Photos courtesy John Bollozos at The Fader.

High Places is the kind of band that you want to be best friends with. The band is composed of just two members, Robert Barber and Mary Pearson, the latter of whom is so damn cute it kind of doesn’t matter if she’s talented or not. Lucky for the rest of us, she actually has a super sweet voice, just perfect for the band’s innocent and cute-but-not-cutesy lyrics. At the High Places’ show at the Echo last Thursday the band again has proven themselves to be more than the single hipster’s wet dream.
»continue reading Journey to High Places (Echo, January 22, 2009)

If there’s one thing I know about hipsters in Silver Lake Echo Park with a little bit of green in the bank, it’s that they love finding new ways to spend their money. And what better way to spend it than on the classiest of all class-defining drinks, yep, you guessed it: wine.

The deal with City Sip is that they’re really laid back and unpretentious about what can possibly be called the most pretentious drink of all time (until Pitchfork comes out with its own PBR knock-off beer, that is). The ambiance of the place is pretty much exactly what you think the inside of a wine bar should look like—dark with soft lighting and Bon Iver on the stereo. »continue reading Notes on City Sip

The other night my boyfriend and I were lounging around the house, getting high, trying to decide what to make for dinner when the desire for Thai food struck me to my very soul. Living close to Hollywood, there are probably about sixty-thousand Thai restaurants to chose from. But which one?! Being high and trying to decide on something like this can only be aided by one thing: yelp.com. I always turn to my trusty yelp whenever I want to read some reviews by people who take themselves way too seriously and get all huffy when their drinks aren’t thoroughly chilled or when the waitress that they’re drunkenly hitting on asks them to please leave.

After an hour of wading “this place is SO delicious and afterward my friend and I tag-teamed his girlfriend for the rest of the night and used our leftovers for clothing, SO HOT,” etc., we finally decided on a little place called Bulan. We didn’t really chose it because it had gotten such stellar reviews, but mostly because we were dying from hunger and it’s literally a block from our house.

»continue reading Bulan: High Thai

Note: Please welcome Moira to the fold! Moira, a confessed traveler, “soft launched” on site last week by reviewing O’Death at Spaceland. With any luck we’ll see her eating bacon-wrapped hot dogs and tripe tacos before year’s end, en route to a crucial gig someplace. I give the tripe 50/50 odds. Huzzah! -Ed

After moving around the country for a bit, I’ve finally decided to rest my bags and settle down in the city of angels. Moving to Los Angeles (as you may well be aware) is a fucking trip. But, as overwhelming as it is to move to a new city, it’s also pretty awesome. I mean, it’s not like I’m moving to Boise, here, I’m moving to LOS ANGELES.

I was waiting to get on my flight to LAX when I heard a familiar voice. I look up and I recognize that girl from EuroTrip. I was fucking stoked! I hadn’t even gotten to LA yet, and I was already spotting celebrities. Even though this chick was kind of a small fry, I was already beginning to look forward to lounging by the pool with a margarita chatting up Lauren Conrad and Perez Hilton.

»continue reading You’ll Never Guess Who Just Walked In…

This past Saturday night I found myself at Spaceland as O’Death took the stage. If you haven’t heard the band before, they fit somewhere between the genres of jug band, folk, and pirate punk with an added splash of well-educated academic musicianship. Most of their songs are sea shanties and their drummer plays the chains as a legitimate percussive instrument. O’Death plays pirate music, but not Jack Sparrow pirate, more like that awesome pirate ship in the Goonies with all the skeletons and tons of jewels and treasure and shit.

This band definitely lived up to their reputation for putting on an energetic show; Bob Pyciore, the fiddle player, was jumping spastically around the stage like an epileptic Tim Burton character and David Rogers-Berry actually stood up a few times to throw a cymbal against his drum kit for an ear-splitting crash.

»continue reading O’Death @ Spaceland, 11/22: The Per-folked Storm