Something is skulking through the toxic runoff of the entertainment capital of the world. With several 45s and last year’s debut LP, Wounded Lion established themselves as Los Angeles’ catchiest art-punk band. Fans love their exciting and weirdly direct live shows as well as their strange and original music videos, and the group is proof that genuine and cool music is alive in today’s LA underground—no longer must one rely on rad memories of the Urinals, Suburban Lawns or Wall of Voodoo. The group’s sophomore album IVXLCDM is a total ripper. The Lion has grown smarter and meaner with the addition of Lars Finberg (chief Intelligence officer, original pounder for the A-Frames, and current drummer #2 for Thee Oh Sees) nailing it behind the drum kit and adding rich, fucked-futurist guitar action. Recorded by the singular Chris Woodhouse (Mayyors, Karate Party, etc.), the LP sounds dense and purposeful, with clattering, duel-Telecaster strum, tube-amp hum and feel-it-in-your-chest kick drum. IVXLCDM is without a doubt one of the best records of 2011—not just from Los Angeles or the underground, but from the entire spectrum of activity of living things in the universe. "Wounded Lion's brand of charmingly timeless pop…rejects conventionally accepted aesthetics and approaches, to revel in an ecstatic indifference toward time, place, trend, and fashion… [Their] formula is relatively simple. The band writes shambling, alternately silly and poignant songs that bend and twist timeless pop hooks from the sixties onward." --Anomalous L.A. "The drum skins resonate with deep thudding as the bass and rhythm guitars belch out raw distortion, lending the band's music a primitive quality. But there is also a whimsical sensibility present that elevates its abrasiveness to a level of jubilance. Wounded Lion writes pop songs that celebrate the unrefined, dispensing with ego and tapping into the primal areas of the brain." --SF Gate