The Laguna Beach music scene is blowing up big time -- except it's not happening in Laguna Beach.
Laguna Beach High grad Mikal Cronin left Laguna some years back and cut out to San Francisco to pursue his sonic passions. Now that drive -- along with the release of his second album, MCII, on uber-indie lable Merge -- has just landed him on the cover of SF Weekly, with lots of nice accompanying words from writer Ian S. Port that basically proclaim Cronin as the best pop songwriter in the City by the Bay.
He's not the only Laguna Beach High alum to have left our warm, sunny beaches for the cold, grey ones up north in recent years. Cronin's school chum Ty Segall has hit it big in indie rock circles, and two others with Laguna ties, Charlie Mootheart and Roland Cosio, play in Segall's side project band Fuzz.
From the SF Weekly profile piece on Cronin:
"While their classmates were glamorized in an MTV reality show named after the touristy hamlet, these dudes formed weird rock bands and played for friends at house parties. They loved San Francisco's art-damaged, do-it-yourself rock 'n' roll tradition, so after high school, they all moved here separately. Now, one by one, they're launching out of the incubator of their tight social group and into national notoriety. Segall, who practiced and hung out but didn't live here, was the first: Building on years of buzz, he released three albums in 2012, won national acclaim, and sold out his homecoming show at the Fillmore."
Nice for all these guys. You can listen to clips from Cronin's MCII here at the Merge site.
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