Queens of L.A.'s lo-fi scene

It's the night after New Year's Eve and hundreds of kids are crammed into the Smell, the downtown DIY tabernacle of the Los Angeles avant-garde. A sweating mass of art students, skate punks and subterranean scene staples ecstatically moshes to a blistering set from Mika Miko, an (almost) all-girl punk rock quintet celebrating its dissolution the only way the group knows how: with a farewell performance heavy on serrated guitars, funky bass lines and one of the band's singers, Jennifer Clavin, screeching lyrics about turkey sandwiches into a Soviet-style red telephone doubling as a mike.

By Jeff Weiss >>>

February 7, 2010