By Kimberly Chunarts@sfbg.comSONIC REDUCER We’ve got a fever for the flavor of sleep deprivation: everywhere I look, our proud ladies of the recession are pushing prams filled with spawn, swinging Baby Bjorns crammed with newborns. It’s baby time — the ideal way to fill the hours emptied by layoffs, buyouts, forced shut-downs, mandatory vaca. Severance packages ought to come with a bonus pack of Pampers, ’cause you can’t sever that 18-year-plus invisible umbilical cord to the most personal of side projects.
Karin Dreijer Andersson of electropop sensations the Knife and now Fever Ray knows of what I speak: she gestated this year’s Fever Ray (Mute) over eight months shortly after she had her second child. "I guess it’s a lot about being in the house, and the new ideas you get when you become a parent," Andersson, 34, explains by phone from her digs in Stockholm.
"When you give birth to something you also start to understand what life is — and you also start to understand the opposite, what death is about," she muses, carefully parsing out each word. "So for me, it was a very frightening time as well because it’s the first time you see the very thin line in-between. It’s a huge awakening in a way.
All of which explains the corpse paint Andersson sports in Fever Ray’s promo shots — and the folkish costumes designed by Andreas Nilsson for the tour. Together, Nilsson and Andersson hoped to evoke "the very primitive and primal elements in the music," while acknowledging Fever Ray’s digital and high-tech qualities — fashioning a kind of "laser-folk" look, if you will.
Fever Ray itself marked a major switch for Andersson: a return to making music on her own, something she did long before she started collaborating in 1999 with her brother Olof Dreijer. After gathering acclaim and awards for the Knife’s Silent Shout (Rabid, 2006), they decided to take a break, though they also recently collaborated on Tomorrow in a Year, an opera about Charles Darwin, which debuted this summer in Copenhagen. "It’s very fun to use pitch-shifting on a classically trained mezzo-soprano," Andersson says happily.
For Fever Ray, Andersson stirred together digital sonics, synths, and software with analog drums, guitar, handclaps, and piano, as well as her beloved pitch-shifter for vocals: it seemed apropos for beauteous, dark, and downtempo ruminations like "Concrete Waltz" and "Keep the Streets Empty for Me." "That mix between very digital instruments and the analog sound — I think it’s very important to get a good dynamic," Andersson notes. "It becomes very … flat if you just use digital. And I think the same when you just play with just analog — for me it sounds a bit boring."
FEVER RAY With VukMon/5, 8 p.m., $28–$30Regency Ballroom1290 Sutter, SF. www.goldenvoice.com
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GRAZING IN THE ‘GRASS
Cutbacks abound, but don’t expect many amid the free golden fields of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. This year brings unexpected couplings like comedian Steve Martin brandishing his banjo with the Steep Canyon Rangers; Booker T ganging up with the Drive-By Truckers; and Rage Against the Machine/Street Sweeper Social Club’s Tom Morello in the songwriter circle with Dar Williams and marrieds Steve Earle and Allison Moorer. I’m looking forward to relatively HSB newbs like Allen Toussaint, Marianne Faithfull, Mavis Staples, Okkervil River, Elvis Perkins in Dearland, and Amadou and Mariam, and I’m hoping to hop on the way-way-back machine for Little Feat and Malo (Carlos Santana broheim Jorge’s band, of "Suavacito" fame). For a primo education in the real dealie, install yourself at the Sunday’s Banjo Stage for Hazel Dickens, Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs, and Ralph Stanley. *Fri/2-Sun/4, check site for times, free. Speedway Meadow, Golden Gate Park, SF. www.strictlybluegrass.com
MUSIC At an age when most rock ‘n’ roll veterans are content to retire from performing live or trade in their electric guitars for acoustics and change the way they approach their material, Lemmy Kilmister continues to tour the world, bringing his blistering blend of hard rock to fans. The 63-year old leader of Motorhead has been playing music for nearly five decades and shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon. He and the band have hit the road for another tour.
Getting his start in a series of local bands in his native England in the early 1960s, Kilmister eventually moved to London, served a stint as a roadie for Jimi Hendrix, and performed with Hawkwind before founding his own, now legendary band in 1975. Boasting the slogan "Everything Louder Than Everything Else," Motorhead has gained the reputation for being one of the most thunderous groups ever measured in concert.
"We never planned to be the loudest band in the world, we just liked playing that way — I wasn’t trying for any titles," Kilmister explains by phone after a recent sound check in Orlando, Fla.
Though Motorhead has always revolved around Kilmister, the current lineup has been together for some time now; guitarist Phil Campbell joined in 1984 and drummer Mikkey Dee came on board in 1992. But Matt Sorum — who has played with Guns N’ Roses, the Cult, and Velvet Revolver — is filling in on drums for the band’s current tour. Dee is on a hiatus while filming a reality TV show, the Swedish version of I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.
"We saw Mikkey on it last night, he was riding a bike on a rope bridge 30 feet up. Unfortunately, they had a safety harness on him," Kilmister chuckles.
A documentary about the iconic frontman, simply titled Lemmy, is set for release later this year. It explores the history of a singer whose penchant for uncompromising rock ‘n’ roll and passions for drugs and women have become the stuff of legend. The film includes live performances, and interviews with various people who have played and worked with Kilmister, who is known for being affable and laid-back when offstage.
"They’ve got a lot of interviews with different people saying what a nice guy I was. It was very flattering. I had no idea I was held in such high esteem," Kilmister laughs.
Following the San Francisco show, Motorhead will be on tour until around Christmas. The group heads back into the studio to record its next album — the follow up to last year’s ferocious Motorizer (Steamhammer/CPV) — in February. That release undoubtedly will be followed by yet another whirlwind trek across the globe to play in front of faithful fans. The elder statesman of hard rock takes on a serious tone when asked if he ever tires of the relentless rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle.
"This is where I belong, I’m supposed to do this," Kilmister says emphatically. "I’m lucky I’ve found my place — a lot of people don’t ever find theirs. This is mine."
SUPER EGO How could anyone say no to Joan Rivers? The turbulent past, the red-carpet gushes, the petrified visage? Sure, we could blame her for Kathy Griffin and the rise of celebrity culture, but she also created the one true tagline of our time in a Geico commercial that defined a generation: “I can’t feel my face!” Recently roasted, the hysterically hysterical comedian is gracing us with her presence in early October, and the only time she could talk to me was smack dab in the middle of Folsom Street Fair. So I unhooked myself and ducked in to a Porta-Potty to call her in New York.
