule being that every idea was on the table — except hastiness.

The band had believed its recordings should essentially be documents of its often searing live dynamic, with each instrument speaking for itself and the songs written around the clamor. Under King's guidance, however, they pored over effects, tried out new elements like drum loops and programming on tracks such as "Sensitive Kid," and took pains to write their most immediate melodies yet. It's a record rooted in well-crafted songwriting and production more than the dank desperation of a warehouse practice space.

After a time of creative turmoil, Willett also turned to more intimate and classic spheres of subject matter for his lyrics. His old songs seemed haunted by the things chasing bluesmen for decades — the devil, booze and disappointed women — along with nods to literary heroes such as Nabokov and Joan Didion.

But those fictions didn't make sense with these new sounds, or with the truth of their lives as a successful mid-career rock band. So the long-married Willett wrote about what he saw — old friends on the brink of divorce, couples in too deep to quit but riven with old wounds, and the tough joys of making a life with someone.

"We were watching a lot of Cassavetes films, and he had said that there's no more fascinating subject than men and women together, and for me to admit to that was a real 'a-ha' moment for me," Willett said. "My friends were all getting divorced and turning 30, and for the first time I wanted to write about the people around me."

The album is generally optimistic about love, but like in any relationship, old attachments come back and cause trouble. Much of the early criticism lobbed at "Mine Is Yours" comes from the specter of Kings of Leon, whom producer King shepherded from big-in-England underachievers to arena-filling megastars.

Although there will likely never be anything approaching the Tarzan alpha swagger of "Sex on Fire" in Cold War Kids' catalog, it's not entirely coincidental that King's ear for taking flinty, pop-adjacent blues-rock and spit-shining it for big stages had its appeal for the quartet.

"Sure they want that [commercial success], but with them the art is always first," said King. "I hear a lot of talk of them cleaning up and going mainstream around this record. The goal wasn't to find a top-40 audience, but to have worked on classic songcraft and productions. It's not bad if you want to say something that connects with a lot of people."

Whether "Mine Is Yours" kicks Cold War Kids from the Wiltern into the Greek Theatre will be determined this year. They've severed many of their outré bona fides in pursuit of something bigger, and arguably harder.

For now, though, Cold War Kids have had enough of running from the perpetual warmth and commercial possibility of Los Angeles and all it stands for. Maybe embracing it is the most dangerous thing they could have done.

"People think you need to be uncomfortable to make art. You don't," Willett said. "You first have to be comfortable to really let yourself be vulnerable."

august.brown@latimes.com

Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times

Interplanetary Travelers [1.26.11]

The Essex Green - Sixties

Sleepover - Peace Buds

Toro y Moi - Thanks Vision

Eero Komstoinen & Co - Near but Far Away

New York Ska Jazz Ensemble - Filthy McNasty

Chicago Afrobeat Project - Chupacabra

Sun Ra - Interplanetary Travelers

De La Soul - Jenifa Taught Me

J. Dilla - Workinon It

Chaweewan Dumnern - Lam Toey Chaweewan

Thao and the Get Down Stay Down - Geography

Neil Young - Walk With Me

Kigali Y Izahabu - Invura Yaranka Geyi

Pink Floyd - Welcome to the Machine

The Pixies - Broken Face

Death From Above 1979 - Cold War

No Bunny - Ain't it a Shame

Sushi 4004 - Fantastic Plastic Machine

Gilbert Deflez - L'Agonie Instrumental

The Fugees - ..........

The Apple Tree Sessions: The Sounds of a Unified Struggle

Bring your soul and an open mind

The Sounds of a Unified Struggle is a special installation to commemorate African American old school soul and RnB musicians. Dr Stone and The Sinister Kid will be providing the rhythms every Monday night in February from 7-8 pm on KCPR 91.3 FM.

