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Dub trio

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PREVIEW Let’s say you’re a fan of dub — the remixed reggae subgenre pioneered by the studio experimentalism of King Tubby and Lee "Scratch" Perry — and I say to you, "Hey, come over. You have to hear this new dub CD I’ve got." Excited, but in a laid-back, dubby way, you roll a semistereotypical joint and skate down to my place on a longboard with big, soft wheels, smoking all the way. I throw on Another Sound Is Dying (Ipecac), the new Dub Trio CD. Immediately bombarded by crunchy guitar riffs and a distorted, growling bass line reminiscent of New York noise mavens Unsane, you become confused. Why the fuck is this metal record harshing my mellow?

Dub Trio — three spot-on musicians whose lists of recent session work reads like a who’s who of putf8um hip-hop artists — eventually work island rhythms and delayed reggae riffing into the album, which may or may not bring your buzz back, Smokey. Yet the band is most true to the core idea of dub — the experimental manipulation of sound — in its willingness to destroy it, to go beyond the confines of traditionally dubable reggae material and say, "Fuck it, we can do a dub of this and that too." The trio’s ambition, their sheer steeze to take the chains off the dub aesthetic, makes them fascinating, if not brilliant, and they go from nut-crunching sludge riffs to long, loping chill-outs without flinching. "What the guys in the beginning of dub were doing in the studio, we try to bring that element and re-create that concept live," drummer Joe Tomino said over the phone from New York City.

They stay true to the roots of dub in a wild new way: each band member controls effects for everyone else’s instruments as well as their own. Which means Dub Trio’s 12 Galaxies show will be a must-see: these guys can’t just sleep through the same set every night. They’ve got to be on it, reacting to and changing the music as it’s being made. "It’s a constant way of thinking as one and listening to exactly what’s happening onstage," Tomino said, "so you don’t get in the way of the conversation or dialogue that’s happening."

DUB TRIO With Foreign Island and Hour of Worship. Fri/15, 9 p.m., $12. 12 Galaxies, 2565 Mission, SF. (415) 970-9777, www.12galaxies.com

Shocked, G?

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When I first heard Digital Underground in 1989, via "The Humpty Dance," little did I imagine it would someday fall to me to announce the group’s end. After a 20-year run — including five albums, one EP, one rarities disc, solo albums by Shock-G and Money B, and a helluva lot of touring — DU are calling it quits. Their Feb. 22 show at the Red Devil Lounge may be your last opportunity to see these putf8um Bay Area OGs. You’d be a fool to miss it: their shows are a cut above most live-rap, P-Funk-style fests, driven by Shock’s keyboards and an endless array of MCs, including, at one time, 2pac himself.

"Every group from [Public Enemy] to the Stones has experienced a hiatus, some straight-up fallouts," says Shock, a.k.a. Humpty Hump, on the phone from Los Angeles. "I think we hold the record for longest harmonious run without a breakup. I gave it a loyal 20 years — ya can’t be mad at that."

Despite the lack of internal beef, however, Shock’s decision to disband DU is both personal and artistic. Constant touring, for example, has taken its toll, particularly with the group’s partying reputation.

"The energy was gettin’ bad," Shock concedes. "Both the group and the audience were becoming a bunch of alcoholics. That means it’s time for a break.

"I did several sober shows over the past few years, like 1 in every 10. However, when I suggested this to the band, everyone looked at me like I’m crazy, as if I suggested doing the show naked!"

Even more pressing, however, is Shock’s desire to expand as an artist, musically and otherwise.

"I’ve always wanted to give serious musicianship a shot," he says, "to sit down at the piano like a jazz musician and do complicated arrangements and improvisations with other musicians. But it’s hard to be fully present anywhere when I’m outta town every weekend to do DU shows."

While Shock confirms he has about two albums’ worth of unreleased DU he’ll eventually drop and doesn’t rule out the possibility of a reunion — "Ask me in five years," he says — for now he wants to direct his energies in nonmusical directions.

"I wanna go down to Hollywood and see what it do: voice-overs, comedic acting, films, TV — stuff I never had time for from recording and touring. For the first time since 1987, I have time to commit to something else. I’m excited.

"I used to use George Clinton, Sting, and RZA as my models," he concludes. "Now I plan to be more Ice Cube, more Puffy, more Jamie Foxx, more wherever I wanna be."

DIGITAL UNDERGROUND

Feb. 22, 8 p.m., $20

Red Devil Lounge

1695 Polk, SF

1-866-468-3399

www.reddevillounge.com

Drink, then Swallows

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

When Jon Miller was a boy, his parents pulled off an impressive trick: convincing him there was beauty to be found on the New Jersey Turnpike. Wondering, as any hopeful naïf might, about the strange fogs puffing from roadside refineries, the lad was given a celestial explanation. Those were, he was told, cloud machines.

Miller is old enough now to be a bit more suspicious of Garden State industrial output, but that entrancing image gets new life as the title of his second record with Portland, Ore., duo Swallows. The pair, Miller on drums and pal Em Brownlowe covering vocals and guitar, have been honing a sinewy turn on Pacific Northwest alt-rock since 2003. They call it garage pop, but that term feels too claustrophobic, too sweaty for the sound they develop on their Cloud Machines EP (Church of Girl, 2007). The previous Swallows effort, Me with Trees Towering (Cherchez la Femme Projects, 2006), was fairly sludgy, with guitars thrust forward in the mix and Brownlowe’s piercing vocals left to fight it out from the rear. Cloud Machines is no less textural, but it is largely free of such gridlock. Its filthy space is bigger. Put a warehouse or a factory in front of that pop.

But be sure to keep calling it pop. Cloud Machines‘ intrigue stems from the cohabitation it gins up: cheery American melody making keeps its shape amid angular chord charts and sharp vocal tones. On lead track "Anchors," Brownlowe has moments of channeling Patti Smith, but she’s also describing how she’ll kick out the jam: "Start to move your feet / Jon’s gonna find his beat / And it’ll burn the house down." Much like its titular image, which envisions a utopia on dystopia’s home turf, the record gets fantasy and disaffection all mingled up.

I asked Miller and Brownlowe about this, and they confirmed that their songs are meant not just as tracks but as ditties. Brownlowe copped to aiming for "memorable and catchy" music: "stick in your head"–type cuts. But on this point, even the band isn’t sure where the parody ends and the sincerity begins. Brownlowe related how the most sugary track here, "When You’re in Love," initially started as a "mockumentary" dashed off as a joke with her girlfriend. Portland bands, after all, do not sing things like "When you’re in love, nothing else matters / When you’re in love, you smell the flowers." But then she showed the gag to Miller, and "he wanted to write a verse too," she said.

The vocals are key to Swallows’ evolution on Cloud Machines, but equally crucial are Miller’s increasingly adventurous drums. The group’s earlier songs hint at impatience with straight-ahead rock rhythms — both "Words of Love" and "Pulsar Heart Attack" from Me with Trees Towering include unorthodox tom-tom rumbles — and tradition has now been pretty thoroughly dismissed. The beats of Swallows 2.0 almost encroach on world music territory, an effect increased by Miller’s out-of-order kit and unusual tuning. He claims to have copied his intervals from "Three Blind Mice," but whatever manual he’s using, it’s effective. On album closer "Language Is Restless," for example, he uses shifty rhythms to leave the melody unmoored and adrift, cleverly scrambling our wish for a quick fix.

All of this sullied pop got me thinking about another image, complementary to those merry smokestacks, that Brownlowe detailed in an e-mail about Swallows’ early days. When she and Miller first began playing together — in a "dank practice space in the industrial part of Portland run by a crazy alcoholic stoner" — they cut an EP as Dirty Shirley, a reference to the vodka-laced Shirley Temples that fueled the sessions. Other bands just have beers. These two had to spike a nonalcoholic drink.

SWALLOWS

With Agent Ribbons and the Moral Tourists

Feb. 22, 9:30 p.m. doors, $5

Edinburgh Castle Pub

950 Geary, SF

(415) 885-4074

www.castlenews.com

SWALLOWS

With Agent Ribbons and Light Peaks

Feb. 24, 9:30 p.m., $6

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

The return of the return of the DJ

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Born from the ashes of New York hip-hop DJ supergroup the X-ecutioners and from a frustration with the current state of turntablism, Ill Insanity are on a mission to return the art of the DJ to its former glory.

Composed of ex-X-ecutioners Rob Swift and Total Eclipse along with younger inductee DJ Precision, the turntable trio have just released their progressive scratch music debut, Ground Xero, on Fat Beats, which includes among its turntable guests fellow former X man Roc Raida, plus Excess and DJ Q-Bert.

Ill Insanity’s ongoing national tour, which stops in San Francisco on Feb. 21 for a performance and a workshop at Guitar Center and a party-rocking throw-down at Levende Lounge, seems less like a jaunt and more like a crusade to its three impassioned turntable ambassadors.

"This is the beginning of us taking the art form back," Rob Swift said, sounding something like one of the Marvel Comics heroes from which his original group, the X-Men, took their name. "And I feel that we are putting it on our shoulders to show people that this is real creative music. And we are educating people about this art form because it seems to me like no one else is really doing it right now."

Speaking a few weeks ago at Swift’s Queens, NY, apartment, which also serves as the group’s recording studio and rehearsal space, the trio had gathered to mourn what they see as a creative lull in the art of turntablism and to prepare for its pending renaissance.

"Basically we were all bored with music, and that’s what brought us together," Total Eclipse said. All three agreed that for several years now DJ battles, traditionally the barometers gauging the advancement of the turntable art form, have been in a decline. "There has been a really poor attendance at DJ battles for the past five years, especially here in the US," said Precision, the 2007 USA DMC Finals DJ battle champion. "And it’s because the art form has slipped so much."

Part of this artistic stagnation, they believe, is because DJs of recent years have been satisfied with merely imitating instead of trying to innovate. "The younger DJs are too caught up with looking up to what came before, so they stop practicing when they master that trick that QBert or whoever has already done years ago," Swift said, "and consequently now everyone is sounding the same."

Precision jumped in: "And a lot of them don’t even know the complete history of the DJ, like that Steve Dee created beat juggling."

In performance Ill Insanity’s setup includes five turntables, three mixers, and computers to operate the Serato program. "What we are trying to do is to use the new technology without dumbing down the art," Swift insisted. "We have much respect for what came before us, still applying the skills of Grandmaster Flash, party-rocking, and so on…. But we’re saying, ‘Let’s do a 2008 version of what’s already been done in the past.’<0x2009>"

And as for the future of turntablism? Swift is optimistic: "There could be a kind of DJ revolution again. I predict that in a couple of years things will go back to the way they were." (Billy Jam)

ILL INSANITY

Feb. 21, 6 p.m. performance and workshop, free

Guitar Center

1645 Van Ness, SF

(415) 409-0350

www.guitarcenter.com

Love on the road — and on the page

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Dean Wareham mainly remembers his last San Francisco performance for a "botched guitar solo." Though the alleged incident was hardly a blip during the seductive show he and wife Britta Phillips delivered with their band, he promises on the phone from New York City, "It won’t happen again."

We’ll see. Dean and Britta come back to San Francisco to play Yoshi’s with French postmodern chanteuse Keren Ann in the first nonjazz performance at the tony new venue on Fillmore.

Wareham met bassist-vocalist Phillips in 2000 when he was first considering leaving Luna, a band he fronted for 10 years and eight albums. She replaced longtime Luna member Justin Harwood, piquing Wareham’s interest in keeping the group together — at least for a little while.

