Mini Mansions is the dark psych-pop project of Los Angeles-based vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Michael Shuman (also of Wires on Fire and bassist for Queens of the Stone Age), vocalist/bassist/keyboardist Zach Dawes, and vocalist/keyboardist/guitarist Tyler Parkford. Shuman had known Dawes since childhood, and Dawes met Parkford when they went to school in Santa Cruz, CA. Dawes sent Shuman some of Parkford's songs in 2005, and when Parkford returned to Los Angeles in 2008, they made plans to make music together. The trio officially became Mini Mansions in 2009 after Queens of the Stone Age finished touring in support of Era Vulgaris. Shuman and Tyler picked the best of the songs they had already written and made those into a self-released EP they released later in 2009.

Mini Mansions continued recording, with QOTSA frontman Josh Homme mixing some tracks, and readied their self-titled debut album. Suzuki Epc 5 Keygenguru. The single Monk, which featured a slow-motion cover of Blondie's “Heart of Glass,” arrived in June 2010 on Psychedelic Judaism, and Mini Mansions was released by Ipecac Records and Homme's Rekords Rekords imprint that November. The band spent two and a half years writing its second album, and recorded it at L.A.'

S Vox Recording Studios with special guests including the Arctic Monkeys' Alex Turner and Brian Wilson (Dawes also played bass on a session for Wilson's 2015 album No Pier Pressure). T Bone Burnett's Electromagnetic imprint released The Great Pretenders in March 2015.~ Heather Phares • ORIGIN Los Angeles, CA • FORMED 2009.

HOLLAND, MI - Tulip Time has announced its upcoming entertainment acts for the 2018 festival, and headlining is the 1988 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee The Beach Boys. Tickets for all shows go are scheduled to go on sale Nov. 9. Tickets can be purchased online at, in person at the Tulip Time Festival Box Office located at 74 W. 8th St. in Holland or by phone at 800-822-2770. The Beach Boys are led by Mike Love and Bruce Johnston, who along with Jeffrey Foskett, Brian Eichenberger, Tim Bonhomme, John Cowsill and Scott Totten, continue the enduring legacy of the American band.

The performance will not feature Brian Wilson, Al Jardine or David Marks. The Beach Boys are set to perform 7 p.m. on Friday, May 11 at Central Wesleyan. Premium seating tickets, rows 1-11, are $75 each. General seating tickets are $65 each. From the NBC television show 'America's Got Talent,' The Texas Tenors will perform at Tulip Time on Wednesday, May 9, at 7 p.m. The show will be at Central Wesleyan and tickets are $32 each. Also hailing from an NBC television show, 'The Voice' finalist and Michigan musician Joshua Davis will be performing songs from his recently released album at Knickerbocker Theatre. He performs Thursday, May 10 at 8 p.m.

Tickets are $25 each. Returning to the festival is FiddleFire, featuring Holland's own Panning Family. FiddleFire will play Wednesday, May 9 at 7 p.m. The show will be at Beechwood Church and tickets are $25 each. Liverpool Legends joins the lineup this year. Hand-picked by George Harrison's sister, Louise Harrison, Liverpool Legends perform songs spanning the entire career of The Beatles and on through the solo years. Liverpool Legends will perform at Central Wesleyan on Thursday, May 10 at 7 p.m.

Tickets are $32 each. 'Calendar Girls' is a British play based on the true story of 11 women who posed nude for a calendar to raise money for the Leukemia Research Fund, and will be performed at the Holland Civic Theatre. There is no actual nudity in this performance. Performances are on Saturday, May 5 at 7 p.m., Sunday, May 6 at 2 p.m., Tuesday, May 8 through Saturday, May 12 at 7 p.m. Tickets are $23 each. Nightly performances from New Odyssey will run from Monday, May 7 through Saturday, May 12 at 6:30 p.m. The trio from Chicago plays musical numbers on over 30 instruments. Shows are held at the Haworth Inn and tickets are $46 each. Tulip Time is scheduled for May 5-13, 2018. More information for the coming festival can be found.

Throw the words ‘classic Beach Boys album’ at the world at large and the immediate association would be Pet Sounds, maybe even SMiLE if they’re a little further through the looking glass. By definition, this enables every other LP they made to be considered for ‘underrated’ status, and we here at Rocksucker are in the midst of chronicling ten Beach Boys albums we feel to be criminally overlooked by the world at large – ‘criminally’ on account of the fact that they are each bloody brilliant.

Here’s our ninth selection, 1971’s Surf’s Up – – – – – – – – and 9. Surf’s Up (1971) For The Beach Boys’ 17th studio album, their newly installed manager Jack Rieley insisted that Carl Wilson be appointed officially as “musical director” in recognition of his contribution to keeping the band going through the difficulties of the preceding few years. He also demanded that Brian dust down his SMiLE number “Surf’s Up” and get it fit for release, a request that was initially met with reticence until Carl weighed in with a vocal overdub on the first part of the song. Another suggestion of Rieley’s was that a lyrical preoccupation with social awareness might help reclaim some of the group’s credibility amongst the cool kids, and this is abundantly evident straight from the off with Mike Love/Al Jardine co-write “Don’t Go Near the Water”, a rather more troubled affair than Sunflower closer “Cool, Cool Water”.