SFBG Hi Joan, please forgive any background noise. I’m calling you from a Porta-Potty at our giant leather fetish festival, the Folsom Street Fair.
Joan Rivers Fantastic! I’m there with you in my heart.
SFBG I remember you were here in San Francisco this time last year. The gay press published the screaming headline, “Leather Fair a huge success!” with a big picture of your face underneath it.
JR I really couldn’t ask for much more.
SFBG This year’s fair falls on Yom Kippur, so you get the beatings and the atonement all in one. Do you observe Yom Kippur?
JR I do observe it. I’m the matron of my family, so I have a huge dinner to prepare!
SFBG I’ll keep it short and sweet, then. I adore your signature line of jewelry that you sell on QVC. Lately, I’ve seen many up-and-coming drag queens wearing your items.
JR It’s such an absolutely gorgeous collection, and I’m not just saying that because it’s mine. It’s truly exquisite, and I’m sure it looks lovely on the girls.
SFBG It really does. And congratulations on your hard-fought win on this year’s Celebrity Apprentice. You went tooth and nail!
JR The best part was donating my winnings to [meal-delivery service to AIDS patients] God’s Love We Deliver, a charity I’ve been supporting for years. Let me tell you, Marke, it was such a thrilling experience. Would I do it all again? No.
SFBG At 76, you’re still doing standup. You’re doing four shows in two nights at Cobb’s. Good lord! What are the crowds like here?
JR I love San Francisco. I once lived there for a month when I was in residence at the Magic Theater and it was a beautiful time. San Francisco is smart and it’s gay. What more do you need as a performer?
JOAN RIVERS Fri/2 and Sat/3, 7:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m., $53.50–$55. Cobb’s Comedy Club, 915 Columbus, SF. www.cobbscomedy.com ———-
FEEL THE LOVE
“Our club is for young people,” the promoter of a popular electro club responded cooly when I asked if her tribe would have a presence at LovEvolution, formerly Lovefest, formerly Love Parade, on Saturday, Oct. 3. It’s true that the programming of the massive outdoor raveathon can seem a bit, er, mature. But the all-ages party is bursting with eager youth, with a youthful outlook to match, even as it seems more and more panicky about reeling in out-of-town Big Names. The true local and new will be found on the smaller parade floats, with California Dubstep Republic, Homochic, and the “Janky Barge” looking especially twisty. And this time around, at the satellite parties, the kids are in for one holy cow of a house education. DJ Frankie Knuckles will show them why he’s the godfather of house at Temple (www.templesf.com) and the awesomely gifted and underage Martinez Brothers will represent the next soulful wave at Mighty (www.mighty119.com), both on Fri/2. Also at Mighty, on Sunday, Oct.4, is an event that everyone in Clubland is wetting their drawers for. One of the best parties I’ve ever been to (and spent a ton of frequent flyer miles on), New York City’s Body and Soul, is popping up for one night here in San Francisco, reuniting founding DJs Francois K., Danny Krivit, and Joe Clausell. It’s all too much, and that’s quite a bit of the point.
MUSIC For those of you who missed the memo, it all hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing for the good people of the ol’ U.S. of A over the last year or so. You don’t have to be Noam Chomsky to realize that if the national unemployment rate is hovering right around 10 percent, that’s not good. If you toss in a confusing war that we are still involved in, the polar icecaps melting faster than Joan Rivers’ face in a boiling torrential downpour, and the small matter of a monster flu pandemic, it’s quite clear: Americans have a right to feel a trifle downcast at the moment.
Yet while we face some strains of a musical slump (screamo, ringtone rap etc.) that is just as woeful as our current financial state, 20th century American history tells us that there may be hope for the future. If you look back through the 1900s, there is a constant byproduct of periods of American crisis. We get some pretty damn awesome music.
Financially speaking, the past year or two has been dominated by scary words like recession and downturn, yet you and I have largely avoided the most bone-chilling term of all. To encounter it, you need to set your DeLorean to the 1930s, where you will find our country in the midst of the most terrifying 10 letters in our economic lexicon — depression.
Beginning with some dramatic leaps in 1929, the Great Depression is the benchmark for what happens when things go horribly wrong. In the U.S., unemployment rates reached an unprecedented 25 percent, and the country, not to mention the rest of the planet, was wallowing in the unpleasant waters of the River Styx.
But something curious happened. As folks were dealing with the decade’s bleakest times, Americans were also writing, recording, and performing some of the finest music in the nation’s history. Legendary jazz artists like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Billie Holiday released some of the best material of their careers, while the roots of country music were sowed by musicians like Jimmie Rodgers, Lead Belly, the Carter Family, and Woody Guthrie. Much of the Depression-era work of these artists combines palpable, affecting melancholy with surprising overtones of faith, hope, and celebration. Music served as a window into the pain of the average American, and also as an escape from the real-life problems people were facing.
This phenomenon returned in many ways during the late 1960s. While thousands of Americans were fighting a war that nobody seemed to understand, those left behind faced widespread inflation and high interest rates. America again turned to its musicians to air frustrations and fears. Taking cues from artists like Pete Seeger and Doc Watson (who were still active during the generation), a new generation of protest music exploded. The new folk of singers-songwriters such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez gripped the nation. So did the socially-conscious soul of troubadours like Marvin Gaye, Gil-Scott Heron, and Sam Cooke.
Though these are perhaps the two most obvious instances of great music being created during hard times in America, they aren’t the only ones. Deep in the 1980s, as white suburbanites were loving Reaganomics and rocking out to Kajagoogoo and Huey Lewis, residents of inner cities across America were stuck smack-dab in GOP-perpetrated trickle-down hell. Groundbreaking artists such as NWA, Ice-T, and KRS-One sprang out of the cities, further igniting the massive cultural and commercial force that is hip-hop.
Which brings us to the big question — can we do it again? While you may call it naiveté, I’m optimistic about the chances of history repeating itself. In just the last year, folk has made quite a resurgence, with Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, the Avett Brothers and others gaining massive followings and selling out venues wherever they play. Also, due to file-sharing, the rise of easily-streamable digital music, and well-run independent labels, artists are able to get their music out to larger audiences without interference from conservative and controlling corporate entities. The rise of independent music is apparent in the lineup of the upcoming Treasure Island Music Festival, widely expected to be one of San Francisco’s biggest concert events this year. Though tickets aren’t cheap, people haven’t minded shelling out for a bill that features only five bands currently signed to a major label.
