Youth Code – Spinning Platters

Festival: DRILL LA – Day 03 @ The Echo and Echoplex (Los Angeles)

The music explosion concludes!

Anticipation is a tricky thing. Much like hype, it can make or break whatever it surrounds. I don’t think I can even count the number of times my anticipation of something has utterly ruined it. I had built it up so much in my head that when it finally came down to it, it was mediocre at best compared to my anticipation. However, the third and final day of DRILL LA managed not only to surpass my anticipation, but crush it outright.

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Festival: DRILL LA – Day 02 @ The Echo and Echoplex (Los Angeles)

The musical explosion continues!

If the opening night of DRILL was a taste of things to come, Day 2 was a build up to the inevitable explosion that appears to be in store for Saturday’s closing night. With use of the entire building, fans and festival goers had a plethora of choices on either stage. The stairs leading between the venues provided a nice amount of passive exercise as we would either hike up to The Echo or bolt down to Echoplex to catch whichever bands met our fancy. For my part, I ended up spending most of my night downstairs at Echoplex, but I did catch the first two acts at The Echo.

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Show Review: Baroness with Youth Code at the Regency Ballroom, 6/2/2016

Near-death experiences have often been labeled as the reason behind sudden shifts in artistic mindsets, philosophy, spiritual beliefs, and overall lifestyle changes. For the men of sludge-psych heroes Baroness, who experienced their own brush with the beyond in a horrific bus crash in Bath in 2012, it almost spelled out the end of the band, with founding member Allan Blickle and new bassist Matt Maggioni leaving the group after their recovery. Their frontman, John Dyer Baizley, thus had the incredible task of healing from his own injuries and also deciding what to do with the thunderous force that he had been helping to craft for half a decade. Miraculously, Baroness have returned, possibly even stronger than before, and their plight has not affected their egos whatsoever — they are genuinely as passionate and ferociously happy to be onstage as ever, and grateful for all who have come to see them.

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Spinning Platters’ Best Of 2014: Individual Staff Lists

One of the many great records that Spinning Platters Writers enjoyed in 2014

2014 was a good year for music — you just had to lose yourself in something unsafe. – Staff Writer Jonathan Pirro.

A lot of people seemed mighty nonplussed by 2014’s recorded music output. Sure, there was a lot of somewhat generic, unimpressive stuff. However, if you did some real hunting, you’ll find that there was some incredibly impressive stuff out there. Here are Spinning Platter’s Staff’s individual lists of favorite records of 2014, starting with my own list:

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