LOS ANGELES has no "music scene." It has a bazillion niches populated by musicians of every stripe who cultivate their small followings and clamor for more attention, all in the shadow of a music industry that magnifies the line between commerce and art.
Myriad sensibilities abound. What's cool on the Sunset Strip might be crass in Silver Lake; what rocks Orange County might earn shrugs in Hollywood; what's hip in Long Beach might be harlequin in the Valley.
Mine those nooks and crannies and you might find the next great L.A. band, or at least an artist appealing enough to get you off the couch and into any of the more than 150 Southland clubs where, on a given night, 300-plus acts take the stage.
Here we profile seven acts -- some new, some not-so-new, all just hitting their stride -- whose distinctive take on their respective styles figures to earn them wider notice. Plus, we offer a batch of up-and-comers soon to show up on the radar of music fans.
The harvest of 2005, in no particular order:
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Silversun Pickups
File under: Indie heroes
This is what indie rock aspires to: originality where seemingly every chord has been played, familiarity where appropriation of the past is scorned and audacity where innate self-consciousness rules.
Five years after their jokey beginnings in Silver Lake, the Silversun Pickups (named for the liquor store on Sunset Boulevard) have arrived, making rock that exposes and tweaks nerves that have been anaesthetized by music television, corporate radio and hipster fashion.
The quartet, already a veteran of hundreds of club shows ranging from transcendent to train wreck, recently released its first proper recording, the 35-minute EP "Pikul," on independent Dangerbird Records. With an album expected in 2006, the mounting attention is daunting for front man Brian Aubert, who acknowledges SSPU was "in a way, birthed from knowing what we don't like."
A demo tape sent on a lark to New York in 2000 earned the original SSPU lineup (Aubert, bassist Nikki Monninger and their respective love interests at the time) a spot in the CMJ New Music Festival, a national showcase. It was not pretty. But the band started getting gigs in the months after its return.
"Sometimes you need things to push you into things. We never had any goals for the band, none at all. Somehow, we got support, and not just from our friends in the [Silver Lake] scene," says Aubert, 31, mentioning club bookers Mitchell Frank and Jennifer Tefft, of Spaceland, and Scott Sterling, of the multi-venue promotions firm the Fold. "They give bands chances. Everything has happened organically. Slowly we started to see it, to take it seriously.... And now, to us, we've hit it rich -- we sit there and giggle and high-five. There are all these people with all these career ideas, but you make the music the way it is."
SSPU's sprawling rock songs, which faintly echo the Smashing Pumpkins because of Aubert's pinched vocals, swell and recede over Monninger's fat, rolling bass-lines. Aubert keeps his lyrics abstract and his guitar tones painterly -- gentle, then fuzzy, then convulsive. Joe Lester's loopy keyboards give the Pickups a spacey feel; Christopher Guanlao's punk-rock drumming shows they mean business. The songs, to borrow an old title, explode and then make up.
"I love to build things on top of one another. I love things that sound geometrically broken and then beautiful," says Aubert. "But it's just music. I'm not a rocket scientist."
Recommended: Stream "Kissing Families" at www.silversunpickups.com.
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The 88
\o7File under: Stylish power pop
\f7For all his chops as a songwriter, Keith Slettedahl is pretty rough on himself. "The hard part is knowing deep down that we're really not improving on anything," says the front man of the L.A. quintet the 88. "I mean, I sit in my room and write songs. I'm obsessed with it. It's something I've always done.... But my life is changing. I'm getting married, and I worry, 'Are we going to have this life?' "
He's talking about life as a struggling musician, which, for now, includes such mundane duties as passing out fliers and sample CDs outside local clubs. It's no way for a 32-year-old singer-guitarist to spend his evenings. But Slettedahl knows it is penance for being a late bloomer, a chunk of his 20s having been clouded by drug problems.
With last week's release of the band's sophomore album, "Over and Over," however, the 88's outlook figures to brighten. The album is a follow-up to 2003's "Kind of Light," a do-it-yourself affair produced by keyboardist Adam Merrin. It netted a flurry of TV and movie placements, including a song on "The O.C.," and landed the fivesome on "The Jimmy Kimmel Show." Between their cathartic pop and their penchant for getting all decked out in suits for shows, they became L.A. club favorites.