Not so long ago, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the economy was booming. Things were great for everyone — except the American pop music fan, who was subjected to overproduced boy bands, toothless pop rock (Sugar Ray, Smashmouth), nu-metal, and countless other forms of forgettable garbage. So while your pockets may be empty now, it might be a good thing. Hold out a hope that maybe, just maybe, in 30 years, the music of the next decade will be lauded much like the tunes of the 1930s and the 1960s.
Until then, just sit tight and keep praying for the death of auto-tune.
SONIC REDUCERGod Is Good, the name of Om’s new long-player on Drag City, may run the risk of landing the heavy, heavy drone dealers in the gospel section of your clueless big-box retailer, but founder-bassist Al Cisneros couldn’t help the tug of title: "To me, at this point, in the journey of my life, that’s really all I can say."
The soft-spoken, spectacled musician, all in black with his instrument tucked beside him, laughs a little — and who can blame him? The longtime Bay Area fixture has been tackling some major changes in the past year. I almost don’t recognize him, now shorn of his long, black tresses, amid the bustling throng and espresso-machine groan of Muddy Waters at 16th and Valencia streets. He waves goodbye to his wife, whom he followed last year to San Luis Obispo, close to where she’s attending graduate school. In ’08 he also said farewell to the drummer he’s played with since high school, Chris Haikus, who quit in the middle of the last Om tour and retired from music. And after our chat, Cisneros will drive up to Portland, Ore., a commute he now makes regularly in order to practice with Om’s new drummer Emil Amos. Cisneros, who, with Hakius, once made up two-thirds of the legendary doom/stoner metal trio Sleep, is fully awake and in motion — and everything appears to be falling effortlessly into place.
"I have to keep playing," he explains. "I have music all the time, and it has to come out." To that end, Amos, who’s also in Grails, slipped into the drummer’s seat perfectly. "His playing style spoke my language directly when I first saw him playing drums," Cisneros murmurs. "The specific lyricism that he puts into his drumming, aside from the flow itself — which is beautiful. It was absolutely what I’d hear inside in many riffs and many parts I have, the complement of what I hear. There are certain fills, the way he’ll sit in a beat, the way he’ll be with a beat — it felt so familiar."
So he called up Amos on the chance that he would be able to work on a scheduled Sub Pop single. The two had already bonded during late-night rock-philosophy jam sessions while Om and the Grails were on tour a few years ago. After each show, Cisneros, Amos, and Hakius would hang out and analyze everything from dub to Billy Cobham — "the extremely nerdy academic aspects of the records we grew up with," the amicable Amos recalls by phone, taking a break from his day job at a Portland homeless shelter. "We’d get into philosophical debates, almost Platonic dissections of, when a verse ends and you go into chorus, what do you do on drums in this specific situation, in 1971? It was just this weird way of talking about music as a metaphor for spiritual education. We’re obsessed to that level. I think Al’s brain just thought, who can I trust?"
Remarkably, Cisneros — a man who has a Sanskrit passage from the Bhagavad-Gita tattooed on the left hand he uses for fingering — was right on, and though the two had never played together, a three-day rehearsal in Amos’ basement yielded the 7-inch. The Steve Albini-recorded God bears out the partnership, picking up the tempo, folding in tamboura and flute, and coming close to realizing the sounds in Cisneros’ head — the only other instance, he says, occurred with Sleep’s Holy Mountain (Earache, 1993), and "in the best way, we didn’t know what we were doing. It happened to us." Still, he offers, chuckling, "I don’t want to be in Sleep for the rest of my life."
For metal monks, as well as spiritual disciples of any order, the key is to focus on the practice — not fixate on whether or not Amos has a beard, a discussion the drummer says he’s found on some online forums. "I’ve never seen another band that gets so much attention about changing one bass guitar pedal or overdubbing one extra tambourine," Amos observes. "Nobody would say anything if Men at Work switched out a bass, but in this band, there’s the sense of trust between an artist and audience. It’s a delicate thing."
And it sounds like Cisneros has found an understanding new foil in his ever-evolving dialogue. "It’s a joy to work with Emil," he says softly. "The interplay between the instruments — the very premise of having a duo is to have a conversation between the instruments, and it literally happens nonstop when we play."
MUSIC Brought together by the 23 enigma (and, more than likely, straight-up friendship), the two folks behind Rainbow Bridge get a bit elusively new age in discussing their musical partnership. After several minutes of semi-coded phone conversation from their Olympia, Wash., home base, touching on author and teacher José Arg?elles, the Mayan calendar, and the idea of "cultivating obscurity," it becomes increasingly clear that the band’s raison d’être is actually pretty simple: maximizing the two-piece drum and electric guitar format — "trying to see how much spirit we can cultivate with super-basic things" as drummer/co-vocalist (and sometimes keyboardist) Bridget O’Brien Smith puts it — for a shuffling, mesmerizing twang that really ought to reach ears well beyond the Pacific Northwest.
Guitarist-vocalist Adam Croce and O’Brien-Smith are in the process of intensive rehearsals and days spent recording a prospective LP. "Each time we’ve recorded, we’ve had a different set-up — getting a different ambience, the breath of the day," explains Croce, relieved to "exhale finally" after one such session.
Rainbow Bridge began playing together early last year in Olympia, where both members attended Evergreen College, and each thought up the name individually before — simultaneously, I guess — suggesting it to the other. This was a fortuitous early sign of what they describe as their "harmonic convergence," not unlike the Arg?elles-initiated 1987 event of the same name. While their band’s name might seem to allude to Jimi Hendrix’s 1970 Rainbow Bridge concert in Hawaii ("a different kind of harmonic convergence," Croce assures), it has more to do with Arg?elles, whose 2012 Circumpolar Rainbow Bridge meditation is said to be able to spiritually unify the planet.
