Photos By Darren Kim
(darren@rockscope.com)

Who's Next In LA?

Something's in the air in Los Angeles and it's not the smog. It's the buzz surrounding a band called The Airborne Toxic Event. So much so, they even got the notoriously cynical and apathetic crowd of LA to take notice.

First of all, they don't even sound like an LA band. One quick listen to their EP, and you'd think Jarvis Cocker decided to start a Cure side-project in California.

In fact, the whole band is a mystery to me. They're unsigned. They don't have a full-length album. Their success so far has come from a three song EP played to death on their myspace page. Nobody knows about them outside of LA yet they've already toured in the UK. And to top things off, they're currently being played on a major radio station here in Los Angeles (KROQ) who's most famous for championing alternative rock bands in the nineties.

And where did they come from? It's been rumored that lead singer Mikel Jollett was once a freelance music writer. Then one day, he just snapped and decided to start a band.

If it's that easy, it makes me wonder why I'm sitting here writing about other people's music when I could be starting the next great band to come out of LA?

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