"I was thinking, ‘I’m just not sure I want to do it without Justin,’" Wareham recalls.

Not only did he feel his longtime friend and bassist’s departure was a sign to move on, but the music business had entered a funk that had the modestly popular but hugely respected band scrambling for a label. Wareham wasn’t really a happy camper.

"Then Britta joined the band, and I have to say if I’m being honest with myself that that made it fun again," he says.

Indeed. The intriguing, siren-voiced Phillips was already something of a cult figure when she joined Luna, having gained notoriety as the singing voice of animated TV character Jem.

Wareham thinks the last two Luna records made with Phillips, Romantica and Rendezvous (Jetset; 2002, 2004), are two of the best from the group, which mainly developed its music together.

"We would be in a rehearsal studio playing electric guitars so it was a louder thing," Wareham says. "Someone would have an idea that we would just play again and again."

Luna played their final concert at the Bowery Ballroom in New York City on Feb. 28, 2005.

In contrast, Dean and Britta make silkier, sexier pop, though their first recording together, 2003’s L’Avventura (Jetset), started as a Wareham solo project that Phillips gradually became a part of. "Neither one of us really knew what we were doing," Wareham explains. "It was going to be all covers and then, bit by bit, sort of transformed into something else." The album encompasses an eclectic batch of songs by other writers — the Doors’ "Indian Summer," Madonna’s "I Deserve It," Buffy St. Marie’s "Moonshot" — but the couple’s intimate sound became defined by Wareham’s "Night Nurse" and two outrageously seductive Phillips originals, "Out Walking" and "Your Baby," as the couple’s vocals purr through floating washes of strings and vibes courtesy of producer Tony Visconti.

Wareham concedes last year’s Back Numbers (Zoe) was more thought-out. "We probably had a better plan, and more of it was recorded at home," he says. "The record was built brick by brick in the studio. Then we have to learn to play the songs live, which makes it quite a challenge, actually." The couple took time to get married when producer Visconti left to work on a Morrissey album in England.

Indie-rock gossip hounds might be interested to know that Wareham and Phillips didn’t become a couple immediately after they met — and they kept it on the down low even after they hooked up. Wareham promises to tell all in his new memoir, Black Postcards, which will be published by Penguin in March. "The dirt is going to be out there soon," he deadpans with a laugh. The frontman seems circumspect in conversation, though he also clearly strives for as much honesty as propriety allows.

"It covers a lot of personal stuff," he adds.

The writing was difficult for Wareham, and he likens the two-year process to a "very long therapy session," albeit one in which they pay you instead of the other way around.

"Obviously I’m used to writing, but when you write lyrics they can be cryptic and you don’t really need to reveal very much of yourself. Sometimes you might, but you can pretend something’s about you or it’s about someone else. This was a different kettle of fish," he says.

He believes people may be surprised by what he chooses to reveal, particularly fans of his first band, Galaxie 500, who thought he was "such a nice boy," as he puts it. "There will probably be some people who are disgusted with my behavior, but," he says, sighing, "oh well."

DEAN AND BRITTA

With Keren Ann

Mon/18, 8 p.m., $18–$22

Yoshi’s San Francisco

1330 Fillmore, SF

(415) 655-5600

www.yoshis.com

Ballin’

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER "I get to go to the ball!"

Longtime Oakland soul hopeful Ledisi isn’t spilling the beans about what designer she’ll be wearing to the Grammy Awards on Feb. 10, but on the phone from New York City, where she’s as deep into the wardrobe as the lion and the witch, she guarantees, "I’ll be cute!"

Red-carpet frocks, on-and-off awards ceremonies, and nominations for Best R&B Album for last year’s Lost and Found (Verve Forecast) and, get this, Best New Artist ("People say I’m a new artist, and I am a new artist in this mainstream world," says the woman who put out her previous two CDs on her LeSun label. "I’ve never had third-party involvement in anything!") — it’s all high drama for Ledisi Anibade Young. Nonetheless, she knows she’ll be enjoying herself to the core and even more because she’ll be exactly where she wants to be: namely, comfortable in her own skin.

"I just feel like I’ve finally come into my own, meaning I’m OK with myself," the vocalist says, bubbling like de Brignac. "I’m still hungry, but I’m not begging anymore."

As we speak, Ledisi is floating, as she puts it, in more ways than one: she’s drifting between residences in NYC, Oakland, and Washington DC and lifting higher about the national spotlight that comes with her nominations, a recognition laid on a clutch of other once and present Bay Area artists like Keyshia Cole, Machine Head, and Turtle Island Quartet and local indie label Six Degrees (for Bebel Gilberto, Ce’U, and Spanish Harlem Orchestra). Regardless of how you feel about the continuing relevance of the Recording Academy paperweights — yes, the Best Polka Album category is still in place — the thrill a nominee like Ledisi feels is catching, especially when one considers the flights of ups and downs she’s undergone over the years.

"I didn’t think I wanted the pressure of being in the front again, with all the issues of image and the style of singing and choosing a category to be in — you know, all that kind of the pressure!" she says, recalling the times she thought about giving up performing. After her debut, Soulsinger (LeSun, 1999), won near-universal praise but garnered zero coveted R&B radio attention, she left Oakland and moved to NYC because, she says, she was "tired of going around in circles." With an understudy role in Broadway’s Caroline, or Change in her change pocket, Ledisi had begun developing the stage version of The Color Purple when she signed to Verve and dropped out of the production to work on Lost and Found.

But after working for a year and a half to get her deal, "the guy who signed me," Verve president Ryan Goldstein, was suddenly laid off among many others. She finished the record, took a breath, and went back into the studio, fearing the new powers that be would require further alterations.

Meanwhile, she adds, "I was finding myself in my personal life": she ended a long relationship and met her father. Her R&B vocalist mother had already told her that her biological father was Larry Saunders, but only when Ledisi traveled to Amsterdam and mentioned his name to a DJ there did she realize others knew The Prophet of Soul, the name of Saunders’s 1976 Soul International LP. "He said, ‘We know who he is!’ and pulled out his record," Ledisi remembers. Her parents had met on tour when Saunders was a starring performer and her mother a backup singer, and when Ledisi finally met her father, "it was just like peas in a pod. I never felt so complete. Now I don’t have those things around me going, ‘Who am I?’<0x2009>"

Ledisi also discovered that her father was the love child of blues vocalist Johnny Ace, who achieved legend as an early rock ‘n’ roll casualty, allegedly shooting himself during a Russian roulette game on Christmas Day, 1954. "When I found out," she says, "I was, like, ‘No wonder we’re all singers!’<0x2009>"

"You know this record is really powerful, with all this happening during its process," she says of Lost and Found, which eventually debuted at number 10 on Billboard‘s R&B chart. "I tell you, with all the stuff that went on, it’s all worth it. Win or lose, I’m just so complete. I just want to stay in the moment — couldn’t ask for a better moment to happen."

WALKING PNEUMONIA, HERE WE COME

THE EVERYBODYFIELDS


Everything’s OK with these tenderhearted crust-country kids. With I See Hawks in LA. Wed/6, 8 p.m., $12. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

PIERCED ARROWS


Dead Moon rising: "Walking Wounded" vets Fred and Toody Cole keep flying that lo-fi flag. With Black Lips. Fri/8, 9 p.m., $15. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.gamh.com

TERRIBLE TWOS


Motor City kiddies trade in snot-laced cacophony. With Top Ten and Wylde Youth. Sat/9, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

PALEO


Gimmick or gimme-gimme? Brooklyn’s David Strackany followed in the footsteps of Suzan-Lori Parks with his "Song Diary" project: 365 songs, one written and recorded each day for a year. But his next trick after that media blitz? With the Blank Tapes and Eddy Burke. Sun/10, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

MERLE HAGGARD


NorCal’s country music giant reaches east with 2007’s The Bluegrass Sessions (McCoury/Hag) — see where it takes him. Mon/11, 8 p.m., $65. Grand at the Regency Center, 1290 Sutter, SF. www.ticketmaster.com

LOS AMIGOS INVISIBLES


The very newest sounds from the Venezuelans of disco derring-do? With Si*Se and DJ Franky Boissy. Mon/11–Tues/12, 8 p.m., $22. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

Double visions

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

After almost 10 years and four albums, Pinback’s Rob Crow and Armistead "Zach" Burwell Smith IV rightly take it in stride that major differences, and slender fissures, will occasionally open up between them. Consider, for example, this Osmonds fixation of Crow’s, soon to appear in the form of a rock block of tunes by the ’70s Mormon clan band on one of two Goblin Cock LPs Crow is now resurrecting after a certain hard-drive disaster. "A lot of Donny’s synthesizer work is really outrageous and predates a lot of people!" Crow, 36, mumbles enthusiastically over the phone from San Diego, comparing the Osmonds’ "My Drum" to something off the Melvins’ last LP. "There’s no Osmonds record that’s good all the way through, but there’s at least one awesome song on each one."

"Yeah, I don’t get that one at all," the easygoing Smith, 37, says, speaking separately from the band’s hometown. He’s toiling on his own projects — Three Mile Pilot and Systems Officer discs — during Pinback’s monthlong break. "He played me something once, and I said, ‘Oh, this is all right,’ and ever since, he’s, like, ‘But you said you liked it one time in the car!’ Oh, god, I’ll never live that down."

Similarly, arguments during the making of albums are a given — although of all their recordings, Crow says, their latest, Autumn of the Seraphs (Touch and Go), inspired "the least amount of bickering. I think it had to with drinking wine during the day, which made everything go faster and seem more productive." Likewise, side projects have become de rigueur for the twosome, with Crow unofficially becoming known as the most prolific songwriter-collaborator in the so-called Southland — thanks to Goblin Cock, Aspects of Physics, Thingy, and various other diversions. "We both have different outlet for things that don’t work with us," Smith offers. "He has 20 of them, and I try to keep it to two."

Yet all of that doesn’t mean Pinback isn’t still meaningful for both musicians. The proof lies in Autumn of the Seraphs: like the best full-lengths, it ebbs and glows, tugging the listener along from the percussive, Genesis-style AOR pop of "How We Breathe" through the arch, rubbery progressions of "Blue Harvest" and its softer, more sorrowful relation "Torch" to the fittingly stirring closing epic, "Off by 50." They’re songs that not only "displace you from reality," as Smith puts it, but also satisfy Crow’s requirements for honest music making. "I just try to make sure we like what we’re doing and it has an emotional thing for us," the latter says.

If the pair can avoid pinning those emotions to new obsessions, they hope to put out another Pinback album within a year and a half rather than their standard three years. The danger for Smith: World of Warcraft. "You need to have groups for this, like Warcraft Anonymous or something," he says with a rueful laugh. "Luckily, I have too much music to do."

PINBACK

Sun/10, 8 p.m., $25

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

www.ticketmaster.com

They need more

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It’s probably not fair to expect that if your duo goes bass free, if its rock falls somewhere under the crude banner of garage, and if your early riff education occurred in Detroit, you won’t be assailed with comparisons to the White Stripes. It’s even less fair if the best song on your debut pulls off the protoblues swagger and gnarly scale work that once made Jack and Meg interesting. But as applied to Leopold and His Fiction — the pairing of Motor City expat and current Russian Hiller Daniel Toccalino and drummer Ben Cook, formerly of Kentucky — that match is a little too neat. As Toccalino dryly put it to me the other week, checking in from a tour stop at the Sundance Film Festival, "There are garages everywhere."

