Listless and languid phrasing, the pieces are all mid-tempo, which gives them a very lascivious and hovering side. It's pop for hallucinogenic purposes and smoky evenings. Or a real treaty of laziness to the attention of younger generations.

LILAC is the lovechild of Will Ivy and Kirsten Knick.

Will and Kirsten met as a result of fate. They were drawn to each other in a love-at-first-sight fashion, became lovers, and started living together.

Will Ivy, young and relentless, already had a relentless presence in the thriving San Francisco music scene for years playing in BRIDEZ, Honey, Hunx and his Punx, and Girls. Kirsten Knick had been a model and stylist, but always had a passion for music. She found her path to pursue it in Ivy.

Dreamed out on alcohol and vicodin, Ivy & Knick began experimenting with keyboards and writing songs. Knick had a beautiful voice that she was completely unaware of, and they shared the same visions. Immediately it worked, and with the same instancy and passion that Will and Kirsten had themselves combined, LILAC was born. The excitement and chemistry was immediate and they decided that night to pursue LILAC as a reality and a band. Guitarist and close friend Chrys Nodal and drummer Jesse Short were later added to the line-up.

LILAC finds its influence primarily in the 1990’s, which they consider the last great movement in psychedelic pop, and also from such bands as Primal Scream, Echo and the Bunnymen, Stone Roses, The Vaselines, Love and Rockets, The Fall, My Bloody Valentine, and Velvet Underground.

LILAC is a pop religion for non-believers. A heavy driving acid grunge dream LILAC’s music, similar to Nirvana in spirit and intent, aspires to represent a subculture. A subculture comprised of the passionate, unusual, angsty, romantic, poor, queer, long-haired, starry-eyed, depressed, downtrodden, dirty, loud, funny, ugly, beautiful, and bright. They want the true singers and dreamers of the dream to take back culture and make it shine again. Their songs are a reach for the eternal, acts of passion in the face of death. It is about love but mostly sexual and even more, about heartbreak. It’s a flower and it is a drug.

Accomplished Bay Area producer Patrick Brown of Different Fur Studios fell in love with LILAC after seeing them live for the first time. He invited them to record this self-titled 5 song EP at Different Fur Studios.

“Take risks. Get high. Make Love. Write Songs. Live Forever.” –LILAC

DIIV is the nom-de-plume of Z. Cole Smith, musical provocateur and front-man of an atmospheric and autumnally-charged new Brooklyn four-piece.

Recently inked to the uber-reliable Captured Tracks imprint, DIIV created instant vibrations in the blog-world with their impressionistic debut Sometime; finding it’s way onto the esteemed pages of Pitchfork and Altered Zones a mere matter of weeks after the group’s formation.

Enlisting the aid of NYC indie-scene-luminary, Devin Ruben Perez, former Smith Westerns drummer Colby Hewitt, and Mr. Smith’s childhood friend Andrew Bailey, DIVE craft a sound that is at once familial and frost-bitten. Indebted to classic kraut, dreamy Creation-records psychedelia, and the primitive-crunch of late-80’s Seattle, the band walk a divisive yet perfectly fused patch of classic-underground influence.

One part THC and two parts MDMA; the first offering from DIIV chemically fuses the reminiscent with the half-remembered building a musical world out of old-air and new breeze. These are songs that remind us of love in all it’s earthly perfections and perversions.

A lot of DIIV's magnetism was birthed in the process Mr. Smith went through to discover these initial compositions. After returning from a US tour with Beach Fossils, Cole made a bold creative choice, settling into the window-facing corner of a painter’s studio in Bushwick, sans running water, holing up to craft his music.

In this AC-less wooden room, throughout the thick of the summer, Cole surrounded himself with cassettes and LP’s, the likes of Lucinda Williams, Arthur Russell, Faust, Nirvana, and Jandek; writings of N. Scott Momaday, James Welsh, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, and James Baldwin; and dreams of aliens, affection, spirits, and the distant natural world (as he imagined it from his window facing the Morgan L train).

The resulting music is as cavernous as it is enveloping, asking you to get lost in it’s tangles in an era that demands your attention be focused into 140 characters.

“Sometime” hit stores on October 11th with a second single to follow November 29, culminating in an early March EP release.

If the Velvet Underground were to take a dark depressing trip down a rabbit hole, then they might end up sounding like Royal Baths. However, Royal Baths have risen from said hole and bring with it an aggressive edge that keeps their tunes from being anything but melancholy. Their recent offering, Litanies, came out on the New York Label Woodsist late last year and has been generating headlines. A lengthy listen is recommended, as it is one of those rare gems that stand heavily on not one song, nor two, but the complete set.

CHAD MITCHELL