January 31, 2011

THE ENTRANCE BAND - M L K

JIMI HENDRIX - Fire

THE OLYMPICS - Rainin' In My Heart

CHUCK BERRY - Johnny Be Goode

THE MARCELLS - Blue Moon

J.J. JACKSON - Down, But Not Out

THE CHAMBERS BROTHERS - Uptown

SAM & DAVE - Soul Man

THE TEMPTATIONS - Ain't Too Proud to Beg

PATRINELL STATEN - I Let a Good Man In

THE APOLLAS - You're Absolutely Right

MARY LEE WHITNEY - Don't Come a Knockin'

SAM COOKE - A Change is Gonna Come

BOB MARLEY & THE WAILERS - Get Up, Stand Up

February 7, 2011

DEE DEE SHARP - Mashed Potato Time

THE OLYMPICS - Good Lovin'

THE ESQUIRES - Sadie's Ways

ARCHIE BELL & THE DRELLS - Tighten Up

JOHNNY WOODSON - I Wanna Be Near You

JIMMY JONES - Mr Fix It

THE ESQUIRES - Come On, Come On

THE MIGHTY HANNIBAL - Get in the Groove

SCORPIO - Ninety Nine and a Half

CHUCK BERRY - No Particular Place to Go

CHUCK BERRY - Rip it Up

RAY CHARLES - The Right Time

THE RIGHT TRACK - You Destroyed My Soul

J.J. JACKSON - But It's Alright

THE MARVELLOS - Why Do You Want to Hurt the One That Loves You

THE DRIFTERS - There Goes My Baby

THE MARVELETTES - Here I Am Baby

ARETHA FRANKLIN - RESPECT

February 14, 2011 - Valentines Day Special

MILES DAVIS - Bye Bye Blackbird
LINDA JONES - Hypnotized
THE TEEN TURBANS - We Need to be Loved
LITTLE JERRY WILLIAMS - I'm The Lover Man
BOBBY BENNET - Soul Jury Pt 1 & 2
CURTIS MAYFIELD AND THE IMPRESSIONS - I'm the One Who Loves You
SMOKEY ROBINSON AND THE MIRACLES - Shop Around
MARTHA REEVES AND THE VANDELLAS - Honey Chile
THE INVINCABLES - Heart Full of Love
THE MARVELLOS - We go Together
WALTER FOSLER - Your Search is Over
MILES DAVIS - Tadd's Delight
THE INTRUDERS - Cowboys to Girls
TOWER OF POWER - You're Still a Young Man
THE DELFONICS - La La Means I Love You
THE ENCHANTERS - I Wanna Thank You
The Apollas - Lock Me In Your Heart
Barbara English - I've Got a Date

February 21, 2011

The Capitols - Cool Jerk
Johnnie Taylor - Who's Making Love
Wilson Pickett - Land of 1,000 Dances
Otis Redding - Try a Little Tenderness
Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers - Does Your Mamma Know About Me
Gladis Knight & the Pips - Midnight Train to Georgia
Billy Butler & the Enchanters - I Can't Work No Longer
Gene Chandler - Good Times
Major Lance - The Monkey Time
Artistics - Patty Cake
Walter Jackson - It's All Over
Al Green - Love & Happiness
Michael Jackson - Man in the Mirror
The Primettes - Tears of Sorrow

February 28, 2011

THE PSYCHEDELIC ALIENS - Hijacking

THE 5TH DIMENSION - Puppet Man

THE FOUR TOPS - I Can't Help Myself

SAM & DAVE - Soul Man

ARCHIE BELL & THE DRELLS - Tighten Up

MARTHA REEVES & THE VANDELLAS - I Promise to Wait my Love

TEEN TURBANS - We Just Need to be Loved

LORRAINE ELLISON - Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)

THE 5TH DIMENSION - Save the Country

BILLY BUTLER & THE ENCHANTERS - I Can't Work No Longer

GENE CHANDLER - Good Times

MAJOR LANCE - Monkey Time

THE PSYCHEDELIC ALIENS - Gbe Keke Wo Taoc

THE INVINCIBLES - Heart Full of Love

IKE & TINA TURNER - Finger Poppin

FRANKIE LYMON & THE TEENAGERS - Portable on my Shoulder

JACKSON 5 - The Love You Save

BEN E. KING - Stand By Me