There’s a definite spiritual connection between Rainbow Bridge and the Bay Area, where Croce grew up and played in a ton of bands, including the SPAM Records-affiliated Tommy Lasorda and Los Rabbis. I first heard his music on a self-titled album by Broken Strings, a solo work that circulated extensively on CD-R before its vinyl release on True Panther Sounds last year. It’s a weird, home-recorded rock revelation, peppered with Carl Sagan soundbites and crackling with a feverish energy reminiscent of Robert Pollard’s mid-1990s brilliant streak.
Broken Strings is over now, but Croce and O’Brien-Smith already appear set to considerably improve on that work, judging from both sides of Rainbow Bridge’s killer debut seven-inch, "Big Wave Rider/Birdcage" (True Panther Sounds), out this month. "Rider" is a knockout, small-scale anthem, a summery song of measured meter ("Hangin’ 10 /Gnarly session /Shootin’ the curl /Shootin’ the curl for the world! /For a surfer girl /Waves they unfurl!") and ecstatic delivery. The flip is a chugging, jilted blues, likewise remarkable.
Rainbow Bridge plays its first show outside Olympia in Seattle later this month, and hopes to tour the West Coast soon. Just be sure to understand their reasons for being: "We are connected by the 23 enigma," says O’Brien-Smith, while Croce adds, "And we don’t wanna be stigmatized for that."
Montreal-based turntablist and producer Kid Koala (born Eric San) is the type of artist you can expect to take some formidably playful risks. Known for his virtuoso skills scratching and mixing on the wheels of steel, back in 1996 he was the first musician in North America signed to the U.K.’s boundary-busting label Ninja Tunes. Arriving in the wake of a fantastic mixtape, San’s debut hip-hop-jazz-funk crossover Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (Ninja Tunes, 2000), featured a video game and a surreal comic book he designed himself. For him, the creative impulse is dedicated to telling a compelling and unlikely story. Free for download at www.nufonia.com, The Slew’s 100% — San’s self-released fourth effort in collaboration with long time friend Dynomite D — continues this tradition.
San and Dynomite (born Dylan Frombach) had discussed collaborating on a full-length project ever since vibing together on a couple spacey jazz singles about a decade ago (peep their "Third World Lover"). Thus, when Frombach was enlisted by his cousin Jay Rowlands to produce the score for a feature documentary on elusive Seattle psych-rock recluse Jack Slew, he brought San along. That was four and a half years ago. The documentary has since fallen through, but the score evolved independently into a masterfully abrasive and chest-rumbling soundscape. "We wanted to do some Black Sabbath meets the Bomb Squad," San tells me, laughing.
Initially the loosely-defined "Black Squad" duo gathered concrete inspiration from Jack Slew’s unreleased material — an ample body of work, thick with ferocious dusty breaks, bluesy vocals, and fuzzed-out riffs. Slew has a gravelly yet piercing voice that cuts right through the drums. He sings knowingly of freedom lost and the fragile sentiments of an ape trying to become a man. It’s rich material that just begs for sampling. San and Frombach reassemble the parts to produce a fresh perspective on the dangerously free spirit of the outlaw. "We needed a car chase scene, and a jail break scene, and then we ran with it," says San. Indeed, the album roves widely and digs deep, concluding with the epic moral struggle of "A Battle of Heaven & Hell."
Despite a cinematic narrative akin to a rogue spaghetti western, The Slew nearly succumbs to the usual pitfalls faced by turntablist albums. In the aesthetic sphere of turntablism, the scratching and abrupt pattern changes can sound gluttonous and overtly technical, warping the sonic landscape into a show of narcissism. "On the one hand [100%] is super-psychedelic, loud, and banging," San explains. "On the other hand" — he laughs — "it’s the most masochistic, purist turntable record I’ve ever made."
However, what saves the effort from sadism as well is that the Slew’s hip-hop inspired pastiche takes cues from authentic recording techniques of early ’70s rock. San and Frombach dove into their history books to study the methods for producing the screeching drums and sandblasted guitar riffs of that era. To really polish the coarsely hypnotic sound, they asked Mario Caldato Jr. — the engineering innovator behind the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique (Capitol, 1989) among others — to master the effort. The result is an interweaving of pummeling breaks and wa-wa guitar nastiness fractured by effects modulations and the emboldened seams of mixing and scratching. And it hits loud.
Koala and Dynomite originally entertained the idea of performing 100% live with 14 turntables. Fortunately, they scrapped that idea in favor of working with Chris Ross and Myles Heskett, the former rhythm section of Australia’s the Wolfmothers. Ross and Heskett play bass guitars, drums, and organ while Kid Koala and mad scientist partner P-Love (Paolo Kapunan) handle six turntables. San had to build "bass-proof, shock-proof turntables" to face the monster loudness that will ensue on the Slew’s two-and-a-half-week North American tour. "We bought spring-loaded tone arms and made custom vinyl to cue faster, so we can just drop the needle and go," he says. "We are going to just cut loose."
Like a cold, wet pinky, porn has truly inserted itself into every facet of our lives — even our nightlife. Gay porn, especially, is big business in the Bay, and besides the endless stream of between-flicks go-go boys this provides many mainstream gay clubs and a host of porn-themed parties, most featuring DJ Pornstar, it also draws a lot of international hopefuls to our fair shores, maintaining some diversity on the homoclub scene. You wouldn’t believe the amount of Swiss buttboys I’ve met at the disco, child.
But what about the music of gay porn? Has it moved beyond the stereotypical boom-chaka-wahow-wahow to reflect our hip-hop-infused, electronic reality? I recently talked via hot pink iPhone with The minor9 (www.theminor9.com), a young production duo who’ve been working with Raging Stallion for the past few months, helping to infuse that megastudio’s soundtracks with a little contemporary flavor, from the neo-tango trappings of the forthcoming Hombre to the trip-hop trimmings of shoe-and-weed fetish flick High Tops, which features a sampled recipe for marmalade(!).
Minor9 members Marcus and Chris stepped into the giant shoes of legend JD Slater, a cofounder of Raging Stallion whose soundtrack work helped bring rock, ambient, and industrial sounds into the porn mainstream, and who recently retired to concentrate on his own music. "It’s amazing the amount of opportunity composing for porn provides," says Marcus. "Obviously we’re not out to make a big artistic statement — the director tells us his vision and we do our best to match it in the background. So no grand chord changes or cymbal crescendos at the climax. But in terms of creative outlets, you couldn’t ask for more."
