Author Archives: Andrew Bain

Imagine if there was never any music blasting from the Bruin Plaza stage or that Schoenberg Hall no longer had an orchestra to fill its acoustic clad walls.

In a music world mostly dominated by people, one endangered species is ready to release another full-length album.

If the average UCLA student was asked to identify a qanun, a resonant Near Eastern regional instrument that consists of an irregularly shaped wooden box with strings stretched across it that a player plucks (much like on a zither), the most common result would probably be a blank stare.

For almost every band, the second full-length album is a time of reckoning. As a general rule, the fact that the band is releasing a second album indicates that there was something, some quality, in the previous release that attracted fans.

Anxious longtime fans of Peter Bjorn and John can breathe a sigh of relief. When the band released “Writer’s Block,” the album’s joyful music, complete with whistling and clapping, attracted large numbers of fans to the band’s ranks.

Well, whoever writes the lyrics for Noah and the Whale is clearly over his break-up. With its last album, “The First Days of Spring,” Noah and the Whale took listeners for a trip through what could only be described as one of the most epic and earth shattering break-ups of all time.