It’s there when you wake up, hungover from the happy hour turn drinking marathon from the night before. It’s there when you realize that there is a guy sleeping next to you and that the reason why he’s there is probably best figured out over some logic inducing, secret revealing grease food with the girls. It’s brunch in the City of Angels. In this series, I’m going to take you on a journey across this massive concrete jungle, looking for the best “Morning After.”

One of the newest additions to the LA brunch scene, T on Fairfax is a lovely delight just down the street from Canters (one of the few 24 hours joints) and across from Largo (where Jon Brion likes to perform while you eat) and the Dime (also known as the place where Jessica Simpson and Lindsay Lohan like to thrown down the best “I hate you for no reason stares”).

A small outside patio filled by screenwriters, students and moms with strollers, guards the front entrance. The minimal effects of a bland exterior design, large glass door, makes this a place to detox and enjoy yourself or your company. Small tables lined both sides of the large room. The tall ceiling allows for the sense of calm and the soft white walls also increase the size of the room. Complementing the green plaid cushions are dark brown wooden chairs, each with customized carvings of ivy like designs. It’s calming, which really helps when you’re in the middle of figuring out whether or not your one night stand is going to turn into a second. There’s ample seating for your party of four and then some, but take note: find a seat first, then go up to the counter to order.

The menu lists over 100 black, oolong, pu-erh (a Chinese tea that comes in “bricks”), green, white and herbal teas. And for the people who know nothing about tea except that it’s what grandma drinks, there’s a short explanation under each section in the menu explaining the differences as well as a brief description of each tea flavor. Of course, if reading is too much trouble, asking the nice lady behind the counter will do just fine as well.

In addition to their teas, the menu also offers sandwiches, salads, other beverages (coffee too) and desserts. Most of the items on the menu are organic and use ingredients like “artisan breads” but the fancy descriptions don’t dent the prices. The average plate is about $8 which includes the sandwich and your choice of a side salad served on a large, white square plate.

Overall, the experience at T on Fairfax is a pleasant one. With the calm atmosphere and a nice plate of food with a pot of strong, invigorating tea to bring you out of the dehydration and disorientation, T on Fairfax is a good place to discuss everything you missed from the night before.

And just in case you’re still trying to find an excuse not to go, you know that that guy you woke up with, probably won’t follow you there.

Artists to bring in case your friends are still sleeping off their hangover:
Ray LaMontagne
Lily Allen
Serge Gainsbourg
Beck
Nick Drake

Troubador, the hometown bar with a not-too-shabby stage, hosted a sold-out concert featuring Teddy Geiger. Opener Alexa Ray Joel was followed by Holly Brook, known for her work with Fort Minor (Mike Shinoda) on “Where’d You Go”.

Brook’s sweet, innocent voice washed over the audience like a rolling tide with mellow guitar strings and piano chords. Nevertheless, her sober lyrics are driven by poignant words and vehemence. Brook’s debut album “Like Blood Like Honey” is a definite must have.

The enveloping trance left by Brook’s dreamlike ballads was soon disrupted by screaming high school girls as Geiger and band took the stage. Energy increased; the personal ambiance of Troubadour was augmented as audience members sang Geiger’s lyrics along with him. Between songs, Geiger exchanged in sophisticated yet playful banter with the audience and interjected many dry humorous comments. At one point some crazed chick, a drooling high school girl no doubt, screamed “Take it off!” Geiger’s rebuttal to the infamous cliché was a raised eyebrow and a coy “Inappropriate”.

Teddy Geiger, the young songwriter/musician whom some would crudely throw into the maelstrom of “pop”…ehem Itunes…emerged in early 2006 with his debut album Underage Thinking. Despite puerile lyrics, the serene melodies and intimate whispers confidently realize the adult contemporary genre and leave the listener grasping for the fading embers of Geiger’s raspy vocals. His emergent sound is similar to that of John Mayer and Five for Fighting. Geiger’s Troubador performance met the standard of talent exhibited by Underage Thinking, if the album was not surpassed by Geiger’s personal human touch and live vocals of a more solid, virile nature. To all Geiger’s fans unable to attend, the concert was certainly not to disappoint. Check out this native New Yorker at his interactive website, Teddy Geiger Music.