Indeed. Toccalino and Cook — who have been playing together for three years, releasing one self-titled LP along the way — have their reasons for limiting personnel to two. Cook’s training is in jazz, and as his frontman sees it, this has taught the percussionist to carry a heavier load — to artfully sub in where the bass is supposed to go. "He fills up a lot of the low end," Toccalino notes admiringly. This doesn’t always come up on the album, on which songs are colored in by other instruments. But it’s a central skill when it comes to Leopold’s two-person live show, and the studio session drops clear hints in this direction. "Promise to Reality," a Doors-ish epic late in the record, is heated by a boplike boil of toms and kick drums.

Still, this is a jazz tactic being used in the service of rock. It’s a way to launch a leaner attack without losing depth, which makes sense: Leopold’s overriding urge is toward the primitive. Spare blues structures, ragged guitar riffs, and spent vocals abound on the LP, the last given extra wear by Julian Casablancas levels of distortion. This skuzzy bent can go several different ways. The trashed-up "Gonna Be Your Boy" — as opposed to your dog? — is the Stooges with the blues kept more audible. Yet — almost as if to even things up with his Kentucky bandmate — Toccalino can also twang out his melodies and head up a country and Southern rock path, as on the wide and glowing "Miss Manipulation," which evokes My Morning Jacket. The group may be at its best when covering a few scenes at once: "Mother Natures Son" feels like Iggy Pop up front with an Exile on Main Street–era Keith Richards on guitar.

There can be an itch, in supposedly bearish times for back-to-blues rock, to fetishize a band like this — to get giddy about the so-called honesty of its raw sound. To Toccalino’s credit, he seems to have little interest in playing the ideologue or the prophet. He mostly just likes the rapport of playing with only one other dude, feeling that it accelerates the creative process. "In three years we’ve gotten as far as [other bands] get in 10," he told me.

Besides, austerity has its limits. Ticking off the changes we’ll find on the pair’s second full-length, already cut and set for a late-spring release, he could only come up with increases: "A little more country, way more Motown, more Stooges." More, it seems, of everything.

LEOPOLD AND HIS FICTION

With Candy Apple

Sun/10, 8 p.m., call for price

Parkside

1600 17th St., SF

(415) 252-1330

www.theeparkside.com

Furries, for real

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Super Furry Animals are a mischievous lot. Having marked the universe with their tech-pop grandeur for 15 years, they must now keep the world wondering where their music will pop up next and in what form. For their new album, Hey Venus! (Rough Trade), the Welsh quintet maintain their love of vast, Donald Fagen–esque noodling but have stripped down into a craftily introspective niche. In keeping with their new sound, they have a secret weapon in the studio, and it isn’t bleeding-edge sonic wizardry or Timbaland at the desk. It’s a dulcimer — a hammer dulcimer, to be exact, and it’s wielded on some songs with as much aplomb as any siren, blip, or squawk that’s graced any of their previous seven full-lengths. What gives? "For some reason, [the album] has a ‘band playing in a room’ kind of mood," lead vocalist Gruff Rhys offers simply, speaking on the phone from Cardiff, Wales, in early January. "Nobody brought any samplers to the recording sessions."

Super Furry Animals emerged from the Welsh capital city amid a wave of other acts, effectively marking a movement that included bands like Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and Catatonia. The core members of the group had originally come together as a techno outfit — a background that set them apart from their contemporaries. The group’s first album, Fuzzy Logic (Creation, 1996), saw the combo establish its mastery of cheekily strident pop tunes. Its next release, Radiator (Flydaddy, 1997), upped the ante with an inventive melodic complexity that the Furries had obviously already mastered.

The band made its mark by continuing to issue fearless, originally crafted indie rock that stemmed at least in part from Rhys’s schizoid musical background: he was in a jangle-pop band called Emily before moving on to noise ensemble Ffa Coffi Pawb. The Furries’ next release, Guerilla (Flydaddy, 1999), is a densely layered technorock symphony that ranges between the cheeky blips of songs like "Wherever I Lay My Phone (That’s My Home)" and the introspective balladeering of tracks like "Fire in My Heart." Each disc since has been notable for a particular reason, whether it’s an all-Welsh double album (2000’s Mwng [Placid Casual]), a special DVD with a video crafted for each song (2001’s Rings around the World [Sony]), or the quirky explorations into spaced-out country rock and überharmonic ruminating on recent albums Phantom Power (XL, 2003) and Love Kraft (XL/Beggars, 2005). Hey Venus!, Rhys explains, is partially based on the mellow mood he described earlier in our conversation. "In the past I wrote all the lyrics, and then the last two years [the band has become] more confident and has started to bring complete songs to the soup." He pauses, then confirms, "I suppose this was a songwriting kind of record."

Which brings us back to that dulcimer, most prominently used on the bittersweet "Carbon Dating." It’s a signature Furries multicultural hash: a kaleidoscopic ballad that begins as a carnival waltz before morphing into Motown–meets–Ennio Morricone doo-wop surrealism. Rhys credits its composer, keyboard player Cian Ciárán, calling it "the most beautiful song on the record" before explaining that Ciárán also played dulcimer on it. Demonstrating the band’s virtuosity and playfulness in the studio, the dulcimer is showcased like a sonic effect throughout Hey Venus!, echoing like a ghost as all other instruments drop away. Lest fans think the Furries have gone fully folk, Rhys laughs and explains the instrument’s lure: "Dulcimer for us represents a lot of the old Michael Caine cold war spy movies. He always had [it] going on in his soundtracks."

Cosmopolitan kitsch aside, Hey Venus! runs an emotional and socioeconomic gamut, albeit with a wink of the eye. On the Shangri-Las throwback "Runaway," lovers flee each other while wistfully recalling the other’s "banking details." (The video is an ’80s-inspired romp with Matt Berry of United Kingdom comedy series The Mighty Boosh.) There are also moments of quintessential SFA lyrical humor, as on "Baby Ate My Eightball," which offers the apologetic understatement of the decade, "See you on the other side / Sorry to cut your life so short." Equally acerbic is the track "Suckers!," which offers a straightforward litany of gripes concerning the world and its gullible inhabitants. Rhys wryly calls it a "miserable, complaint-rock song" that came to him at a dark moment on a rainy day in Cardiff: "Sometimes I sing that song tongue in cheek, and at other times I sing it and it’s absolutely sincere."

Rhys sounds like he’s still skating on that schizoid musical past. Yet while Hey Venus! seems to function as a musical exorcism of sorts, the frontman sees it as part of the natural order of the Super Furried Universe, with each recording a reaction to the last. He suggests that the next effort will depart from their current space age moodiness. "Maybe next time we’ll bring back the electronics," he says. He pauses and laughs before adding, "And I can start writing lyrics that are less exposed!"

SUPER FURRY ANIMALS

With Holy Fuck and Here Here

Sat/9, 9 p.m., $20

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.gamh.com

Accidental tranny

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› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Guilty! I’m totally real-time guilty. Yeps, frenz, I’m that spastic whore on the dance floor whooping like a neon cough, flinging my Mary Kate triceps up when a thump drops in the mix. If a club has one of those heinous black lights at the door, I sneak in the back so no one spots the glowing spunk on my skirt or my phosphorescent VCR. I always ask for extra antioxidant-rich lychees in my pomegranatini, to offset the American Spirits. OK, I’ve blown the DJ. And although I’ve never stuffed a tube sock down my sequined thong or Botoxed my rosy areolae, those are my fake digits you just beamed into your contacts, sweetness. Thanks for the pomegranatini. Call me!

Also, I take things for granted. Some parties in this town have been around since Y2K was ripped-knee-high to a troll doll (New Wave City, 1984, Popscene, Death Guild, Red Wine Social, Qoöl). I’ve surely enjoyed them all. But in my ravenous quest for novelty I’ve watched them gradually fade from my schedule, like tears of joy evaporating on a monitor. Thus I was shocked when word squirted down the pudding pipe that — after 12 years of lunatic antics at the Stud — weekly trash-drag frenzy Trannyshack was slamming its barn door shut in August. Just where the heck will club pervs get their weekly fix of "two trannies, one cup"?

"I never intended to become a professional drag queen, Marke B. It was almost an accident," Trannyshack hostess Heklina said, laughing groggily into the phone when I rang for dish. I’d woken her up: it was 2 p.m. "I was merely dabbling in drag when the Stud approached me a dozen years ago to fill the Tuesday night slot. It’s been wonderful, but I’m ready for a change — and I’m too much of a control freak to let Trannyshack go on without me."

The lady was feeling candid. "I’m done with punk-rock drag," she added. "I’m tired of feeling like I have to haul in my own amps, manage the entire bar, and clean up afterwards. At this point I simply want to walk onstage and have the light show ready and the sound board all cued up. And I want more challenges, to work more in theater, expand my horizons, travel, figure myself out. You get trapped in a persona. This great thing comes along, people love it, and then suddenly it’s your whole life. For 12 years. Time for a breather!"

Hold on to your panicked panties, though. "Trannyshack the brand isn’t going away," Heklina continued. "I’m working on making it a monthly party somewhere nice, and we’ll still do big events like the annual pageant, Trannyshack Reno, international gigs, and maybe bring back the cruise." The weekly Trannyshack’s planning to go out with a bang too: a countdown of greatest hits and command performances has begun, with Ana Matronic of Scissor Sisters hosting Feb. 12 and an explosive 12th-birthday blowout Feb. 19.

Heklina is one of the OG rave-era club kids who made San Francisco fabulously unsafe at any speed, and Trannyshack freed drag from its Judy Garland fetters, flooding punk spirit — and oodles of bodily fluids — into the stalls of gay nightlife. The ‘Shack’s now venerable enough to be thought mainstream by some young turks, but it still feels like the scene’s bloody wig’s been yanked off.

TRANSPORTING How’s this for a leap of global proportions? The papacito of the nightlife’s global grooves movement, DJ Cheb i Sabbah — himself a proprietor of one of SF’s longest-running parties, 1002 Nights (now at Nickie’s in the Lower Haight on Tuesdays) — has just released another stunningly internationalist CD, Devotion (Six Degrees), and he’ll be throwing down, celebration-wise, at the huge returning one-off Worldly at Temple. Boosting Cheb’s subcontinental turntable wizardry live will be Pakistani vocalist Riffat Sultana and percussionists Salar Nadar and Mitch Hyare. Also trading on the tables: electrotabla etherealist Karsh Kale and bhangra breakster Janaka Selekta. Fold dem paper planes and twirl.