"My greatest triumph was slipping some bassoon into a scene," adds Chris. The local duo share a past as independent musicians and combine live instrumentation with software hijinks to set the right backseat blow-job mood. Chris and Marcus asked me not to use their last names to avoid future employment kafuffles. So, is there still a porn stigma?
"Porn’s such a fact of life now, and my mom said, ‘That’s great!" when I told her about my new job," says Marcus. "But you never know." Chris chimes in, "Let’s put it this way. I used to be a graduate student in math. Talk about stopping a conversation dead. Now I tell people what I do and suddenly I’m the life of the party."
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BEARRACUDA MAGNUM
Sweaty gay leather bears packed in hairy shoulder-to-shoulder, grunting to live sets by dark duo Ejector and drag tragedy Christeene, plus electro-pop DJ Francisco Guerra. Fri/25, $10. DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF. www.bearracuda.com
BLOWOFF
Another hairy bear woof attack, this time on the rock remix tip, with indie hero DJs Bob Mould and Rich Morel at the first anniversary of this too-popular party. Sat/26, 10 p.m., $15. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. www.slims-sf.com
SISSY FIT
"Rock ‘n roll, cheap bear, and sloppy dick" brought to us by the queer punk Trans Am boys. DJs Dirty Knees and Pickle Surprise help usher in the mosh madness. Sat/26, 10 p.m., $6. Sub Mission, 2183 Mission, SF. www.myspace.com/transamtheclub
SS TRANNYSHACK
What’s better than nutso drag? Nutso drag on a boat. Try to stay seaworthy at this swingin’ who’s-who with Heklina, Dirty Sanchez, DJ Juanita More! and more. Sat/29, 8:30 p.m., $45 advance. Pier 41, SF. www.trannyshack.com
SONIC REDUCER How do you fluff up sagging ole demon rock in the 21st century? Break it down to just one dude with a laptop and free-floating mix of hip-hop and hesher, ho’-pulling and hoary? Take it up a couple jillion notches and set it free of verse, chorus, and bridge to nowhere, heading into noise’s bristling, gristly outerzone? Or just turn it around and send it through the filter of another country, another tongue, another cult-cha — and back. The latter is the case for French combo Phoenix and Israeli outfit Monotonix (see sidebar), two travelers in the rutted, wrecked roads of rock — both playing this week in this bobo bastion by the Bay.
"When we were young," says Phoenix guitarist Laurent "Branco" Brancowitz, 35, "we tried to sound like the Velvet Underground and tried to erase the Frenchness." He chuckles under his breath. He’s on the phone from Versailles, where Phoenix first rose up from old Europe’s antiquities. "But now that we’ve grown up, we don’t try to hide our accent. We love the fact that we had to admit we come from a different country than most rock musicians. We can’t talk about Cadillacs, but we talk about our own things: we talk about the Eiffel Tower, Versailles, the things that are our Mississippi and cotton fields."
Tough to reenvision the Eiffel as a small-town Midwestern water tower — but Phoenix manages its own reinvention on the Parisian landmark on "1901," off Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (Loyaute/Glassnote) — as well as, Brancowitz explains, "all these things that were so modern at the time, that are now so obvious and cliché. There was a moment when [the Eiffel was] scary, offering a new vision for the future. It was an idea we were fascinated by, the idea of modernity in the past and how you relate to that."
Phoenix has flown far since the days when it served as early Air’s live band and had a sleeper hit of sorts with "Too Young" via the Lost in Translation soundtrack. Vocalist Thomas Mars might have graduated to the gossip columns as director Sofia Coppola’s baby daddy, but Wolfgang can stand proudly on its own (with help from producer Philippe Zdar of Cassius), straddling the kingdom of Killers-ish dancefloor-friendly rock-pop with ethereal numbers like "Fences" and the more austere, ambitious ambient outskirts, as embodied by the lovely "Love Like a Sunset Part I."
Thanks to its old Versailles nest, the outfit is accustomed to both staring inward at the past and out. There, says Brancowitz, "the buildings were perfectly symmetrical. There’s the boredom — that’s important. We had all these dreams of escaping. The combination of boredom and beauty shaped us." The band members hid out in their basements listening to the Velvets and the Beatles and retreating to another kind of inspiring yet imposing past, while Mozart, Liszt, and the like blared in the background. As kids, Brancowitz recalls, "We had a lot of soccer matches with a soundtrack of classical music — very loud classical music."
That breed of bonding has led to the fact, as the guitarist puts it, "for some very strange reason, all the good French artists are friends." Brancowitz himself started out in a band called Darlin’ with Daft Punk’s Guy Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter, the pair who changed the world’s perception of French pop. The punk Beach Boys-inspired band crumbled when the other two "decided to go to a lot of rave parties, and I didn’t because I didn’t like the nightclub life. I’m a bit of a snob about it — I find it very vulgar." He laughs. "But we are friends. No issues." *
"Sit the fuck down! Sit the fuck down!" yelled Monotonix vocalist Levi "Ha Haziz" Elvis, né Ami Shalev, at this year’s Mess with Texas getdown during South by Southwest. An impressive display of crowd control, honed by somewhat unexpected circumstances. "I was trained in the Israeli Army," says Shalev. "They want you to be able to control people — just kidding!" But seriously, kids: "I must say every time the crowd does whatever I tell them to do, it’s kind of surprising." He’s on the phone in Jaffa, outside Tel Aviv, where the rock-out rage machine known as Monotonix is still based, despite the city’s (and country’s) small rock scene: "The only way for us to get bigger, develop, was to go outside Israel," he says. "There are a lot of good things in Israel, but not in rock music. Rock music is not in our culture." Nevertheless Monotonix’s first full-length, Where Were You When It Happened (Drag City), which the group recorded with Tim Green in SF, sounds like it’s running spectacularly well on the filthy fumes of stateside guitar-army conscripts like MC5. And word keeps spreading about Monotonix’s fiery shows. "I don’t want to sound arrogant," says Shalev, "but it keeps snowballing."
If it’s 1988 all over again, Crocodiles are our Spacemen 3, ready to deliver the perfect prescription: drum machines. vintage organs, drugs = god lyrics. They’ve got the best Jesus and Mary Chain death anthems too, and the occasional burst of energy, trading ‘ludes for upper-spiked punk on "Soft Skull (In My Room)." The poise and epic production here are surprising for a debut.