After the performance, I was lucky enough to score an interview session (and autographs and pictures) with the talented Holly Brook. Thoroughly pleased with her personable presence and gracious acceptance of an impromptu interview, I asked her what motivates her each time she sets forth on stage. She claims that her music is a catharsis, her “diary place where I get off my frustrations”. Brook hopes that, if her music can console her, perhaps it will serve as a soothing reassurance for others as well. Her musical inspiration evolves from 60s and 70s songwriters and notable names such as Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, and Death Cab for Cutie. For further information on Holly Brook and for streaming audio tracks, visit her website at Holly Brook Music.

I find it really hard to listen to something from Europe — France in particular — with a negative bias against the music. They’ve got too good a track record, and while there’s plenty of junk coming out of the country, that sexy foreign style overrides any let downs I experience. Maybe I should be more judgmental, but hey, my current outlook only opens me up to a more diverse range of styles and genres.
And Poni Hoax does a pretty good job of covering up their intrinsic French-ness, I must say, so I was a little surprised to read that they hail from Paris. Listening to their stuff is indeed confounding, though … traces of kraut-rock throughout, hints of a love for DEVO, and an obvious desire to be tacked on some DFA-released mix (sometimes I feel like Nicolas channels Alex Kapranos). While all of their tracks have their own unique characteristic — “She’s On the Radio” being their whacked-out electroclash tune and “Budapest” being their stylish, moody and atmospheric dance track, for example — there’s something uniting about everything. The sultry vocals, the smooth synth lines, the crisp, bouncy guitars and bass lines, the layering of a surprising number of melodies and hooks …
They’ve got their stuff together. Listen to additional songs of their on their MySpace page.

Poni Hoax - L.A. Murder Hotel

Robert Pollard has been cranking out rock/pop gems for a long time now and he just doesn’t seem capable of slowing down. As the principle member of Guided by Voices, Pollard wrote and recorded so many catchy 2-minute songs that standard LPs just weren’t enough for him. A lot of his best tracks instead found their way onto EP’s or big box sets that contained unreleased demos and outtakes. In addition to GBV’s staggering output (check allmusic if you don’t believe me because “prolific” is an understatement here), Pollard has been recording and releasing albums under either his own name or under a variety of one-time side projects. Since the official disbanding of guided By Voices in 2004, Uncle Bob Pollard has released two legitimate solo albums. From a Compound Eye came out January of this year and featured a double-album’s worth of Pollard’s musical experiments. This week marks the release of his second solo album since the end of GBV and Normal Happiness delivers the short, catchy rock n’ roll songs that Guided By Voices fans have come to know and love. “Supernatural Car Lover” is one of my favorite tracks because it features the kind of catchy, bouncy guitar that just feels good. You can listen to the track here.

In other Pollard related news, indie rockers …And You Will Know Us by the Trail Of Dead have chosen to cover the Guided By Voices track “The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory” for their upcoming LP So Divided. if you’re a GBV fan like me then this is exciting news because not only is this particular track from the miraculous Bee Thousand but it’s an absolute lo-fi classic!

Guided By Voices - The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory

The eerie vocals, the white noise, the bombastic harmonizing and that strange whistle form a track that can only be described as distorted prog-rock. The Trail Of Dead version is cleaned up but captures the spirit of the original well and even features a dramatic reverberating final organ chord that would do Uncle Bob proud. So Divided drops on November 14.