TRANNYSHACK

Tuesdays, 9 p.m., $8

Stud

399 Ninth St., SF

(415) 866-6623

www.studsf.com

www.trannyshack.com

CHEB I SABBAH AT WORLDLY

Sat/9, 10 p.m., $8

Temple

540 Howard, SF

www.templesf.com

www.chebisabbah.com

Paul van Dyk

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PREVIEW In the late ’90s, Paul Oakenfold opted for pop stardom and Sasha and Digweed journeyed into the darker tones of progressive house, leaving Paul van Dyk as the final bastion of trance music’s golden age. Some might argue that one of the Dutch contingency — Armin van Burren, Ferry Corsten, and the prominent DJ Tiesto — has wrested the mantle of trance king from the Berlin DJ and producer. The short answer is a defiant nein. In their own ways, the Dutch headliners have attempted to shift away from traditional trance music’s familiar pattern of build-up then breakdown (now known as Euro or NRG). Trance’s new formula involves grounding a track with vocal talent, then layering melodies and synths on top. While the Hollanders achieve sufficient results, the accomplished van Dyk has overmastered them, even nabbing indie popsters St. Etienne in 2000 for "Tell Me Why (The Riddle)." Since then, his 2003 "Time of Our Lives" with Vega 4 has been played on American TV commercials, and "The Other Side" with Wayne Jackson won Best HI-NRG/Euro Track at the 2006 Winter Music Conference (it was also nominated for Best Progressive House/Trance Track — go figure). Van Dyk’s newest album, In Between (Mute US, 2007), continues the trend with a bevy of guest vocalists, including Jackson, David Byrne, and Jessica Sutta of the Pussycat Dolls. The album title could represent a transitional phase: on well-received single "White Lies" with Sutta, familiar drums and hi-hats mingle with a heavy bass line atypical of the German’s normally fleet-footed sound.

PAUL VAN DYK With Taj and Dirtyhertz. Fri/8, 9 p.m., $40. 1015, 1015 Folsom, SF. (415) 431-1200, www.1015.com

James Blackshaw

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PREVIEW Those seeking musical majesty need to acquaint themselves with the 12-string acoustic guitar playing of James Blackshaw, a Londoner and, at 25, one of an ever-expanding set of John Fahey acolytes. Fahey expanded the purview of folk-blues structures in his 1960s and ’70s prime to accommodate a roving interest in sundry classical forms. The journeying compositions stood apart from the contemporaneous folk revival but immediately attracted disciples, notably Fahey’s Takoma labelmates Leo Kottke, Robbie Basho, and Mark Fosson.

Of the current crop of acoustic shamans, Blackshaw is perhaps the most fluid player and the most frankly transcendental in his musical themes. His song titles are indicative of this mood: "Transient Life in Twilight," "Spiraling Skeleton Memorial," "Stained Glass Windows," and so on. He’s already the owner of a longish discography — three out-of-print early releases are soon to be reissued by Tompkins Square — and his spiral jetty compositions flurry forth with transposed phrases and delicately twisting tempos. The recordings have a pantheistic quality in their detailed sensuousness, a glistening shimmer that begs comparison as much to Terry Riley and My Bloody Valentine as to Fahey and Peter Walker.

Blackshaw has pursued Eastern-tinged, droning passages with increasing frequency over his past two albums, O True Believers (Important, 2006) and The Cloud of Unknowing (Tompkins Square, 2007), and if these segments are less immediately successful than his Gregorian guitar mode, it’s still gratifying to hear the young talent pushing his limits. The Cloud of Unknowing caps its culminating steel-string swirl with a protracted bout of nail-biting strings, not unlike the effect that closes the Beatles’ "A Day in the Life." It sounds like a promise of things to come, a sonogram of the great depths underlying Blackshaw’s placid surfaces. Catch the guitarist in the flesh in a rare stateside appearance, in support of guitar guru Sean Smith’s Eternal (Gnome Life) record release.

JAMES BLACKSHAW With Sean Smith and the Present Moment, Spencer Owen, and Colossal Yes. Wed/6, 9 p.m., $10. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. (415) 861-5016, www.cafedunord.com

Slim’s slimed

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER There are eight jillion stories in the naked, nervous-Naughties city, and one of the increasingly common tales is that of the wannabe slicker who lays out that down payment for a little piece of gritty ‘n’ shitty, gorgeous ‘n’ porous, wild ‘n’ wooly San Francisco. And then supposed slick realizes, "Hey, I’m tired of stepping over panhandlers, looking for parking, and listening to car alarms, building fans, BART musicians, construction blare, and city hubbub in general." Translation: "I actually want to live in Concord, San Carlos, or Corte Madera." So the square spoiler in this happily unholy round hole of a town decides to wreck things for everyone.

That sort of inane, fish-outta-water resolve is, unfortunately, threatening Slim’s, the linchpin of the 11th Street–SoMa club scene since chart topper Boz Scaggs first opened the respected nightspot two decades ago, the site of many a memorable night of music and a venue that, legend has it, bands like Built to Spill have pledged their loyalty to because of its dedication to stellar sound. One of Slim’s neighbors tipped me off last month that the hall — which has consistently passed all sound tests conducted by the city’s Entertainment Commission — was being besieged weekly by a lone complainer living in Juniper Alley. All of this came to a head in December 2007 when the accuser ordered citizen’s arrests of two of Slim’s night managers on three occasions — after, Entertainment Commission industry representative Terrance Alan says, police refused to issue noise-violation citations of their own because they couldn’t hear any vioutf8g sound issuing from Slim’s. The arrests have led the Department of Alcohol Beverage Control to bring an enforcement action against Slim’s liquor license, which may close the club for 15 to 25 days after an April hearing.

"She has been threatening to do this for a while," Slim’s co-owner Dawn Holliday told me. The complaining neighbor and her partner have been registering noise complaints for the past two years, Holliday added, though no other neighbors have complained, and in 2000 all of the area’s condo and live-work residents signed a deed restriction making it clear that the district is a mixed-use neighborhood subject to noise, odors, and other industrial activities 24-7. Nonetheless, Holliday continued, "she calls the police on average four nights a week. The Entertainment Commission has gone into their house and done readings in the house, done readings out in front of house, and we do readings in front of their house every night with a decibel meter on the most sensitive reading you can get, and we are always compliant. It didn’t satisfy them."

One of the charges against a Slim’s manager was dismissed, but both staffers are still due to go to court for the two arrests in February and March. "I’m hoping they let these kids off," Holliday said. "I’ve gone to [San Francisco Police Department’s] Southern Station and asked them to wait for me to come over or Boz to come over and arrest us. It’s not fair that employees get arrested. We’re the two owners that live the closest, and both of us would take tickets before our employees."

Holliday is confident — after going into mediation, consulting with sound guru Charles Salter, and taking actions like installing a new insulated roof and a special four-tiered back door — that a resolution is possible. Still, the idea that one sour grape can pull down another great venue is troubling. "This is a situation where you can see how the system, which was designed to have respect for all the citizenry, can be used by this vexed complainer," Alan said. "They’ve created this history of complaints based only on their complaints. It’s going to cost Slim’s a lot of money and cost their managers a lot of sleepless nights, who want to go on and have a life. And they won’t be able to if they are found criminally liable for this. Imagine, you’re just doing your job …"

And hey, that’s another reason why so many of us come to this cow town in the first place: to work and to cozy up closer to that golden cow pumping pomegranatinis, the raucous crafters of musical ambrosia, et al. Fess up: you didn’t move to SF to feel good about driving a Prius or down Starbucks. What you can’t find regularly in Concord or Corte Madera — and what so many of us continue to crave — is that non-government-regulated minimum requirement of fun: loud, smelly, still safe, inconvenient, sprinkled with homeless parking valets, and still unlike anything you’ll get in the sticks.

For more, see Sonic Reducer Overage at www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

HOWLIN RAIN MAKE THEIR MOVE

Howlin Rain and Comets on Fire’s Ethan Miller has plenty of news about: HR’s superfine new LP, Magnificent Fiend, will be released March 4 on SF’s Birdman label and HR’s new imprint, Columbia Records cohoncho Rick Rubin’s American Recordings. Why jump? Miller told me he was enticed by larger studio budgets and the opportunity to be produced by Rubin, whom the frontman praised as someone who "seems to chip away at all those extraneous things and just draw out the essential fluids onto the tape.

"Those are the reasons," Miller said. "This is not the type of record deal where you get a million-dollar check and drive away in a Rolls-Royce, and you’re, like, ‘Fuck, cool, man, they bought me a Corvette, and now everyone can just go get wasted on coke and it doesn’t matter now, man!’ And then, whoa, a year later you’re kicked off the label, and you’re, like, ‘Fuck, I blew my $2 million advance now. This sucks! Now I’m a fucking nobody!’ That’s not this."

HOWLIN RAIN

With Black Mountain

Mon/4, 8 p.m., $14

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

www.theindependentsf.com

Top o’ the world, ma

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› duncan@sfbg.com

My ex-girlfriend hipped me to TopR, short for Top Ramen, around 2003. We were driving in her car, and she cracked open the newly released Burning the Candle at Both Ends (Earthlings/DWA) and slid it into the dash. I’d like to say it changed my life, but to be honest, I can’t remember it. I do remember that she described TopR as this homeless, couch-surfing rapper who’d slept on her previous boyfriend’s couch. It was classic case of his reputation and lifestyle preceding his music.

Later I met TopR — or Topper Holiday, as he’s ceased using his first name — at 111 Minna Gallery, where I still work a side gig as a doorman. Throughout my years there he’s been a semiregular fixture, posted at the end of the bar, skeezing free drinks. He’s well loved but has this Dennis the Menace air surrounding him, like, "Oh, Topper’s here. Here comes trouble." One night in Minna alley, I remember him — a big, bescruffed white dude in a fitted New Era cap, somewhat rotund and more than a little faded — striking up a conversation with some bland, buttoned-down types, telling them he was a rapper and following up with a drunken freestyle. I came away feeling that it was a little sad, like he was busking in a BART station, trying to impress the squares.

"Fuck being glamorous — I’m cantankerous." So goes the first line on "Frankenstein’s Topster," the opener off his latest, fifth album, Marathon of Shame (Gurp City). It was playing when I walked into Dalva on 16th Street to say hello to my friend Toph One and reintroduce myself to TopR. And quite a reintroduction it was: even before Top starts rapping, the track is a fucking winner, anchored by a sample of Black Sabbath’s "A National Acrobat," the driving guitar riff married to an überfunky drumbeat by producer Dick Nasty.

A good hip-hop album is like a good comedy record: the shit’s got to be so sharp that you want to listen to it more than once, want to scan back on the CD and point out lines to your friends who are riding with you. In Top’s case it’s an apt comparison since he’s influenced by stand-up comedians as much as by other rappers and samples Sam Kinison and Bill Hicks on his previous disc, Cheap Laughs for Dead Comedians (Gurp City, 2006). Marathon is packed with lines that’ll make other rappers wish they’d written them, from favorite one-liners like "Puttin’ squares in their place like Tetris" to heartfelt couplets such as "I don’t want to fit into this banality factory / Where together we can all make profit from tragedy."

It stands to reason that TopR can come up with witty rhymes: he’s been rapping since he was 12. Now 30, he gained his rep as a battle rapper at parties and clubs. "From ’93 until 2000 all I did was battle," he says over a pint at the Richmond District’s 540 Club. "I didn’t record music. I didn’t put out anything. I just made a reputation for myself through battling. If I was putting out albums in ’95, ’96, I might’ve been an actual artist like Living Legends, Atmosphere, and Hieroglyphics. You can only be a battle rapper for so long. After a while there’s not very much creative outlet for it. You can only make fun of someone for so long before you actually want to express your real problems and your real feelings about life. And you do that through writing songs."

In a time when your average radio rap track has more advertisements for sneakers and pricey booze than a copy of GQ, TopR represents a more compelling side of the hip-hop spectrum: the storied tradition of rapper as traveling salesman, hawking CDs "out the trunk," or in his case, out the messenger bag, since, as he says on "Siren Song," "the Muni is my chariot." And while he often calls himself out as lazy in his songs, TopR’s tale is a cross between the 1984 runaway-punk movie Suburbia and the classic Horatio Alger story.

