Orange County Music Blog

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The Raveonettes are gracing us with their presence once again this year at the Detroit Bar. The Danish duo, consisting of Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo, makes music that can be described as a graceful, but highly destructive hurricane--a whirling sound with feedback and overloaded guitars... and all the while Sharin's melodic vocals cruise throughout their songs.

You could say their influences draw from the Ronettes, Buddy Holly, the Jesus & Mary Chain and the Velvets--just take a look at their band name, pulled directly from the Ronettes and Buddy Holly's "Rave On." With this tour, they are promoting their new record, "In And Out Of Control."

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Since we know he's OK and all that by this point, this is in good taste, right?

S. Affandi, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

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That previously announced Kanye West/Lady Gaga "Fame Kills" tour, scheduled to stop at the Honda Center in Anaheim on November 15? Yeah, now there's some amount of uncertainty to if that whole thing's actually happening.

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Move over, lolcats. The hot new Photoshopped macro thing is all about Kanye West, playing off the infamous Taylor Swift Incident (TM) at Sunday's MTV Video Music Awards. You can find dozens of such images--of wildly varying degrees of funniness--right here. It's weird how many of them have to do with Pokemon. The Mortal Kombat one up there is probably my favorite right now (not sure why, but Reptile is probably the funniest MK character to reference in that spot), though a couple more good ones follow after the jump.

17 Hippies mashes up the torrent of sounds that flooded West Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

​If Gogol Bordello is the Rolling Stones of gypsy punk, 17 Hippies must be their more literate Beatles counterpart. Berlin's "orchester spezial" plays a dizzying, high-energy mixture of French songs, English ballads and Eastern European rhythms that will you have you wondering what exactly you're listening to--as you tap your feet to it.

But before proceeding any further, we must confront the name. There are only 13 musicians in 17 Hippies and none are hippies in the peace, love and flowers in their hair sense. One is called a hippie in Germany for half succeeding at any idealistic pursuit--like forming an acoustic folk outfit six years after the Berlin Wall fell and setting out to change the world armed only with a banjo, ukulele, accordion, trombone, trumpet, violin, cello, woodwinds, mandolin, Irish bouzouki, guitar, double bass, Indian harmonium and, from the sounds of it, kitchen sink.

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Our pals at Warner Bros. Records passed along this cool photo of Orange County band Mêlée--who released their most recent record, Devils & Angels, in 2007 on Warner--playing Jakarta, Indonesia last week, playing the Java RockinLand 2009 on August 7. That's just three weeks after two separate hotel bombings in Jakarta that killed seven and injured more than 50. Lead singer Chris Cron's shirt says "We Are Not Afraid," which got some coverage in the local media. As of right now, Mêlée has no more shows on their schedule.