Los Angeles indie-pop band Dummy take their name from the celebrated Portishead album and aren't afraid to wear such influences on their sleeve, but they're more than shoegaze revivalists, interpolating...
Cherry Glazerr alum Sasami Ashworth shares some of the indie sensibilities of her former band, but her solo project SASAMI ditches the lo-fi garage trappings in favor of a modern, electronic, girl-pop sound. A talented multi-instrumentalist, Ashworth delivers her emotionally raw lyrics in a rich mezzo-soprano that ranges from ironically detached to delicate and tremulous. When she sings "I'm such a cancer," one hopes she's comparing herself to the disease rather than indulging in her generation's weakness for astrology, an observation that encapsulates my crochety opinion of the pop cohort to which she belongs. Like Ashworth, Jia Pet's music draws heavily from Asian pop-idol aesthetics but skews more heavily toward break-beat, hyperpop and electronic sounds.
The main creative force behind The Hollies and later member of the supergroup Crosby, Stills and Nash, Graham Nash's influence on harmonic, Laurel Canyon-style soft rock has been immense. Nash's brand of sensitive, save-the-whales pop music remains polarizing, less now for perceived challenging political and social content than for its increasingly shopworn 20th-century naiveté, but this Harper still has a soft spot for three-part harmony and an acoustic guitar.