MusicFridayLive | Music Junkie Press

Enjambre live at The Roxy, no opener, no warm up , just pure excitement.

May 16, 2018

Patrick O’Heffernan (Hollywood) If you have never seen Enjambre play live your life is not be complete. That is a bold statement, but this is more than just a bold group of musicians who have been rocking fans for over a decade. Enjambre is an innovative band for the 21st century built on a solid foundation of hits that make its live performances pure, unadulterated excitement. They proved that at Hollywood’s The Roxy recently in one of the most astonishing performances I have seen in a long time. No openers, no warm-ups, no introduction – just one of the best Latin rock bands in the world delivering an incredible 19 songs and two encores over two hours of non-stop music in an intimate venue to a lucky 500 people who managed to get in. . I knew that this was going to be something special when I arrived at the club early and found that an hour and half before show time the club was almost full and there was a line. This [Read More]

Via from NAKURY: music that makes you groove and think…and maybe change.

May 11, 2018

Patrick O’Heffernan (Los Angeles) It is hard to know where to start when reviewing Via, the most recent album released by the Costa Rican hip-hop/rap artist NAKURY (born Natasha Campos). Usually you start with the music, but NAKURY is so much more than her music and this album is so much more than its songs, that even as you listen to her addictive music, you can’t help but internalize what she is saying as well as what she is singing. Nakury has been a model, a beauty queen, a dancer, and a graffiti artist. Today she is a rapper, a hip-hop poet, an event founder and producer, and an activist. At 28 she has lived what seems like several lifetimes and the wisdom and experience of those lifetimes inhabit the poetry of this huge, 16-song album. Released on the independent label LacteoCoasmico, Via fuses rap and hip hop in Spanish with boombap, backbeat, electroncia, and Nakury’s unique voice which moves easily from urgent highs to rap lows. Produced by Barzo, [Read More]

COASTCITY at the Echoplex in LA: language and musical divides disappear.

May 9, 2018

Patrick O’Heffernan There is no other way to say it: COASTCITY blew away the Echoplex Thursday night. The Grammy-nominated multilingual Puerto Rican duo of Danny Flores and Jean Rodriguez brought pure fun to the spacious stage of one of LA’s best sounding clubs to an audience completely at home with the band’s parallel languages and music forms. They also brought a full band complete with horns. And if that wasn’t enough, they brought rapper Álvaro Diaz, who joined them onstage for two songs before his own set. The result was a solid set of ten songs – some new, some familiar – that kept fans clapping, singing and screaming “otra vez” for an encore (they got it, but more on that later). Flores flashed his mischevious grin behind the keyboard as they opened the act with a new song, “Countach”. Rodriguez moved back and forth across the stage, jumped up and down, called out greetings, pumped his fist to the audience and generally poured electricity into an already energetic room. Moving on to their [Read More]

Living with Your Ghost: rocket fuel from a nascent superstar. By Patrick O’Heffernan

April 30, 2018

Patrick O’Heffernan Blues from down under? Who knew? I didn’t, but when I hear Kara Grainger’s new album Living Your Ghost. I was sold. A solid album – 12 tracks, and every track addictive. No filler, no easy outs, no compromises. Living With A Ghost shows the tremendous growth of an already super-talented artist and wall-to-wall extraordinary music. Kara put her heart and soul into each song and it shows. She kicks off with the title track’s acoustic downbeat and big guitar sound that takes you through a deep-in-your-heart journey with a slide guitar and wailing electric lighting up the road signs. But once you are there, she turns you right around and takes you back in “Working My Way Back Home”, her urgent voice highlighted by B-3 sharps and more big, big guitar blues notes. “Man With A Soul”, written with Trevor Manear, dips into country blues with a danceable backbeat and in-your-face vocals with a touch of seduction and Grainger’s glowing guitar riffs. Things lighten up with “Nowhere to Be [Read More]

Blake Morgan’s tour with Tracy Bonham ends in Hollywood, but the beat goes on. By Patrick O’Heffernan

April 19, 2018

Patrick O’Heffernan I could not think of a better pairing than Blake Morgan and Tracy Bonham. That was evident last week at their final tour stop at Hollywood’s Hotel Café. The music was sublime, the stories were funny and the chemistry was perfect. It easy to see why the tour was sold out – twice. So many Angelinos wanted tickets to see this New York combo that the original Second Stage on the Hotel Café was sold out so they were moved to a larger Main Stage venue which was then sold out. The minute Morgan hit the chords for “I Can Hear You Say” the audience knew it was on its way to musical heaven. When Bonham joined Morgan on stage for “A Helping Hand” they knew they had arrived in musical heaven. And it kept getting better as Blake moved from guitar to piano, giving the audience such favorites as “Haunt Me” and ‘My Love Is Waiting”. The diminutive Bonham took the stage as Morgan stepped down and wielded the violin, [Read More]

The Golden Shore by We Are The West. Musical endorphins and a sonic refuge. By Patrick O’Heffernan

April 7, 2018

Patrick O’Heffernan (Los Angeles) You can’t classify We Are The West, nor would you want to. The trio of Bret Hool (vocals, guitar), John Kibler (bass/vocals) and Elizabeth Goodfellow (percussion/vocals) started with the guys as a duo in a shipping container on a sheep farm in Holland. They came to California via Brooklyn, recruited one LA’s city’s most innovative drummers, and developed a style and a body of work that defies definition but stimulates musical endorphins like no other. We Are The West specializes in creating and playing at out-of-the-box (or sometimes very much in the box) venues that have really stunning acoustical properties like the Santa Monica underground parking garage that hosts their monthly concerts. They use these environments and their top-level music writing and playing skills to creates dreamy, stormy, urgent, galactic sonic environments using drums, chimes, guitar, bass, woodwinds, strings, pump organ, the audiences’ cellphones, accordion, and vocal harmonies unmatched in pop/jazz/rock/opera. Followers of their live shows, especially their Saturday-before-the-full-moon parking garage concerts, are legion but the fan base for [Read More]

Kat McDowell’s new album Ten just makes people happy.

April 6, 2018

Patrick O’Heffernan (Los Angeles) Kat McDowell’s music just makes people happy and her new album Ten absolutely does that – it makes you feel good all day, all over. As the title suggest, there are 10 songs on Ten – which also refers to “hanging ten” on a surfboard, which Kat does – each one offering a different approach to happiness but always with Kat’s trademark pop sound of ukulele, guitar, rhythmic melodies and upbeat tempo in the service of personal stories of love and joy (mostly). Produced by Adam Berg, “Ten”, Kat’s fifth full-length album, is enriched by contributions from lyricist Richard Rudolph and Servt Fridan. She kicks off the album in a collaborative tune with Monkey Majik in a bouncy paean to moving ahead with love. Then she lets loose with her signature ukulele pop in “Language of My Heart”. There is no stopping the head bobbing and even dancing to this one. The tempo picks up even more and moves into more serious pop rock with “Photographs” and then brings us [Read More]