A self-described "troubled kid," TopR left his parents’ home in Santa Cruz at 15, living in squats and hitchhiking to San Francisco to hit open mics and do graffiti. He was arrested for vandalism, went back home, and left again, sleeping on couches if he was lucky and outside if he wasn’t. He attributes his notoriety in the bar scene to necessity: "The fact that I was homeless — I had to be in bars every goddamned night, looking for places to stay. I had nothing better to do."

Slumming, bumming, and battling eventually led to some Greyhound cross-country tours and a devoted following of party kids and misfits, unhappy with the status quo and, like him, struggling to get by. There’s no shortage of the usual hip-hop bravado on Marathon: "I’m a piss artist who spits darkness at bitch targets," TopR raps on "Siren Song," "<0x2009>’cause the music that’s honest is the music that hits hardest." True, but the track isn’t merely empty braggadocio: it’s nothing less than an existentialist crisis with a beat, one rapper’s The Sickness unto Death, asking the eternal questions of the artist and, ultimately, everyone who’s been "up against it."

And while it’s the struggle — and the willingness to cop to it — that makes Marathon so compelling, it seems TopR might finally be on the bus toward Figuring It All Out. On a tour in 2005 he met his fiancée, Kelly-Anne, perhaps the muse of "Siren’s Song," bartending at one of his shows in Asheville, NC. He stayed in the South for more than a year before getting an apartment, with a couch and a bed, in San Francisco’s Sunset District. "I came up as ‘the homeless kid who slept on couches,’<0x2009>" he explains. "But I was good at graffiti young, and I was a good rapper. I got away with a lot of stuff that some punk little kid wouldn’t because people respected me for my talents or whatever. But I’ve mellowed out." Here Top takes a contemplative pull on his pint. "I mean, I’m fuckin’ 30. I’ve got a dog now."

I’m going to do my part to go tell it on the mountain, to put this disc on when we’re cruising down the street, to make sure you hear the hilarious lines and crucial cuts. But on the other hand, one reason why it’s so good is because you ran into him in the bar and bought a disc so he could have beer money. TopR may have reached escape velocity from his day job, but he’s still orbiting the homelessness of his recent past. The line that sums up TopR for me is from "I’m on One" on Cheap Laughs: "It doesn’t take a genius to see that we’re livin’ stressful / The secret to my success is that I’m unsuccessful." It might be better for him if he got the juice to leave orbit altogether and rocket into the outer galaxies of hip-hop superstardom, but would it be better for his music if he weren’t "livin’ stressful?" Living hand to mouth myself, I’m heartened to see someone who keeps grindin’, who tries to live a creative life in the face of SF-size rent, the approaching years, and a music industry that may never give a shit. To quote TopR’s MySpace page, "Even when nothing goes right I still prevail."

TOPR CD RELEASE PARTY

With DJ Quest, Conceit, Delinquent Monastery, Thunderhut Project, Ras One, and DJ Delivery

Fri/1, 9 p.m., $10

12 Galaxies

2565 Mission, SF

(415) 970-9777

www.12galaxies.com

Nailed

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The name should tip you off right from the get-go: the Pine Box Boys. Now, I don’t want to venture any guesses about your mama, but my mama didn’t raise any fools, so when I hear the words pine box, I see the words dead body. Then I shudder: caskets creep me out.

Not so for the San Francisco foursome. These long-haired death defiers give the Grim Reaper a nipple twist or two with their waggishly pitch-black tales of murder, misery, and mayhem, and we shouldn’t want it any other way. Gallows humor has been around just as long as we as a species have been able to tell our stories, and this raggle-taggle band of bluegrass ne’er-do-wells is a bold keeper of the tradition, knowing exactly how to spin a dark and bloody yarn and still bust a gut while doing it.

So let’s consider the pine box: basic, humble, and nothing highfalutin compared to the mind-dizzying, bankroll-sapping array of caskets out there nowadays. It’s strictly old-school: no fancy modern gilded inlays or polished brass handles here but rather a nice, solid vintage construction ready for getting the job done. Much like the Pine Box Boys, who — well, they don’t do fancy, from what I’ve seen.

There are no state-of-the-art production techniques on either 2005’s Arkansas Killing Time or 2006’s Stab! (both Hi Horse), nor are there nods in the direction of any recent, decidedly rockist musical trends. Instead, this largely acoustic quartet wreak unholy havoc from the sounds of their grandpappies’ era — and probably even that of their grandpappies’ grandpappies. All those banjos and strummed guitars might conjure images of barn dances, but underneath the floorboards lays a trail of dead.

The band — fronted by hillbilly-twanged, wide-eyed maniac Lester Raww — has referred to its singular strain of mockingly malevolent roots music as "darkgrass." I’ve also seen it described as "Southern horrorbilly," a tag that makes sense in view of the Pine Box Boys’ thrilling, ante-upping delivery on subjects such as murder, cannibalism, and necrophilia. Supported by banjo thwacker Possum Carvidi’s hot-wired backing vocals, Raww’s chronicling of the most sordid of transgressions gives the same sort of glorious release as a slasher flick, assuming one is willing to suspend disbelief. Not that this requires much effort: Raww’s whoppers are tautly constructed and often brimming with chuckleworthy turns of phrase, and the frenzied rhythm section of Col. Timothy Leather on bass and "Your Uncle" Dodds on drums provides a rollicking, engaging backdrop for surrendering to such giddy, grisly fictions.

"One look into my eyes, and a wise man would lock up his daughters," Raww sings with devilish charm on Arkansas Killing Time‘s "When the Moon Moves the Waters," before going on to explain his blood thirst with all of the juicy detailed satisfaction of a Clive Barker or, hell, Nick Cave. The specifics of the beginnings and middles vary from song to song, but they all end the same: someone dies. And someone laughs — at the ridiculous brilliance of it all. The easily offended will miss out on the point of the Pine Box Boys, but hey, they’ll miss out on all the fun too.

THE PINE BOX BOYS

Feb. 9, 8 p.m., $13

Cafe du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

Digging the new-old roots

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Yodeling is African? Well, one could certainly trace the practice from the Ituri of the Congolese rainforest, described as the first people by ancient Egyptian chroniclers, to country icons such as Jimmie Rodgers — who, incidentally, recorded with Louis Armstrong — but also to less-explored sonic shores like James Brown’s iconic scream or Marvin Gaye’s version limning his legendary 1970s LP cycle. However, if this is too far a leap for you to make, the Carolina Chocolate Drops’ appearance as part of the San Francisco Bluegrass and Old-Time Festival might be a bit of a head-scratcher. The Chocolate Drops — Dom Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens, and Justin Robinson — don’t straight-up yodel, but their harmonies and banjo-and-fiddle-anchored instrumentation reach back not only to the halcyon days when Africans in America entertained themselves at fiddle-scored frolics but all the way to the griot tradition of Western Sudan.

To be sure, the Durham, NC, band — yes, their moniker invokes the Tennessee Chocolate Drops and Mississippi Mud Steppers of yore — is neither superurban nor contemporary. Its members play strictly prewar African American string-band repertoire, as evidenced by their current release, Dona Got a Ramblin’ Mind (Music Maker): see "Tom Dula," "Ol’ Corn Likker," and yep, the ever-contested "Dixie." Still, being young, hip children of the postdesegregation era, the trio have a musical expression and an aesthetic that are informed as much by the hybridity and daring of the 1960s and ’70s golden age of black rock and psychedelic soul as by classic country and western and ethnographic studies of the genre’s African antecedents. If only by pursuing their dusky twang muse in reaction to the deplorable, moribund state of today’s urban music, these Drops live in a world that differs from that of their 1920s and ’30s predecessors chiefly in that (a) the wages of desegregation include black audiences’ will to eschew arts reminiscent of their past of bondage and hard times and (b) the dominant society’s prevailing and most popular stereotype of blackness has an inner-city face — "Makes me wanna holler!" — that rejects any other ways of being or seeing.

Some of my colleagues — and doubtless myself — have been obliquely accused of holding up emerging progressive black artists on the rock scene and satellites such as the Drops as examples of uplift and enshrining their hard work beneath a welter of sociological wankery stretching back into the prewar mists of time to Talented Tenth big daddy W.E.B. DuBois. Yet if some of that giddiness at Afro-futurist striving is sloughed off, there remains the central, inescapable fact that in much of the West, rock is still seen as "black music played by white people" and country is this nation’s most racially separatist genre.

Much was made this past fall of Rissi Palmer’s Billboard debut with "Country Girl," since it was the first such charting by an African American in the two decades after the long-forgotten Dona Mason’s fleeting dent with "Green Eyes (Cryin’ Those Blue Tears)." Critics worked overtime to display color-blind bona fides, bending themselves over backward in the attempt to downplay the role of race in Palmer’s ascent and note the singularity of the event while also sugarcoating their general consensus on the disc’s mediocrity. Personally, I wish Sister Palmer much success and far better material plus production, but what struck me most was the cover of her eponymous release. Only a sliver of Palmer’s brown face is to be seen, the overabundance of russet curls perhaps meant as commerce-inducing allusion to the Great Reba. It’s certainly baffling that 42 years since Charley Pride’s debut was released sans artist photo, one still has to mince around difference.

The Carolina Chocolate Drops have more to overcome, seeing as they play an earlier, unplugged form of twang that’s light-years away from not only the patriotic-pandering, reheated Southern boogie and suburban soccer mom–and–sippy cup sentiments of mainstream Nashville but also the ambitious incursions of Palmer and Cowboy Troy and the recent bluegrass syncretism of Merle Haggard and Alison Krauss and Robert Plant. Now sharing management with fellow Carolinians the Avett Brothers, the Drops are garnering just acclaim from roots-friendly media and making fruitful incursions into important arenas, like the annual MerleFest. Yes, the trio are benefiting from both the breakdown of a music industry in turmoil that’s reliant on streams from independents and a more reflective moment among media and listeners who have come of age in an era of omnivorous multiculturalism. And let us not discount the Drops’ sheer talent and charm.

Nevertheless, as a mere Negress observer, this critic finds her attention inevitably straying to the lack of intraracial institutions to advocate for artists in the Drops’ vein — in addition to an infrastructure for developing and sustaining nonwhite audiences’ taste for the music. Since, y’know, they’re isolated from the rural. (Must Dona be retroactively screwed and chopped?) It would be nice to see the band embraced as part of a continuum by progressive audiences, just as there’s some energy around soul-folk as a viable trend. Will the Drops’ version of young fogydom garner as much breathless critical attention and community building as the so-called freak-folk scene does? Of course, cross-cultural exchange is possible: current Nashvegas superstar and Troy’s boy "Big" Kenny Alphin traveled to Sudan last October to do his bit for the struggle and got the country press to cover his contribution. Now if only the media would turn its attention to the best acolytes of medieval traditions created by Africans not abject but divinely inspired.

THE CAROLINA CHOCOLATE DROPS

Feb. 7, 8 p.m., $18.50–<\d>$19.50

Freight and Salvage Coffee House

1111 Addison, Berk.

(510) 548-1761

www.thefreight.org

CRITICAL ‘GRASS

The San Francisco Bluegrass and Old-Time Festival runs Feb. 1–9. For information on other shows and events, go to www.sfbluegrass.org.