We finish our look at ten underrated Beach Boys albums with an excuse to blather on about their 1973 album Holland. If you would like to catch up with the previous. Listen to Hollandby The Beach Boys and similar music on AOL Radio, where you'll find all of your favorite music. Create personalized radio stations based on Holland.

Paced not all that dissimilarly to “This Whole World”, the agenda-of-sorts is laid bare with lines such as “Toothpaste and soap will make our ocean a bubble bath / So let’s avoid an ecological aftermath / Beginning with me / Beginning with you-OOH!” belying the relative breeziness of the song itself, which then nips down a few keys on luxurious piano and into a fast-picked banjo oasis, all watched over like the sun by those supernatural, deliciously reverb-drenched harmonies. “Take a Load Off Your Feet”, written by Brian and Al with Gary Winfrey, toes (no pun intended) the very fine line between inspired and just plain daft with its clunky percussion, comical sound effects and lyrics about podiatric maintenance. It just about lands on the side of inspired, perhaps stepping on a piece of glass with a cartoonish “ouch!” as it does, while the amusingly squawky backing refrain of “beeee sweet on your feet!” is the almost impossibly endearing high point of a track rich on gentle playfulness.

“Better take care of your life ’cause nobody else will” – good advice, and a rather pointed refrain to drape over such a drunkenly stupendous chord sequence. Bruce’s “Disney Girls (1957)” is as ornate yet sweetly understated as his Sunflower contributions “Deirdre” and “Tears in the Morning”, a beautiful shade cast over the adorable, Tootsie Roll-referencing lyrics by those divine harmonies. It’s so unassumingly sophisticated, so cosily nostalgic and blessed with a mid-section that sounds like an old-fashioned European love song – a sort of Gallic or Mediterranean flair to it, anyroad – and resolves itself so swoonsomely with Bruce’s loved-up delivery of “She’s pretty swell ’cause she likes church, bingo chances / And old-time dances”. With “a peaceful life with a forever wife and a kid some day” he comes across as old beyond his years, renewed artistically by the pursuit of craft rather than the Wilson brothers’ more experimental streak. Hey, Sgt Pepper’s is all the stronger for the presence of “When I’m Sixty-Four”, isn’t it? Mike’s Jerry Leiber/Mike Stoller co-write “Student Demonstration Time” is, purely as a song, not as bad as the opprobrium it has been met with over the years might suggest, changing the pace either welcomingly or jarringly (depending on your viewpoint) with sleazy blues and “Savoy Truffle” brass, but the tone with which the heavy subject matter is tackled just feels a bit misjudged – and perhaps it’s best to leave it at that.

It’s a protest song on an album full of them, sure, but as a rocky interlude it doesn’t enliven the album as effectively as “Got to Know the Woman” and “It’s About Time” do on Sunflower. Another Carl/Rieley effort, the ensuing “Feel Flows” is a bona fide psychedelic masterpiece, a notion lent some modern-day vindication when Super Furry Animals made it the first pick on. Everything about this is simply masterful, from the lyrical imagery ( “Unfolding enveloping missiles of soul / Recall senses sadly / Mirage like soft blue like lanterns below / To light the way gladly”) to the disorientingly phased vocals swooshing past you in the mix, while the heavily lysergic extended instrumental section plays host to a flute fluttering hither and thither like an unpredictable butterfly. Soul-soothing and mesmerisingly imaginative, “Feel Flows” is fit to rival any of The Beatles’ excursions into the realms of the trippy, and you can’t afford it much higher praise than that. An Al co-write with Winfrey, “Lookin’ at Tomorrow (A Welfare Song)” is a quietly astonishing little intrusion of sparse darkness on an album that until this point has only evidenced disquiet in its lyrics. A downbeat, acoustically fingerpicked number comprised of ominously brooding chord changes, it all sounds a bit like Cat Stevens re-imagining “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, with extra added ba ba bas that somehow supplement the mood of disenfranchisement rather than contravene it.

It is, frankly, superb, although the best is yet to come. Rieley pitches in with a dry and suitably weary vocal on Brian co-write “A Day in the Life of a Tree”, which also goes on to feature a vocal cameo from none other than Van Dyke Parks. A defeated-sounding lament from the point of view of a tree, this dire-warning-as-pop-song casts an ethereal presence with peeping recorders and bird noises in a way that shouldn’t work at all but does in spades, asserting itself with too much strange beauty to bum you out and paving the way very nicely indeed for two of the greatest songs ever made. “‘Till I Die” is on the very top rung of Brian songs, an awe-inspiring snapshot of still life on Earth, frozen in time ( “I’m a rock in a landslide / Rolling over the mountainside / How deep is the valley?) – in fact, how this song is not more broadly known is a damning indictment on our planet. It’s followed by “Surf’s Up”, which if you’ve never heard before, prepare to make a special occasion out of it, because you may never be the same again afterwards. I mean, you’ll still be you, but that jewel-encrusted kingdom will inhabit you and colour your dreams.

That there couldn’t possibly have ever been a better closing two tracks on an album is a notion only tarnished by the fact that “Surf’s Up” is now available on its true home of SMiLE. As an album, though, Surf’s Up is entirely worthy of consideration alongside that magnum opus and its predecessor Pet Sounds (you might have heard of it) – it’s perfect, 10 out of 10, even with “Student Demonstration Time”. Perhaps with a little tinkering it could have been 11 out of 10 – and how suitably transcendental would that be? That’s Why God Made the Radio is out now on Capitol.

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