You have to love a band like San Diego’s Crocodiles for being able to channel their obvious influences (Jesus & Mary Chain / Echo & the Bunnymen / Spacemen 3) into creating a sound that mines this genre without sounding derivative. San Diego’s Crocodiles are releasing their third disc, Endless Flowers , on June 5th on Frenchkiss Records which is a ten-track (42 minute) slab of psychedelic, fuzzed-out garage rock. Note: for vinyl junkies, there is a limited edition LP pressing on red/white marble vinyl available through Souterrain Transmissions' Web Store . Recorded in Berlin last summer, Endless Flowers is the first album ...

Echo and the Bunnymen‘s Will Sergeant is not only a musician, he is also an artist. Having only been painting for the past few [...]

When historians record his contributions to society, Will Sergeant is well aware that his role as a member of Echo & The Bunnymen will probably always be part of the headline. Now 54, the musician/artist finds himself eager to speak about his new endeavor: life as a mixed-media visual artist.

Eva Petersen has been busy working on her debut solo record with Echo & The Bunnymen’s Will Sergeant. The album is almost done and dusted and should be with us later in the year. In other news, Eva has kindly posted an amazing version of The Velvet Underground and Nico’s ’Femme Fatale’ on soundcloud. It’s not clear whether or not [...]

After their last tour Girls Names began immediately to work on a more progressive and psychedlic sound. Needful and dark inspiration was given by Echo and the Bunnymen, David Bowie’s Low, The Birthday Party and Spacemen 3. After six month of hard work it’s about time for Girls Names to share the new single “A [...]

Exposure is our scrapbook of our favourite new bands. Today's exposure features Leamington Spa-based experimental-pop duo Coves Name : Coves Location : Leamington Spa, UK Genre : Shoegaze For Fans of : School of Seven Bells, The Kills Website : Facebook Despite only forming last Summer, Coves 's brand of infectious scuzzy-shoegaze has already earnt them a European support tour with Echo and The Bunnymen and plenty of acclaim. Their new track, 'Run With Me', features on their forthcoming debut EP 'Cast A Shadow' on Cross Keys Records.

Echo & the Bunnymen’s Will Sergeant is multi-faceted talent. In addition to making music with the Bunnymen and as a solo artist, he’s an accomplished multimedia visual artist. It’s a passion that—over the past few years—has accumulated in his first gallery showing.

Art rock has a long and storied history perpetuated by bands like Jethro Tull, King Crimson and the Velvet Underground. And then, of course, there are so many performers who have become artists as well, ranging from Brian Eno to Bon Jovi’s Tico Torres, with too many modern acts to name. Now, one more talented musician can be added to this list of cross-media artists, as Echo and the Bunnymen guitarist Will Sergeant opens his first major American gallery exhibition tomorrow....

Wymond Miles' previous Sacred Bones EP, Earth Has Doors took me quite a few listens to absorb. It’s a dense, untethered pop gem that works some fairly esoteric ideas into winding paths of song. I'd expected more of the same on his subsequent LP but it seems that while the grandeur remains, the songs on Under the Pale Moon are much more grounded and tangible. The album pulls from the moody, grandiose, dark pop of the 70's; bits of Roxy Music, Echo and the Bunnymen and The Cure. Its clear that this period in pop had a ...