GRASS WIDOW
Grass Widow EP
(Make a Mess)
Bullseye. Times four.
BARBARA LYNN
Here is Barbara Lynn
(Water)
A lost gem of Atlantic, saved by the boys of Water in Oakland. The clarity and purity of Lynn’s voice are rare — and don’t let those adjectives fool you into thinking she’s a frail flower. Here, the left-handed guitarist makes wise ballads she wrote as a teen burn as strong and steady as anything by Irma Thomas. It’s all in the voice.
EMITT RHODES
The Emitt Rhodes Recordings [1969-1973]
(Hip-O-Select)
Oh, Emitt. At your peak you were picture-perfect: thick brown hair parted down the middle, angelic face with a doll’s complexion. The music business’ merry-go-round was cruel to you, but what glorious pop songs you’ve given us: "Live Till You Die" has been holding me together the last week or two, and it’s just one of many beauties from your self-titled 1970 LP.
SALLY SHAPIRO
My Guilty Pleasure
(Paper Bag)
The mystery girl who goes by the name of Sally and her partner in song Johan Agebjörn trade the melancholic depths of their first synth pop collection for lighter, sunnier fare. But the Expose-like "Save Your Love" has its charms, as does the song that pits love versus people dying in Africa.
SORCERER
Neon Leon
(Tirk)
On his second album, SF’s Daniel Judd veers away from the Hawaiian and beach themes and takes inspiration from novelist Elmore Leonard while adding some funk touches. But the tracks here still bloom and glisten like a tropical flower seen through time-lapse photography. "Dayglow" is gorgeous and many-faceted. "Raydio (Play It)" is the loveliest tribute to Ray Parker Jr. in the history of recorded sound.
It’s safe to say that Achim Bergmann of Trikont, Germany’s oldest independent record label, has an affinity for the underdog. From his favorite soccer team (Munich’s best-loved losers, the 1860 Löwen) to his favorite musicians, it is outsiders who attract Bergmann’s attentions, personal and professional, rather than the heroes of the mainstream. Of course, outsider music comes in many variations, and somehow Trikont manages to embrace them all. From Finnish Tango to American yodeling, German-language reggae to Turkish techno, British punk to Black Panther soul, the label’s eclectic catalog has been transcending language boundaries and international borders long before "world music" became a Billboard buzzword.
First founded in 1967 as a radical publishing arm of the SDS, Trikont started publishing books of political and philosophical ideology collected mainly from the so-called "third world" (Trikont, short for trikontinentale, is a colloquial expression for same), including the Bolivian diaries of Che Guevera, the incendiary Revolution in the Revolution by Régis Debray, and the ubiquitous Little Red Book or Quotations from Chairman Mao. In 1971, Trikont released its first record album — a compilation of neoprimitive folk and radical "self-made music" titled Wir Befreien Uns Selbst or We Free Ourselves, a phrase that could stand as the label’s unofficial motto even today.
"It was very simple, very rough, not polished at all," Bergmann tells me as we sit at a wobbly kitchen table in Trikont’s Munich-Obergiesing headquarters. His youthful exuberance belies his bushy, white Ernest Hemingway beard. When Wir Befreien Uns Selbst sold 20,000 copies, for Bergmann it sparked the realization that "music was the non-dogmatic part of left-radicalism, a way to connect with the working class." It also provided the radicals with music — beyond the endlessly circuutf8g MC5 and Rolling Stones albums — they could call their own. Trikont’s official motto, "our own voice," reflects this ideal to this day.
And what a range of voices call the label home. After splitting from the book publishing side of the business in 1980, Trikont’s focus shifted from being a mouthpiece for the radical German left to being a conduit for what Bergmann terms "popular music" from all over the world. Not popular in the MTV hit-parade sense, but popular as in sphere-of-influence: from the emblematic zydeco of the Louisiana Bayou to the dramatic excesses of Mexican bolero, the label excels at tapping into that particular cultural zeitgeist expressible only through music. It does so through exactingly executed compilations curated by DJs, music journalists, and fellow aficionados of the slightly askew. Their ranks include a veritable who’s who of luminaries from the European music scene — John Peel, Jon Savage, Jonathan Fischer, Thomas Meineke, Bernadette La Hengst — while from our side of the pond, Greil Marcus provided the liner notes for Christoph Wagner’s harrowing 2002 compilation Prayers from Hell: White Gospel and Sinner’s Blues
Like the best mixed tapes, Trikont’s compilations are elegantly cohesive while still retaining the essential element of surprise. My first Trikont album, 1997’s Dead and Gone #2: Songs of Death — which I scored from a department store bargain bin while living in Munich — is an unlikely amalgamation of Serbian requiems, chilling soul tracks, avant-garde moaning provided by Lydia Lunch, Lou Reed, Nico, and Diamanda Galás, a suicidal lament by Bushwick Bill and the Geto Boyz, and an astonishingly moving funeral hymn from South Africa. Not exactly the stock-in-trade set list of goth clubs and vampire movies, yet as suitable a soundtrack for reflection on mortality as any Rosetta Stone album could aspire to be.
A current favorite, last year’s Roll Your Moneymaker: Early Black Rock ‘n’ Roll 1948-1958, plumbs the earliest incarnations of rock music. It includes the first recording of the Preston Foster song "Got My Mojo Working" (sung by the enigmatic Ann Cole), two classic Ike Turner tracks, the powerhouse Etta James anthem "W-O-M-A-N," and the hilariously snarky "Pneumonia" by Joe Tex. Trikont’s acclaimed swamp music series — nine albums’ worth of forgotten zydeco and Cajun gems — evolved from a crash course in music appreciation. Bergmann reminisces: "We came to Floyd Soileau of Flat Town Music … and told him to go to the cellar where the music that he couldn’t sell anymore was stored … [afterward] we were sitting here for weeks, reading things, listening to big boxes of it without any knowledge [of the genre] and ended up with the first three compilations, which were an incredible success."
One of the most outré of Trikont’s compilations is also perhaps one of its most universal: the "La Paloma" series — an audacious collection of 141 versions of one song. Originally penned around 1863 by a Basque national called Sebastian Iraider, the stately habanera spread from continent to continent, insinuating itself into the collective musical consciousness. In Mexico, it’s a call to arms (or to amor). In Romania, it’s a funeral march. In Tanzania, it’s chanted at weddings. In Germany, it’s a seafarer’s anthem. In Hawaii, it’s plucked out on the slack key guitar first introduced to the island by Spanish-speaking vaqueros. In fact, series curator Kalle Laar estimates that "La Paloma" has been recorded well over 2,000 times, in every possible language and style.
