If you’re wondering what to play at your holiday shindig that isn’t as stale as the proverbial fruitcake, look no further. #Christmas is not your great aunt’s Christmas compilation album. Your great aunt does not even know how to pronounce #Christmas. But @you do #youtechsavvything.
The Ivy Hill Entertainment release features local indie artists like Finish Ticket, Mr. Kind, and Marqiss, singing new Christmas songs and breathing life into old ones. The album is available on Bandcamp for whatever you want to pay (including goose egg, but you wouldn’t do that). All proceeds go to Swords to Plowshares, a non-profit veteran service organization.
In light of the album release, Marqiss, The Plastic Arts, and Maria Quiles & Rory Cloud will be putting on a holiday show called Marqissmas at the Subterranean Arthouse in Berkeley tomorrow, December 20. Entry is $10. Here is the best promotional video I’ve seen all year.
Oakland-based Oceanography's EP Parachutes of Plenty, was released today on iTunes and Bandcamp. The project of Brian Kelly (Disclosure: Kelly is the East Bay Express' art director and my colleague), Oceanography combines the depressive folk of Low, the gloom pop of Echo and the Bunnymen, and indie rock -- circa early 2000s Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where Kelly used to live.
Catch Oceanography live at its record release show at Hemlock Tavern on Thursday, Dec. 13 at 9 p.m., with openers Swells and Wilding.
Santa Rosa schizophrenic garage rockers Girls in Suede demand your attention. Just when you think you can juggle the music in their debut self-titled album, they’ll toss you another sound.
Aligning closest with alt rockers like early Chili Peppers and Modest Mouse, the band also nods to jazz, call-and-response, funk, prog, and old-fashioned garage punk. That's a lot of nodding. Listen for angst-ridden screaming choruses, soulful saxophones, and guttural, fuzzed out guitars and basses that make up the album's teenage anthemic colors.
Girls in Suede will be making their way down to Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco for their album release on Thursday, December 20th. Joining them will be locals Wes Leslie, Of Shape and Sound, and "post-schizoid" rockers Coast Jumper. Get your tickets here.
I was just chatting with a friend about how, once in a while, we’ll come across those people whose futures we’d want to invest in. I think it’s just a matter of time before the teens in Oakland’s Fever Charm wind up on the charts, and it’d really rev my hipster sensibilities to say, “I knew them when.”
Fever Charm’s infectious music is a collage of early 60’s rock ‘n’ roll, pop punk, and modern alt rock. If you’re not bopping your head within the first 30 seconds of any song, you’re almost certainly the Grinch.
Stream their newest single, “Recognize Me,” off upcoming full-length, West Coast Rock And Roll, for a sock hop swooner, or listen to their last EP, Sail Away, for nostalgic high school goodbyes and youthful ambivalence. I am convinced that “I Won’t Sleep Tonight” could overtake mainstream airwaves as the next big rock anthem.
There’s a new venue in town. Neck of the Woods, formerly known as Rockit Room, will be throwing an opening party on December 1st, featuring six top notch bands, two DJs, two stages, and an after party. Here’s the lineup and all the info you need to have a great Saturday night. No, I won’t pay for your cab fare.
Let’s start by saying Mahgeetah’s first full-length album Heavy Baby doesn’t qualify as your typical SF indie scene staple.
Beginning with a single interval on a B3 organ—or a B3 imposter—and ending with a classic blues-rock jam, the album is truck stop music’s sensitive cousin who went off to college, but still gets nostalgic for his blues and folk rock roots. It would gladly trade your Bay Area reverb for a little distortion any day.
Heavy Baby uses influences like Dr. Dog and Wilco as a compass, but ventures into territory of its own. It is constructed of propulsive rhythms with easy riding guitars, and furnished with Cat Stevens-like electric piano riffs with soulful, staccato vocals that call to mind Arcade Fire’s Win Butler and Wolf Parade’s Spencer Krug.
Listen to the album all the way through; this is much more than a catchy road trip playlist.
Here's the only track from the album I could find for free download, but you can stream it on major streaming platforms like Rdio, and buy it on major buying platforms like iTunes.
Get convinced you want to buy or stream Mahgeetah's album by watching their show at The Night Light, December 7, with T.V. Mike and Scarecrows.
Evil Eyes’ musical adventure begins with a bro jam in a shabby motel room in a mysterious, suntanned land called Florida. Four years, three new members, two singles, and one EP later, the band is preparing to release their first full-length album here in Palesville (okay, San Francisco), CA.
Their gauzy, glazed pop lives in a similar zip code as Real Estate, Beach House, and Youth Lagoon. Heavy on janglitude, guitar pedals, and pentatonicism, they should have no issue packing out a space in the prolific West Coast shoegaze scene.
Listen to their stuff here, and look forward to their album release early next year.
Do yourself a favor and dig up your old home movies—before the illness, accident, or divorce—turn down the lights, and play Jessica Pratt's self-titled album. Her music is neither rooted in the past nor the present, but somewhere visceral and in-between, like the memories you bothered to keep. Don’t expect hooks and fanfare. This quiet, unadorned album is fingerstyle guitar, timeless vocals, and meandering melodies. It could just as easily live on a cassette tape as it could a lossless file.
Do yourself a favor and dig up your old home movies—before the illness, accident, or divorce—turn down the lights, and play Jessica Pratt’s self-titled album.
Her music is neither rooted in the past nor the present, but somewhere visceral and in-between, like the memories you bothered to keep. Don’t expect hooks and fanfare. This quiet, unadorned album is fingerstyle guitar, timeless vocals, and meandering melodies. It could just as easily live on a cassette tape as it could a lossless file.
When Big Tree got around to recording Little EP, they didn’t each condemn themselves to anechoic solitary confinement; instead, they took a more organic approach and recorded all three songs together in one hyper-productive, ten-hour session onto a reel of 2” tape. Onto the result, they added three more songs, recorded live at San Francisco’s Rickshaw Stop.
The result is a warm, ecstatic album, human to its very core. Infused with relentlessly singable mantras, raw and emotive vocals, and soul-bolstering instrumentals, the album is a barefoot walk on warm soil where so many others are trips to IKEA. If there is one argument against the over-tinkered immaculacy that pervades so much pop music, Little EP is it.