Recidivism.org has a stream of the Trail Of Dead version:

…And You Will Know Us by the Trail Of Dead - The Gold Heart Mountain Top Queen Directory (scroll down)

A side project from the duo of singer/songwriter Keren Ann Zeidel and Bardi Johannson (lead singer of Iceland’s Bang Gang), this all-too-short concept album (38 minutes) is about two children inhabiting the bodies of grown-ups, and not wanting to go back, only to realize the whole thing was in their minds. Exploring musical roots from Lou Reed’s “Stephanie Says” and an airy rendition of “Suicide is Painless”, the theme song from M*A*S*H*, this album is both beautiful in how it experiments musically and how it incorporates eerie yet silly and amusing vocals that somehow evoke both pleasure and discomfort in the listener. The Duo presents a series of simple songs strung together by a few interludes that abuse the effects of pitch shifting and reverb to create youthful voices. From beginning to end, Lady & Bird is both light and dark mixed together, it’s soft and warm, coarse and delicate. If you are at all familiar with Keren Ann you are familiar with her delicate sounding voice that fuses well with Bardi who also has a smooth but deeper voice, which offsets Keren’s surprisingly well. Moments in the album can get almost scary as the two vocalists explore ghost-like, trippy ranges with soft and disconcerting musical accompaniment. An overall emotional roller coaster, this album demands attention through its bittersweet lyrics, eerie vocals, and painfully delicate music. By digressing into a mellower area of the indie-pop sub-genre Lady & Bird explore a level of intensity that tends to be ignored.

You can listen to tracks from the album at the band’s myspace page:

Lady & Bird Myspace

What a lot of people don’t realize about Of Montreal is that the group started out as a pseudo-solo project of Kevin Barnes. For the first couple of albums, Barnes was clearly the key songwriter, and his band’s lineup was constantly changing. Although the members rotated, Barnes kept his sound pretty steady for the first seven or eight years of his musical career: Of Montreal’s tunes were the bedroom recording versions of the Beach Boys gone twee.
And then Satanic Panic In the Attic rolled around in 2004 and [sort of] surprised everyone. The record was solid and had much more of a focus on production than the previous efforts. And there were more traces of … dance on the thing! That made everyone excited for a while.
2005’s Sunlandic Twins was a let down. Barnes and his band mates took the dance thing too far and made the songs too glossy for their own good. They were boring in the most astounding and flashy way conceivable.
Next year’s Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer looks like it too will be disappointing. Barnes’ voice has gotten loopier and goofier, psych guitar melodies are increasingly being replaced by predictable pop riffs, and potentially interesting bridges and choruses are washed away in a sea of distortion and echo. Too much, I say.
But judge for yourself … “She’s A Rejector” is the best song from the forthcoming release. Revel in it’s mediocrity.

Of Montreal - She’s A Rejector

Rough Trade — the label to go to for indie in the UK since 1976 — has done something unexpected and bizarre: they’ve created a compilation record “for children and grown ups too.” But it’s obvious that Colours Are Brighter was made as a compromise between kids and their parents: lyrically and songcraft-wise, this is definitely an album for kids … but Four Tet?! Franz Ferdinand!? the Flaming Lips!? Certainly not another Raffi LP.
Which is good.
A few tracks stand out in particular to me here … Four Tet’s “Go Go Ninja Dinosaur” is actually one of this danciest tunes, and it features one of my favorite samples (”Hey, Ninja D!/Let’s find the Boogie Beat!”) I also really like Franz Ferdinand’s “Jackie Jackson” which, while a little lyrically dense for toddlers, has that classic Franz Ferdinand feel. Oh, and I dig the goofy little piano ditty there. I guess this song will have to hold us fans over until their next release … (is that not sort of sad, though?)

Franz Ferdinand - Jackie Jackson
Four Tet - Go Go Ninja Dinosaur

While their name — Suburban Kids With Biblical Names — means very little to me, it’s charming, I must admit. Listening to any lyrics penned by these Swedes will certainly be confusing (none of their lyrics make sense, and if they do, you’re not listening to them correctly), but that’s part of the fun. They’re all jangle guitar pop, sweet harmonies, and cute-for-imprecision actual delivery. Yeah, I definitely think these guys could have mixed their album #3 a bit better, as they never seem to decide on just how much bass they want and how loud they want those vocals to get and that sort of thing. So the quaintness is very nice, but maybe a few singles is enough.
Regardless, “Rent A Wreck” is certainly one of those singles that will keep your toe tapping for days on end. The only reason I stopped playing this non-stop was because one of my headphone buds blew out (and I’m not into mono).

Suburban Kids With Biblical Names - Rent A Wreck