Author Archives: Dominick Duhamel

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 […]

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. Throw that in with my love for the high quality of records and the fear of […]