Even though his label is open to experimentation and quirk, Bergmann admits that when the "La Paloma" project was first pitched by Laar — a prominent sound artist and "a collector of very strange music" — Trikont’s first reaction was unequivocal: "We said, hey, Kalle Laar, we are crazy, but not that crazy." But Laar persisted, bringing mixed tapes of the song, presenting the history of the tune, and expounding on its worldwide popularity. "It was very interesting to hear," Bergmann recalls. "It was the same song each time, but it wasn’t. You could listen to all these versions at one time and it wasn’t boring or repetitive."
In 1995, the first volume of La Paloma: One Song for All Worlds was released. With versions recorded by Amon Duul II, Hans Albers, Carla Bley, Jelly Roll Morton, and Szedo Miklos, it documents a full 100 years’ worth of "La Palomania," and has since led to the eventual release of five more volumes. In turn Laar’s project inspired Sigrid Faltin’s 2008 documentary La Paloma. Sehnsucht. Weltwide (a.k.a. La Paloma. Longing, Worldwide) which screened at San Francisco’s Berlin and Beyond festival last January.
In addition to genre-crossing compilations, Trikont’s lineup of German-language folk, jazz, and avant-garde pop musicians keeps the label connected to its original mission. Collectively, the label’s single-artist albums are as varied as its compilations: they include recordings by Bayrische Rastafarian Hans Söllner, Berlin-based jazzman Coco Schumann, and Bavaria’s contribution to the anarchist brass band genre, La Brass Banda.
Though Trikont’s desire to free music from the narrow confines of regionalism applies to its German-language artists, the label is best recognized for its compilations of obscure Americana. American music, Bergmann points out, has long been the preferred music of German youth in regions occupied by the U.S. Armed Forces. Alien yet electrifying, the music broadcast on the AFN (Armed Forces Network) during the occupation and through the 1960s inspired a whole generation of young Germans searching for individuality and self-determination. It did so with more success than German volksmusik. "In Germany, we had never really had a revolution, so we didn’t have the music for it," Bergmann muses. "It’s hard for an old leftist like me to say it, but it was the American soldiers who brought freedom. But in the cultural sense, it was true."
On its unexamined surface, Munich seems like an unlikely place for a revolutionary underground music scene. Unlike its edgier northern counterparts, the city has enviably low unemployment and a relatively stable middle-class. It manages — somewhat tenuously — to strike a balance between being the capital of traditionally conservative Bavaria and the southernmost stronghold of the left-leaning Social Democrats. But scrape beneath and you’ll find that the same stubborn spirit that compels Bavaria to retain its status as a "Freistaat" within the German Bundesrepublik, and which has also fueled a streak of hard-left radicalism since the 1960s. Observe Trikont: with limited resources and anticapital ideologies considered counterintuitive by the so-called big players in a slumping music industry, the label nonetheless has created a stable home and well-deserved audience for the previously unheard music from every continent and classification.
What, then, is the key to Trikont’s longevity? "We never really had an agenda," Bergmann reflects. "We just wanted to say, ‘We will tell you a story in music, so you can see how good and how strong music can be.’ People have got an innate sense for it. If they listen to good music, they want good music." No matter what your definition of good music is, chances are, Trikont has it.
Something is happening. San Francisco and the greater Bay Area is, even more than usual, home to some bands that hardwire the heart: Grass Widow, Nodzzz, Rank/Xerox, Mayyors, Ty Segall. But more than that, the place we call home is a nexus for a bunch of great new rock albums — ones that just might be classics. Girls’ Album (True Panther/Matador) is the popular one with the media blitz behind it, but the Mantles’ debut is the come-from-behind outsider, the secret star, the crushworthy keeper. You’ll know it when you hear it, from the one-two-three punch of the first trio of tracks: the Byrds-y jangle of "Disappearing Act"; the churning propulsive energy of "What We Do Matters"; and maybe most of all, the brooding balladry of "Look Away," a now-I-see-you-now-I-don’t relationship ode which possesses a kind of offhand melodic and vocal strength that sounds easy to achieve, but obviously isn’t, because so few ever manage to do it.
Those are some of the things that go into The Mantles (Siltbreeze), along with guitar blazes (the climactic "Thin Reminder") and the overall feel of a band as a thriving living thing. What went on outside the album is an entirely different story. The group recorded with Greg Ashley in Oakland, where the adventures often began before they entered the studio. "One day this cracked-out lady walked up and punched this other lady in the face right in front of our car," says drummer Virginia Weatherby. "There’s a giant pile of trash right in front of his [Ashley’s] door," chimes in bassist Matt Roberts. "This one afternoon I showed up and there was a guy by it wearing no shirt and a Yoda mask — it was totally absurd."
Fueled by friendship and romance, the Mantles are relaxed enough to enjoy absurdity, whether it arrives in the form of a shirtless dude in a Yoda mask or entails playing the role of "psychedelic band" and "mid-tempo downer" at a sweltering garage rock party where people are doing cannonballs into a pool. If anything, the group was too relaxed for Ashley’s spontaneous and live-sounding recording process, an achievement of sorts. "You think you have the situation figured out on the third day of recording," says vocalist-guitarist Mike Oliveras, as the group discusses the different facets of Ashley’s home studio and warehouse setup, where graffiti and ciggies floating in glasses of beer are one norm. "Then he [Ashley] comes down with a bounty of nice-looking tomatoes and says, Do you guys want any tomatoes? These are from my garden on the roof."
The Mantles is being released by Siltbreeze, a pairing that should yield interesting results. The pop immediacy of the group’s songs might make them seem a good fit for Berkeley’s Slumberland, even if they tend to rock a bit more vigorously and wildly than many groups on Mike Shulman’s rightfully vaunted label. A standout track like the easygoing, assured "Don’t Lie" — understated yet almost anthemic at the close — is more melodic than most music released by Siltbreeze owner Tom Lax, whose enthusiasm came from hearing the first of the group’s two 7-inch singles to date. "There’s a certain amount of people who will buy it [the album] because it’s on Siltbreeze," Roberts says. "And there’s a certain amount of people who will specifically not buy it because it’s on Siltbreeze."
