New band of the weekPop and rockA one-woman wave of dazed, lo-fi pop which channels the genre we dare not nameHometown: Los Angeles, duh.
The lineup: Amanda Brown (vocals, music).
The background: LA Vampires is the name of the solo venture by Amanda Brown, formerly one half of Pocahaunted along with Bethany Cosentino, who left to concentrate on her own project, Best Coast. Perhaps Brown, having watched Cosentino's career take off in the last year, wants to match some of Pocahaunted's local/blog acclaim with some commercial success, because with LA Vampires she has moved beyond the dark drones and goth-tinged psych-rock of her former base duo towards a more "pop" sound.
She hasn't moved all that much, actually. And "solo" isn't exactly the right term. Because her three releases to date, which came out last year, were all collaborations of one sort or another, and when we say "pop" we're not talking Britney, unless you think of Britney submerged beneath a mound of murk and diffused by dub. Last summer's LA Vampires Meets Zola Jesus seven-track mini-album saw everyone's favourite new goth ice-maiden intoning like a Teutonic ghost over Brown's literally spaced-out beats as she made connections between psychedelia and dub. So Unreal, released late last year, was another EP/mini-album, this one a team-up with Matrix Metals, one of many aliases for American-born Londoner Sam Mehran aka Outer Limits Recordings. whose washed-out pop aesthetic, all torn and frayed electronics and sun-worn sonics, tallies with Brown's. It's also heavy on the dub – think Lee Perry in a showdown with Chaz Bundwick at Black Ark. Finally, there's the February 2010 Psychic Reality/LA Vampires album, half of which is made up of tracks by San Francisco's Leyna Noel (the titular Psychic Reality), and the other half by Brown, this time an outlet for her more extreme sampladelic side, with its glitched-out electronica, heavy on the hypnagogic and doused in distortion.
Brown's three projects to date aren't massively far apart, but we like the Matrix Metals one best. It reminds us of the great Nite Jewel, formerly of Ariel Pink's band and one of the few females to emerge out of this whole woozy synthpop/dazed disco no-fi scene, the one comprising mainly of lonesome boys in bedrooms with laptops and one that critics are so reluctant to name these days they use asterisks (as in ch******). If your ears have grown accustomed to the echoplexed vocals and faded-tape sound of Toro, Washed et al, and you favour a chopped'n'screwed approach to production (Brown is a massive fan of DJ Screw), it's the Matrix joint enterprise that will most immediately appeal.
The truth: This LA vamp's music thrives in sunlight.
Most likely to: Sound new-fangled.
Least likely to: Bear fangs.
What to buy: You can hear the Matrix Metals and Zola Jesus collaborations on Spotify. The Psychic Reality/LA Vampires album is available on iTunes.
File next to: Nite Jewel, Pocahaunted, Washed Out, DJ Screw.
Links: http://www.myspace.com/lavampiresbite.
Thursday's new band: Niva.
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