If there’s one thing you can say about Liars, it’s that they’ve never had any trouble finding their voice.

It was only four years ago that the first, sustained chord of Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out” was struck on the UCLA campus. Four years since those first couple of lines (“So if you’re lonely / you know I’m here, waiting for you”) hinted at how truly ripe for the plucking radio stations would consider the group to be. Four years since UCLA students had their first taste of the indie rock sensation that, in a matter of months, would take the world by storm.

Performing in front of over 5,500 people is not as easy as it looks.

History will probably write off the days of the cassette tape as a useless transitional phase, analog’s last stand before digital music became all the rage. But there is one legacy that the cassette tape has left behind that will not soon disappear: the mix tape.

Last November, as I stood among the attentive El Rey crowd and listened to Joanna Newsom explain that she was about to play “Ys” in its entirety, I couldn’t help but be a little surprised.

There are some bands that everyone can agree on.
Instances of music with near-universal appeal are rare at best. But, once in a blue moon, a band riding overwhelming critical acclaim will get noticed on a larger scale and, by some miracle, retain the element that their previous fan base loves while delivering music too good for new ears to deny.

This isn’t going to surprise anyone, but I don’t download music from iTunes.
My reasons for this are numerous, but it’s mainly that I have a problem spending a dollar per song on music that I don’t physically own.

Remember that scene in “Almost Famous” in which the Led Zeppelin superfan, Vic, walks through the hallways, holding proudly a pen that Robert Plant himself had touched?

For a long time, I was cynical about the music that was coming out of Southern California.
Having grown up in San Diego, where all music seems to sound the same and is followed blindly by a sea of high school scenesters, I like to think my attitude was justified.

Lou Barlow knows what it’s like to have skeletons in your closet. Like anyone, there have been moments in his past he’d prefer to forget but that always seem to linger on the periphery.