Video Mutants: Booby call

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Who can bring together cast-off crocheted critters and KISS? Early ’70s Ann Arbor, Mich., art noise and the Whitney Biennial? Vampires toiling in cubicles and Sonic Youth’s 1992 album Dirty (DGC)? Mike Kelley, man, can.

Ouch — the allusions get bumpy after almost three hours of mind-altering video candy. The medium may be the favored art material of the moment, but it’s only one weapon at the disposal of the cofounder of Destroy All Monsters — the Stooges’ weirder kissing cousins — and the Dirty cover artist. Kelley’s work can be found in major museum collections around the world, and he’s collaborated on video pieces with artists like Paul McCarthy in the past, but Day Is Done, which screens Jan. 31 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, is his first feature, revamped as a narrative-ish stream from the installation version shown in 2005 at Gagosian Gallery in New York City.

Religious icons, ’80s modern dancers, lousy Nazi rappers, bad comedians, and spacey witches and vampires dance, sing, and hold forth throughout the video musical’s 32 chapters, augmented by a Kelley-written soundtrack that encompasses gospel and techno, light pop and monkish drone. Say I’m lost in pop idolatry, but the most wonderfully bizarre moment in this lengthy bizarre wonder arrives during a painful singles mixer furnished with irksome chair-desks as the differences among the assembled women — two African Americans, a white lost Hee Haw extra, a rocker in full KISS makeup, and a gloomy witch — are highlighted by portraits of their respective all-American idols: Kobe Bryant, R. Kelly, Garth Brooks, Gene Simmons, and Brandon Lee, all painted with clunky, thrift store–style passion. After getting an, erm, tongue lashing from the KISS girl for nattering about the largeness of some big stuffed bananas, the hick chick is forced to defend her painting of Brooks staring at a bare breast (in reality painted by Kelley). "But it ain’t even my tit — it’s my momma’s," the backwoods boob protests as the KISS fan sneers with all of Detroit Rock City’s blood-spitting wrath. "Gosh, I hope Garth don’t go for my momma and not for me!"

The rejoinder "That bitch is nuts!" might be a punch line to a half-cocked sitcom, but it’s also the perfect response to the old biddy dressing down a would-be school pageant Madonna for her posture or the blood-drenched hawker of a putf8um MasterCard that supports the "educational complex" — or any other denizen of Kelley’s jet-black-humored, bleakly antic fun house.

Looking back at the video now, however, Kelley can still picture changes to Day Is Done — each chapter a live-action re-creation of an extracurricular activity photo culled from a high school yearbook. For instance, the many students and office workers dressed as depressed vampires and gleeful witches seem a bit too trendy today, even for a man with a taste for monsters. "If I thought about it more, I would have done something less … au courant, I guess," Kelley drawls over the phone from his Los Angeles home. Does he still glimpse kids in full goth regalia? A heavy sigh, then, "Yeah. Also, it’s kind of gone into the art world. A lot of gothy art is being made."

A self-described "maximalist" who has made noise for years as part of Destroy All Monsters — a forerunner of experimentalists here and abroad — and later on his own, the man once pegged as a major proponent of installation-oriented "clusterfuck aesthetics" is clearly driven to strike out in fresh directions all the time. Day Is Done, for example, emerged from his work with repressed memories and his Educational Complex sculpture, a model of every school the Detroit native ever attended, with, he says, "all the parts I couldn’t remember left blank." The original idea for the video — shot over a few weeks in 2005 at an LA park, Kelley’s studio, and his alma mater, California Institute of the Arts — was to "fill in the blanks with screen memory."

"Also because this show was in New York, I thought doing something with a Broadway overtone would be funny because that’s something cultured New Yorkers are embarrassed about!" Kelley says, laughing.

Kelley is obviously still eager to venture into unexamined office parks of discomfort, provoking his viewers by pushing them into the dead spaces that fill the back lots of corporate break rooms and school yards. The artist’s well-known stuffed-animal works similarly evolved from an unspoken exchange with his audience. "When I first starting using that stuff, I was only working with things that were handmade, and it didn’t matter to me what they were — I was more interested in the idea of love and labor," Kelley explains. "But people were really, really fixated on the dolls, and I realized there’s a great kind of empathy for them, and also I realized that much of that empathy had to do with this kind of rise and fixation on child abuse and that whole victim culture that was coming up in the ’80s."

Shortly after one of those discarded dolls popped up on the cover of Dirty, Kelley, bandmate Cary Loren, SY’s Thurston Moore, and critic Byron Coley put together the 1994 three-CD retrospective Destroy All Monsters: 1974–1976 for Moore’s Ecstatic Peace! label to document the original lineup’s work before the arrival of the Stooges’ Ron Asheton and the MC5’s Michael Davis in the band. The founding group re-formed, while Kelley has continued to work sound components into his artwork and make and release music on his Compound Annex imprint.

Has music video ever been part of Kelley’s Wagnerian compendium of interests? "I’ve never been asked!" he says. "I don’t think I would do one for myself — who would show it? It’ll just be another thing that sits in a box in storage, like all my records." Still, his freshly edited feature might work. "It generated a tremendous amount of music," the artist muses. "In a sense, Day Is Done is one giant music video." *

DAY IS DONE

Jan. 31, 7:30 p.m., $6–<\d>$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

www.ybca.org

www.mikekelley.com

Escape from planet Indie Rock

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

With so many indie rock bands riding the wave of all things post-punk or psych–this and that at present, it’s rare that fans of subversive music are able to listen to subterranean songs as a means of escape. I mean, Band of Horses permeate Ford commercials during the NFL playoffs, and little brothers and sisters everywhere are air-guitaring to everyone from Mastodon to the Rapture.

So it makes perfect sense that Brooklyn, NY, band Yeasayer has managed to engage even the most cynical of indie veterans with its escapist realm filled with an uncompromisingly authentic helping of psychedelic — and extremely technically proficient — guitar noodling, hypnotic pop vocals, and worldly percussion that’s as reminiscent of Carlos Santana as it is of Animal Collective or the Cure. How can you not escape when listening to something that trots along so many unexpected musical paths?

It’s no surprise that this extension of the avant-indie wing is composed of two ex–barbershop quartet members and a rhythm section that employs a bounty of instrumentation including but not limited to accordions, bongo drums, sitars, and sequencers. Driven by guitarist Anand Wilder, the group is a four-piece, genre-eradicating machine, with each member trading off vocal and instrumental duties by track. Eleven months in the making, Yeasayer’s debut, All Hour Cymbals, was snatched up by Jason Foster of Monitor Records (Battles, Early Man) and eventually became the initial — and cornerstone — release of his newest imprint, We Are Free.

After a gazillion positive reviews, rumors of the band’s outstanding performances at Austin, Texas’s 2007 South by Southwest Festival, and yes, acclaim from MTV as part of the burgeoning Brooklyn scene, the band has become one of the few tripper acts that render a true sense of escapism as indie rock’s merge with mainstream culture becomes a reality. I strongly recommend listening to the goth-pop–meets–Middle Eastern music psych-epic "Germs," followed by a serious bong rip. Then turn to the haunting, shoegazing barbershop bhangra of "Waves" and attempt to question what mental plane and planet you inhabit.

But what makes the mysticism of Yeasayer more mind engulfing than that of the mountain of other Dave Sitek– and Paw Tracks–approved artists (e.g., um, Celebration, Panda Bear, Ariel Pink)? One should first look at the group’s penchant for gospel. While it may be hard to associate any of the long-haired and art school–ish members with that genre’s religious core, just about every track on All Hour Cymbals radiates some sort of spiritual a cappella à la TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe — if he were ever a member of a South American Baptist choir. Even more interesting, the band’s lyrics take the proverbial 180 degree turn from gospel’s posi-vibes. Take, for instance, Yeasayer’s single "2080": the members switch off melodically chanting, "I can’t sleep when I think about the times we’re living in / I can’t sleep when I think about the future I was born into," only to follow with "I’ll surely be dead / So don’t look ahead / Never look ahead." Now we have an apocalyptic, uplifting, shredding whirlwind of pop innovation. Whoa.

With a European tour under their belt and an extensive United States tour in progress with their fellow Brooklyn troupe of indie revolutionaries MGMT, Yeasayer are spreading the bounty of escapism worldwide. Experiencing this fearless entity, which is staring indie rock’s mainstream monster directly in the face, should be an entertaining, if not enlightening, glimpse into the future of progressive songwriting as we might know it. *

YEASAYER

With MGMT and the Morning Benders

Mon/28, 9 p.m., sold out

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

Video Mutants: Rave damage

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>>Click here to read Marke B.’s interview with Ryan Trecartin

› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO "Hey Skippy, PattyMay is here. In. This. Room."

"Oh god, it’s true! PattyMay is in this room."

"Yes! Tell him I am here. I am PattyMay, and I am in. This. Room."

"Did you say PattyMay is in the room?"

This is the Guardian‘s video art issue, and anyone who’s recently hung out with a certain brand of cued-in, mid-20s clubber knows that the neon-splattered, inverted Internet psycho-vids of Ryan Trecartin are the new now. Those who’ve not hung out with such can plug directly into any enervated crackles and eyeball quivers lingering from their tab-heavy rave days — a tweekend back in K-land, courtesy of capital A — with a quick scan of the Philadelphia-based 26-year-old’s YouTube channel, WianTreetin.

There — and in several big-time art exhibitions throughout the world — you’ll find one of the most mind-bending glosses on getting ready for a night out, and actually going out, that’s ever been burnt to digi, A Family Finds Entertainment (2004). This half-hourish doozy begins with a gothic drag specter clutching a bottle of generic hair spritz and trying to pull a little girl into a bathroom closet. It ends with a boy who’s been run over by a ghost car rising from the dead, kind of, as a gender-clown version of himself gets reborn in a kiddie pool after a house is destroyed by an underground indie rock dance orgy. (Cue fireworks.)

In between is what one character calls "nonlinear trash, with color!" and the wickedest toss-off line in the universe, "To the dark side — I party alone." Also: a chipmunk remix of Sophie Ellis Baxter’s awful "Murder on the Dance Floor," a spastic impersonation of infernal fiber-optic networks, liberal quantities of ingested toner, confused plans shouted through butcher-paper walls, and the partially imaginary dream girl PattyMay, made somehow realer by several incantations of her name. All this and more, plus an overload of kitten star wipes.

What? That’s not your typical night out? Honey, call me.

Mapping the plots of Trecartin’s hyperactive, live-action phantasmagorias is so beside the point it’s next to it. Part of the posted synopsis of his 2006 short Tommy Chat Just E-Mailed Me: "Takes place inside and outside of an Internet e-mail…. Tammy prints stuff and confronts Beth. Beth does a Google search for ‘fun’ and finds ‘ugly,’ so she phone calls her dark dream girlfriend Pam who has communication problems, a dead computer painting, Apple OSX, and their lesbian communal baby prop."

And although the look and feel of his episodes — Microsoft-blue papier-mâché interiors, vine-sprouting ceilings, fluorescent-dipped skin tones, looped asexual voices, ominous snippets of warped bubblegum pop — are definitely wiggy, drug analogies come up obvious and short. Trecartin’s created a hilarious and horrifying — hilarifying — open-source code for the nightmare side of contemporary life, with its inflatable technological chaos, zombified discount shopping, and endless idiotic yakking. Wild club nights and the ancient rituals of rebirth they tap into yield a central theme — actual physical activity among streaming virtual selves.