Virna Lindt The Windmills Of Your Mind Virna Lindt The Dossier on Virna Lindt Virna Lindt Attention Stockholm The Woodentops Get It On Before Portishead and other vitamin-D deficient Anglophone producers set to a wholesale plundering of the work of film composers  John Barry and Bernard Hermann , in turn giving the world the unwelcome gift of Trip Hop and the adjective "cinematic" as a critical term denoting the addition of vinyl pop & hiss sounds and postmodern ennui - the equivalent of a sepia filter (or hey, Instagram!) - a relatively gorgeous Swede translator by the name of Virna Lindt  infused the icy cold archness & languid irony of Cristina and Amanda Lear (ex-models' musical output, a genre unto itself) with human warmth and her own appreciation of the big-room orchestral pop of soundtracks gone by. The three songs here don't accurately represent the range of Ms. Lindt's output - the lumbering cover of Michel Lagrand's The Windmills of Your Mind , the absurd dead-eyed naivete of  The Dossier on Virna Lindt , and  finally, her Tot Taylor-produced debut single, Attention Stockholm -  virtually a template for 3/4 the output of  Belle and Sebastien ...  Great songs, yes, but there are other songs, more adventurous, sort of like Sparks and Yello Magic Orchestra, especially on 1985 Play/Record, which was, predictably, a hit in Japan. Had Lindt's influence been felt more deeply, Trip Hop might have a more noble pedigree and not reached its nauseating limit in the studied melancholy of Mono's 1996 sap-fest Life in Mono   The song, a barely concealed rewrite of The Windmills of Your Mind , was a prominent part of (the not-unloveable overwrought) fever dream melodrama of Alfonso Cuarón 's film adaptation of Great Expectations .  Or not...  Who knows if we would have been spared the existence of Black Box Recorder - an ignoble and wholly reprehensible musical clusterfuck that has forever tarred the name of Jesus & Mary Chain 's John Moore .  (The wholly calculated effort to get famous and to get into Sarah Nixey 's pants succeeded on one count, at least.) But Trip Hop will continue to live on forever, along with drum & bass, in the scores of police procedurals on American network television, and in the dusty CD-piles buried in the back of a closet by Unmarried Women of a Certain Age. Note: When I think of Dickens style of writing, I think of the Book of Mormon, a tedious a Holy Book as I've ever read...  An entire post-Christian mythology written by a group of autistic people sitting around a table playing Exquisite Corpse - and so it came to pass, and so it came to pass, and so it came to pass... I've spent countless hours, if not days, searching through the Trouser Press , dollar bins and the back-alleys of Discogs.com , and it's very rare that I come across a chart-topping song or artist in the new wave/post-new wave pop genre that I've got no familiarity with.  (Even rarer that I actually enjoy the song).  In this case, I came across the Woodentops in Oliver Assayas ' 1986 film Disorder - a film that presents with weightier issues than those that make up a subgenre of post-punk trainspotting films- the Clash's  Rude Boy , Penelope Spheeris ' Decline of Western Civilization and Suburbia .  As anthropological curios & points of reference for context-hungry teens they serve their purpose -  as an illuminating or even halfway interesting piece of art, not as much.  Assayas' meditation on the corrosive of guilt and murder without consequence , each in their own way, are Cliff-notes Dostoevsky for their respective class/subculture. This song shares the same manic urgency of  The Feelies  or  Human Switchboard , but has more adventurous production and instrumentation.  The obvious touchstone for Rolo McGinty's brashly confident voice is Echo & The Bunnymen 's Will Sergeant. Alright, it's back to R&B; for a little while, so I don't end up investigating bands that shared bills with the Housemartins .

A number of years back, Art Brut released a song whose catchy chorus went, “Modern Art. Makes Me. Want to ROCK OUT.” As a guy who religiously visits the Duchamps room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art whenever I go back East, this sentiment is not lost on me. Later this week, like Eddie Argos and myself, you too can rock out to Modern Art by a legendary rocker, as starting May 18th (through June 16th, 2012) Will Sergeant, from the Liverpool post-punk band Echo & the Bunnymen, will be showing ...

On the 18th of May of each year, fans from all over the world make a pilgrimage to the pit of Lancashire known as Macclesfield to pay tribute to Ian Curtis. Coming up to the thirty second year since death at his own hand, the passion of fans has only become more fervent whilst the commercialisation of his death has reached its lowest ebb, sneakers, bath-towels, Disney t-shirts, his band's bass player hawking third rate cover versions, that kinda thing. I'll take my life Into my own hands I'm the one that I will blame I'm ...

Photo by  Ruvan Wijesooriya Quite a busy year for James Murphy in his post- LCD life, with no signs of slowing, either. Murphy has teamed up with  Pedro Winter  (a.k.a. Busy P) of Ed Banger Records  on a series of collaborations to celebrate the opening of a new Levi's store on Champs Élysées in Paris. The pairing was commissioned to symbolize a union between French and American creative cultures.   Murphy and Winter co-designed limited edition T-shirts and trucker jackets to be sold at the store during its opening months, and curated collections of albums that will soundtrack ...

Melling, England-born Will Sergeant is best known as the guitarist in iconic post-punk Liverpool rock band, Echo and the Bunnymen. A band famous for their detached, brooding mix of psychedelia and minimalist punk, Echo and the Bunnymoon were the godfathers of post-punk with songs like “The Killing Moon” and “Lips Like Sugar” inspiring bands of [...]

xylography \zye-LAH-gruh-fee\ noun the art of making engravings on wood especially for printing cinco de gringo play on words from the holiday cinco de mayo where the mexican town of puebla won a military victory over french forces. a relatively insignificant holiday to mexicans, especially in comparison to the day of mexican independence where there is much more emphasis and celebration among mexican communities in the united states. Cinco de Mayo, in short, merely acts as another holiday where people can party and get drunk. White people seem to like the holiday more than mexican immigrant families do, hence the ...