In 2007’s I-BE AREA — basically what the invisible thing that sneaks up behind you when you’ve been online too long looks like — the main gist is the soul’s fate in a world of obnoxious social networking, one that reduces individuals to quasi-emotional ADD outbursts and illogical catchphrases. It’s life aboard the MySpace Death Star, and everyone had better fill up their blogs, crop their pics, broadcast in a perfect urban patois, and be their own friends. "Look, I think I just saw a highly advanced, 3-D text message of my future self giving me the middle finger," main character I-BE, a.k.a. Trecartin, says snootily.

I-BE AREA zings off on a million paths in its quest for authenticity — names become other names, twins melt into clones, characters switch places with their avatars and turn clairvoyant. There’s a jaw-dropping tap dance sequence featuring orphaned kids recorded on Adoption Audition Tapes. At one point a woman who looks like she wandered off the set of Dynasty identifies herself as the Head-PArent and drops a hypothetical blow-dryer into a hot tub full of hippie ghouls. Later a noodle-eyed tranny ectomorph called Pasta kidnaps a baby.

Near the center of it all is the Wood Shop — a real wood shop, with band saws revving and lumber strewn precariously. It’s also the perfect joke on a mainstream gay dance club (or online hookup site). "Exotic" black go-go boys writhe frantically on tables, fractured machinery noises sub in for lame-ass techno, and an obnoxious, pig-tailed faggy avatar screams "What?" into her brick cell phone. Then everyone prances around lewdly and breaks windows. Just like real life!

www.elizabethdeegallery.com/artists/view/ryan-trecartin

www.youtube.com/WianTreetin

Pop op

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER "Omigod, I totally love that." A doll-faced, teenage dead ringer for Zooey Deschanel gawks dreamily at a dabbed dwarf cactus drifting off the edge of a cream-colored sheet of paper — jaw a-dangling, china blue eyes a-gobbling. It’s not often you catch a snatch of pure rock ‘n’ roll idol worship amid the pristine white walls of a museum space, yet here it was, flowering quietly in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art room that hosts the shifting collection of Paul Klee prints gathered and loaned by San Francisco’s father of the pill, Carl Djerassi. These days the Klee pieces are sharing space with the whimsy-washed ink, watercolor, and graphite works by San Francisco Art Institute graduate and international psych-folk rock emissary (and Guardian copydesk swear-jar star) Devendra Banhart, who performs at the museum Jan. 17 in celebration of "Abstract Rhythms: Paul Klee and Devendra Banhart."

The small show opened quietly, but judging from the cool kids reverently orbiting the pieces, word is slowly leaking out about this charming clutch of images, which displays both opera lover Klee’s most music-inspired, antic pieces — is that the musical fruit of a bean burrito or bassoon emerging from a posterior in Der Fagottist (The bassoonist)? — and Banhart’s sweetly humorous paper pieces depicting a fictitious fan called Smokey, who’s also the center of his recent, somewhat decentered LP, Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon (XL). Banhart is clearly a man of many gifts: here, Flowering Corn Maiden Smokey and Banded King Snake and Thunder Maiden show off a playful yet refined eye and an overflowing though focused imagination with a transfigurative bent that conjures Giuseppe "Fruit Face" Arcimboldo.

While the word show is increasingly, happily confused in both its musical and visual art contexts — and the term pop becomes more relevant in the art world than in the shiny plastic disc marketplace — the exhibit arrives as yet another instance of the healthy, ever-bubbling and brewing cross-pollination going on between the two types of media since the turn of the century. That highly consensual crossover fever dream is evident at art openings throughout the Bay every first Thursday, and it’s heartening to know that just as music becomes a harder proposition to tackle commercially and art has become a bigger business, musicians are finding their way toward new audiences and artists are coursing toward pop. And while spaces like 21 Grand and LoBot Gallery weather their share of hassles, newbs like the month-old Fort Gallery are throwing open their doors undeterred. The last, a Mission District space, is currently showing collage and sculpture by Ryan Coffey by appointment only — "Until we quit our day jobs," co-owner Jesi Khadivi says with a laugh — but Khadivi and cohort Vanessa Maida promise a mix of art, barbecue, live music, and special soirees like the Jan. 16 movie night that will juxtapose Ranu Mukherjee’s Sustenance short with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s tripindicular The Holy Mountain (1973).

The blend of high art and lowdown sounds isn’t new, ace genre bender Chris Duncan asserts: music-art hybridization "has always been around on different levels, but I think most people who make art also make music, or are very much influenced by music. As far as different mediums and different ways of doing things, the lines are so blurred at this point. For me, I like to keep busy, and I like getting a lot of people involved in stuff. I can get lost in my studio for a long time, and it gets kinda lonesome."

This may explain why Duncan — whose visual art career has been far from dormant, considering his fall solo show at Gregory Lind Gallery — has been dipping his toes into other creative wellsprings: on Jan. 18 he’ll celebrate the first release of SF twosome Pale Hoarse’s The Gospels on his new label, the Time Between the Beginning and the End. Call it a handmade labor of love: Duncan stitched and silk-screened about 100 multihued covers for the limited-edition record. Each one — available at Aquarius Records and via Duncan’s Hot and Cold Web site — promises to shimmer with different tones beneath the pink fluorescent-ink silk screen.

It’s the first record the Oakland artist has made, though he once designed a cover for a Jade Tree split with Songs: Ohia and My Morning Jacket, as well as for Battleship’s Presents Princess (Ononswitch, 2005). "There’s a total Sub Pop Singles Club influence, for sure. Music has always been part of my whole trip, and record collecting was such a big part of my growing up," says Duncan, whose also recently edited his first book, My First Time: A Collection of First Punk Show Stories (AK Press), a project that mushroomed from a slim zine, and he’s embarking on the next issue of the wonderful art zine he assembles with Griffin McPartland, Hot and Cold. (The next issue sounds like a doozy and will include contributions from Colter Jacobsen, Chris Corales, and Hisham Bharoocha and a CD by Golden Bears, a new project from the Quails’ Julianna Bright and Seth Lorinczi.) "Making a record fulfilled the need to hand-make stuff," Duncan continues. "A lot of projects I do outside painting are about gathering and collecting things, doing records, zine assembling. Now I’m inspired to put out a record every year." *

MOVIE NIGHT

With Sustenance and The Holy Mountain

Wed/16, 8:30 p.m., $5 donation

Fort Gallery

83B Wiese, SF

www.fortgallery.com

DEVENDRA BANHART

Thurs/17, 8 p.m., $15–<\d>$20

Phyllis Wattis Theater, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

www.sfmoma.org

PALE HOARSE

With Raven and Hannah, visuals by Chris Duncan, and shorts

Fri/18, 8 p.m., $6

Artists’ Television Access

992 Valencia, SF

www.atasite.org

For more, see Sonic Reducer Overage at www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

Messy Marv at large

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Even the short list of elite Bay Area rappers — say, Too Short, E-40, Keak Da Sneak, and Mistah FAB — must include the Fillmore’s own Marvin Watson Jr., a.k.a. Messy Marv. Since selling 15,000 units of his debut, Messy Situations (Ammo, 1996), at age 16, Mess has consistently earned impressive independent numbers: his solo discs Disobayish (Scalen/Sumday, 2004) and Bandannas, Tattoos, and Tongue Rings (Scalen/SMC, 2005) both sold 20,000, while his collaboration with San Quinn, Explosive Mode (Presidential, 1998), has moved more than 50,000.

Mess began 2007 with Da Bidness (Gateway/SMC), the creation of a supergroup formed with Keak and PSD, which, according to SMC’s Will Bronson, was last year’s best-selling local independent disc, at 19,000 and counting. Mess’s current project, Draped Up and Chipped Out 2 (Scalen/SMC), dropped at the year’s end. By mid-December, Draped was the number one independent and number 13 overall album on the Music Monitor Network, which tracks sales from major United States indie chains.

The soundtrack to an uncompleted film, Draped consists mostly of songs by Mess — spitting alongside national talent like Mike Jones, Juvenile, and Sean Paul — plus tracks from local heavyweights like G-Stack and B-Legit. Despite its various hands, the disc still has an album feel, containing some of Mess’s best work since Bandannas. Highlights include his singles "My Life Is a Movie," which showcases a hook by the late Mac Dre, and "Sei Luv," a rare foray into romantic R&B. With multiple business ventures in the works — including a clothing line and a reality TV show — and perpetual major-label interest, Mess is as likely as any Bay rapper to go nationwide.

Coming from the Fillmore’s projects, however, presents challenges most artists don’t face. When I spoke with Mess, he was fresh out of Santa Rita Jail, where he spent the past year on a weapons charge.

"I was charged with felony possession of a firearm, my second firearm case," he said. "The deal was three years’ state pen, but my legal defense got me a year. Now I’m back out, trying to turn my negative situation into a positive.

"Jail didn’t stagnate anything as far as my label Scalen," continued Mess, who even recorded a Draped intro behind bars. "They had a phone so I could do my business and my time. I have a strong team behind me."

Nonetheless, given California’s three-strikes law, another felony gun charge could land Mess serious prison time. When asked if he’s worried, however, he got a little heated.

"Now you sound like the SF police," he said — the last thing a rap reporter wants to hear. "Are we trying to make people think I don’t care about going to jail?" he asked, citing his displeasure with a May 15, 2007, San Francisco Chronicle article implying his gun toting had ruined his career opportunities.

"I felt real exploited by that article," Mess said. "I said I’d rather be caught with than without, any day. The way the murder rate is, it’s like that. I don’t regret any of it. I’d rather people read about me in jail than read about me dying or being shot."

He has a point. I absolutely hate guns, as do SF voters, who passed Proposition H — banning possession and sale of firearms within city limits — in 2005. But Prop. H was struck down Jan. 9 by the First District Court of Appeal, based on a challenge by the National Rifle Association, for conflicting with state law, and I think it’s hypocritical to condemn rappers for carrying guns in a society that refuses to ban them. Street rappers like Mess have to maintain a presence in the hood to preserve their credibility and fan base. But money and fame make them targets for violent crime.

"We need some kind of protection," insisted Bay legend Spice 1, who was shot in the chest during a Dec. 3, 2007, attempt to break into his Escalade while he slept inside. The bullet pierced his lung, leaving him in critical condition, though he’s now out of danger and recovering.

"Entertainers should get a break, but we can’t even wear [bulletproof] vests," added Spice, who has had six gun charges, including four in California that predate the three-strikes law. "Marv ain’t trying to jack nobody. He’s trying to protect himself."

In any case, despite the risks, Mess has no intention of abandoning his hood. Beyond the usual rapper’s neighborhood pride, he has taken on an active role in attempting to turn negatives into positives. Aside from using his label to employ youths whose criminal records and/or poor education make getting jobs nearly impossible, he’s put out two volumes of Fillmore Nation (Scalen/SMC, 2006) to help young rappers launch their careers. He intends to donate a portion of the profits to two Fillmore community centers.

"When I got my position in the music industry, I didn’t turn my back on the kids," Mess said. "I’m out here with these kids, these criminals, and they look at me as hope because I was the same way. When they look at me, they can say, ‘If Messy Marv can do it, I can do it.’<0x2009>"

All told, I think San Francisco — or at least the Fillmore — is better off with Mess on the street than in a cell.

Adrift and lovin’ it

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It couldn’t have happened any other way, really: Ray Raposa, the wise-beyond-his-years voice behind the Castanets moniker, is chatting with me by phone from a motel room. As a chronicler of the wandering spirit and a champion of the blue highways who has spent many of his days on the road — ever since completing high school at 15 in order to roam the country by bus — Raposa is entirely qualified to discuss his latest disc, In the Vines (Asthmatic Kitty), from such familiar turf. Inevitable, even, if we’re willing to talk about such heady fare as fate — a subject about which, judging from In the Vines, Raposa has more than a few ideas. The album was inspired in part by a Hindu fable about being the victim of an unavoidable destiny, and it’s a theme that drifts specterlike among the ripples of pedal steel and squalls of electronic treatments that hover at the edges of Raposa’s troubled rasp. Look no further than the slowly unsettling opener, "Rain Will Come": "So it’s going to be sad, and it’s going to be long / And we already know the end of this song," he portends with the gravest of emphasis over a mesmerizing blues-folk acoustic guitar line before, in confirmation of such claims, the song explodes in shrieking, devastating electronic white-noise chaos.

And the other inspiration for In the Vines? Wandering, of course, and so a motel room it must be, then — in Portland, Ore., specifically — while Raposa assembles a new backing band for his upcoming West Coast tour. "You know, one day I sat down and counted," the songwriter says, chuckling. "And the number of places I mention on that album runs in the double digits, easily."

It’s a telling comment, but not without its complications: much of the Castanets catalog feels like a tug-of-war between the lure of the road and the desire to put down roots and build a community. Take "Three Months Paid," an intimate confessional on which Raposa reveals, "I was ready to settle down" — and even lists a few possible locales — over a plodding drum track while synths whirr and bleep in hesitation at the mention of domesticity. Above it all, an aching pedal steel floats onward and upward, much like the song’s narrator, who, intriguingly, manages to sound both relieved and rueful about his decision to keep moving on. Or perhaps neither emotion is involved and the singer merely acknowledges his fate.

"It’s a tough one — I get more writing done when I’m at home than on the road, but I get so much inspiration from roaming," Raposa explains. Having recently given up his Brooklyn, NY, apartment to accommodate a rigorous touring schedule, the former San Diego resident — "I can’t survive too long without seeing the ocean," he jokes of his bicoastal tendencies — sounds energized by his newfound freedom. After all, so much of the Castanets journey has been guided by a spontaneous, largely improvisational attitude, which has ushered in an impressive cast of collaborators over the years — ranging from labelmate Sufjan Stevens to kindred spirit Matthew Houck of Phosphorescent — and encouraged a willingness to incorporate elements of electronic ambience, free jazz, and noise rock into the spooky-country framework.

Such fearlessness also extends to the Castanets live experience. "I can’t imagine doing the same thing every night," Raposa asserts in explanation of his largely unscripted approach to performance. "For me, to do so would mean there’d be no authenticity, no spontaneity. No, I’d rather just let things go where they may."

CASTANETS

With Sholi and El Olio Wolof

Mon/21, 9 p.m., $10

Cafe du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

3-D Technicolor

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› johnny@sfbg.com

A Cornelius concert at the Fillmore is great because Cornelius, a.k.a. Keigo Oyamada, appreciates the setting’s history far better than your average rocker. It’s also ideal because the venue is kitty-corner from Japantown, where the colors on the metal boxes containing pencils and crayons at the Kinokuniya stationery store aren’t far — logistically or in spirit — from the drip-paint blue, yellow, red, and black on the cover of his latest album, Sensuous (Everloving).

Vivid color has long been important to Cornelius’s aesthetic. I’ll never forget the day I bought the initial, Japanese edition of his 1997 album Fantasma (Matador) at Kinokuniya’s bookstore. I was blown away to discover that its Orangesicle packaging included a pair of white earphones — and even more wowed when I put on those earphones and realized that Oyamada had used three-dimensional digital recording to chart new rock-and-space vistas.

A decade later Oyamada remains clear about his concepts, breaking down the differences between his last three albums in the simplest terms. "Fantasma was an album that included all sorts of information that was gathered and edited," he writes via e-mail when asked about his approach to music and visuals. "Point (Matador [2001]) was an album that included information that was necessary, and it was arranged that way. Sensuous is like a brushed-up version of Point." Indeed, commencing with the breeze-grazed chimes of the title track and closing with the warm cyborg nighty-night of Oyamada’s take on the Dean Martin chestnut "Sleep Warm," Sensuous finds a precise midpoint between Fantasma‘s meta-Disney excess and Point‘s sharp minimalism.

Filtered through e-mail channels, Oyamada is less forthcoming than I remember him being during a stroll through Chinatown one night around the time of Fantasma‘s United States release. He suggests that his wife, Takako Minekawa — who hasn’t released a recording under her own name since 2000’s Maxi On, on Polygram — will probably share her music with listeners again someday, noting that last year she recorded with Ryuichi Sakamoto. Oyamada says his son, Milo (named after the child of Planet of the Apes‘s Cornelius), is a fan of the ’70s pop band Godiego, who made the theme song for the Japanese TV show Monkey. He states that he’s looking forward to visiting relatives and eating Italian food while in San Francisco. (It’s no accident that Oyamada named his influential — though now defunct — record label Trattoria.)

Nonetheless, Southern California might be a highlight of Cornelius’s current tour. He has a date at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. "A Cornelius show is a synchronization of sound and visuals and it’s influenced by Disney’s Fantasia," Oyamada says when asked about the venue. "I was trying to make a rock version of Fantasia [in Fantasma]. So I’m very happy [to be playing there]."

Oyamada knows better than anyone that sound charts limitless outer and inner space, suggesting other worlds and also bridging different countries (say, Brazil and Japan) and time periods (say, from the ’60s to 10 years from now). Looking through one of Cornelius’s Web sites, I happened on a photograph of Oyamada posing happily with Caetano Veloso, a find that immediately brought a new perspective to the way I hear particular recordings by both artists. Certainly, the inspiration for Fantasma (a still-ahead-of-its-time collection that was rejected as too fractured and manic by some US rock critics who had no problem kissing Beck’s feet) can be found in Veloso’s recently reissued 1972 album Araçá Azul (Lilith), an album that — returned for refunds by a multitude of confounded consumers — was similarly radical in its application of collage aesthetics to symphonics.

"About two years ago I went to go see [Veloso’s] show around the time Takako [Minekawa] did a remix of his son Moreno’s band [Moreno+2]," Oyamada explains when asked about the photo. "He performed music that ranged from standard bossa nova to avant-garde compositions, and covered DNA and Nirvana. It’s in my top three of the best shows I’ve ever seen in my life."

Some people rank Cornelius shows high on their lists, thanks to Oyamada’s gift for spectacle. As for Sensuous, its highlights — especially the gliding flight of "Omstart," a collaboration with Erland Øye — have a prismatic quality that no colored pencil or paintbrush, even the 70-some varieties at Kinokuniya, can approximate.

CORNELIUS

Fri/18, 8 p.m., $25

Fillmore

1805 Fillmore, SF

(415) 346-4000

www.cornelius-sound.com

Say w00t

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› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, good-bye, Ms. 2007. Don’t let the 404 error smack your red-soled Christian Louboutin–clomping, MySpace bisexual ass on the way out. And take your tired $500 embroidered jeans, Belgian sunglasses, Hollister panties, Affliction Ts, and fake Bape reeking of your mama’s Target fabric softener with you — you know, the one with all the circa-2004 Louis Vuitton rainbow logos on it.

Screw you, Marc Jacobs. Bite me, DJ Tiësto. Can it, rosé-tipsy lady on the dance floor who keeps smacking me in the back of the head with her knock-off Fendi glitter-enameled suede baguette. Arrivederci, neon-streaked hair-don’ts, shuffling texters, drunken Googlers, Killers remixes, Rihanna drag, and Red Bull breath. Au revoir, veneer of social networking. Sayonara, bump watch. Fuck off, gay-lined tweeners.

Heyz, Marke B.! Can’t we get a little more <3???

Totez!!11!one. I know it’s halfway through January, but I had to let my bitter 2k7 hens out — and the above are just so country. I’m zipping them into my lead-lined Hannah Montana backpack and tossing them — gracefully yet firmly, in one sweeping motion, with my profile turned toward the camera, chin up — onto the raging pyre of fashion victimology. ‘K? The new year has me feeling positively jagged with sophistication, deliciously complex, and I need a squeaky-clean slate to cut my witty lines on. (Best overheard club phrases of 2008 so far: "Are those pants or a skirt?" and "This bathroom smells like Fritos and cum!" and "From the top you looked like someone else, but from the front you look like yourself.")

Also: fuzzy resolutions. It’s time to get more worldly, more intel, more funkily interconnected. Time to put the pow in MIA, the wise in dubwize, the balls in global. Everyone on the scene’s been snugging on their knit Sherpa thinking caps, braiding all of their international musical tastes together, and letting them hang down cutely over their ears. The fractured bass lines pumping through the multiculti underground are raising the roof of the world.

What the hell am I talking about? My secret favorite forward-thinking monthly of the past year: Surya Dub. I need to pack my glass bong up and hit there more on the regular.

Rocketing toward its first anniversary at Club Six, Surya Dub’s one of the few joints in San Francisco where the crowd is truly interdenominational, where representatives from all of the latest club contingents — Balkan lovers, Bollywood dreamers, rave revivalists, stoned dubsters, ancient househedz, indie cosmopolites, post-hyphy hoppers, grime gawkers, ragga ragers, and eager sublebrities — meet in a kind of United Nations of Nightlife, getting off to a tuneful mulligatawny of pan-planetary styles.

Resident and cofounder Maneesh the Twister describes Surya’s sound as "dread bass music." "There’s not really a genre that fully encompasses what we do," he told me over e-mail from Southeast Asia, where he was breaking for the hols. "Obviously there’s a heavy bass component which is the foundation, and a prominent dub influence, but one of our main goals is to bring seemingly disparate music styles and communities together. Hence our vision to bridge the gap between organic styles such as reggae, bhangra, and other global beats and more electronic styles such as dubstep, glitch, breakbeat, and drum ‘n’ bass."

Maneesh, who also resides at the fab Dub Mission weekly (www.dubmisionsf.com), went on to name-check some of his favorite regular parties — Surefire Dubstep, Grime City, Nonstop Bhangra — and a few Surya-friendly up-and-coming music makers, like Roommate, Juju, Process Rebel, and Matty G. But his bass-loving heart really pumps for his own Surya Dub Crew, which includes DJs Kush Arora, Amar, Ripley, Kid Kameleon, Jimmy Love, Ross Hog, and Neta, along with MC Daddy Frank and VJ Ohashi.

"For our anniversary celebration we’re presenting a huge coalition of local artists called the Bay Area Dubwize Soundclash, featuring J-Boogie, the Antiserum, Sam Supa, and Emcee Child," Maneesh wrote. "We wanted to book some UK and European guests, too," he added sheepishly, "but they’d rather be earning euros. Can’t say I blame them, really. Underground music here is a far ways from being as economically viable as it is in Europe."

Maybe the International Monetary Fund oughta launch an underground-nightlife development program.

(Click here to read my full interview with Maneesh, plus Surya Dub’s Top 10!)

SURYA DUB ONE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY

Jan. 26, 9 p.m.–4 a.m., $10

Club Six

60 Sixth St., SF

(415) 863-1221

www.suryadub.com

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