Fortunately, The Mantles is the kind of album that defies expectations. Its shades of New Zealand-ry (an organ sound and laconic vocal delivery not far from Flying Nun groups such as the Chills and the Verlaines), its Paisley Underground touches (some reviewers have mentioned Steve Wynn and Dream Syndicate), and its better-than-NME‘s-C86-cassette pop appeal seem very au courant, but come across as natural as breathing. Oliveras’ vocal presence is both a weapon and a major reason for this — he’s got more confidence and presence than your average rocker, yet he never falls into cringeworthy or over-the-top rock star gestures. There’s no T.T.H. (tries-too-hard) to his or the band’s approach. This forthright pleasure and assurance might have grown from the group’s recording experiences to date, which range from the experimentation and live takes of Ashley to the precision and attention to detail of Papercuts’ Jason Quever, who produced one of their singles.
Along with friendship and romance, family plays a role in the Mantles’ music — not corny Christian family values, but a bond with family members that’s taken a variety of funny forms during the group’s existence. "At [a show at] Café Du Nord, my mom said she wanted a drink, and when I told her to go to the bar, she said, It’s not my milieu," says Roberts to much laughter. He lists his favorite show to date as one the group did for Oliveras’ family: "There was an audience of six people on patio chairs sitting 20 yards away from us," he says.
"The Mantles: Being Earnest," Oliveras jokes.
The Mantles has the arresting look required of a vinyl-only release, thanks to a stark and handsome design by local musician Nathan Berlinguette, art by Colter Jacobsen, and another family touch: the photo on the album’s cover. As evocative in a nostalgic way as the cover of Night Control’s Death Control (Kill Shaman) is in a 2009 manner, it’s a picture of a man holding a picture — a photo of Jimi Hendrix. The man, standing in front of a gorgeous mountain-lined horizon, is Weatherby’s father. "My dad is beside himself," she says with a smile. "He went to one of our shows recently and was walking around saying, Album Cover Guy’s here. Want to meet the album cover?"
In heaven, apparently, there’s really good asparagus. Damn fine string beans, too.
So writes the composer Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), somewhat kookily, in the incandescent ode to the afterlife called "We Enjoy the Delights of Heaven" that caps off his typically over-the-top Symphony No. 4. And if Measha Brueggergosman, the too-hip barefoot soprano delivering the news in German ("Gut’ Spargel, Fisolen!") hadn’t been so dazzling — or dazzlingly backed by the San Francisco Symphony — my bf and I would have succumbed to an unholy giggle-fit in our seats. Seriously, asparagus?
That was a couple years ago, however, before foodie culture had tightened its iron crème-brûlée-cart grip on the Bay. Now, thoughts of angelic asparagus and legumes aux cherubim seem only natural, and the main question would be, "Yes, but are the vegetables in heaven local?"
There are more substantial ways that Mahler’s massive output — currently being explored by SFS in an ongoing stream of self-released recordings and annual Mahler extravanganzas, the latest of which takes place Sept. 16-Oct. 3 — seems up-to-the-minute. Mahler, with his ecstatic song cycles and otherworldly symphonies, was the last, and arguably the most bombastic, of the Romantic composers, attempting to transform the shuffling grunts of our mortal coil into a celestial star-chart of the Soul. If there’s one thing a quick listen to indie rock and dance music of the past two decades, from My Bloody Valentine and early rave to Animal Collective and the Field, shows, it’s that we’re in the midst of a similar period of musical transcendence through sensory overload.
Yet despite his yearning for earthly oblation, Mahler always kept both ears to the ground. His symphonies (SFS presents No. 1 and No. 5 this year) are whirligigs of pastiche, scandalous at their debuts for including tavern tunes, folk dances, mechanical noises, self-quotations, stage directions, shock tactics, even a slightly tipsy rendition of "Frere Jacques." To my ears they sound like DJ mixes of DJ mixes, each separate movement an isolated act of alchemical distillation. If the sum of the exquisite parts doesn’t quite exceed the whole — Mahler always seems to be reaching for the same perfect conclusion, and is never less than full-on intense, even in his more hushed passages — the individual moments are ravishing. I dare you to sit through SFS’s exhilarating new CD of Symphony No. 8, the so-called "Symphony of a Thousand," and not leave your body a few times.
Another contemporary relevance: Mahler was a bundle of shifting identities and internal contradictions. He was a Jew who unhesitatingly became a Catholic to score a major conducting gig yet quit Europe for America due to rising anti-Semitism there, a Bohemia-born, Germany-raised, Austrian citizen, an advocate of complete creative freedom who obsessed over his status in the canon. He was a composer who conservative critics accused of abetting the rise of the labor movement with his yen for popular music and whom other critics abandoned for more avant-garde experimenters. According to Alex Ross in his juicy book The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Picador, 2007), Mahler agonized over the question, "Can a man win fame in his own time while also remaining a true artist?" Culturally, we’ve moved beyond that question a bit, and sure, Mahler’s Facebook updates would be atrocious (total oversharer), but in his struggles and ambiguities he’s of the now.
One way Mahler released some of the pressure of his churning personality was through song. Voices are everywhere in his work, popping up in the middle of symphonies, vertiginously interlacing and often opposing each other. Ventriloquism reigns supreme. In Das Lied von der Erde ("The Song of the Earth"), which SFS recorded in 2007, Mahler composed six rather trippy songs based on ancient Chinese poems, four by Li Bai, the "wandering poet" of the Tang dynasty. The vocal wandering and searching continues in Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen ("Songs of the Wayfarer"), which SFS will present with baritone Thomas Hampson. Wayfarer traces a young man’s crazy voyage of romantic love, including "I Went this Morning over the Field," in which a finch shouts, "Zink! Zink! How the world delights me!" and the creepy, suicidal, "I Have a Gleaming Knife." SFS will also perform Rückert-Lieder with the radiant mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, in which Mahler forcefully adapts the OK poet Friedrich Rückert, kicking off the set with a bittersweet wink called "Do Not Look at My Songs!"
In working his way through Mahler’s oeuvre, SFS conductor Michael Tilson Thomas is doing something very psychologically interesting. The project is a bit anal — everything is polished to MTT’s usual, almost fussy, tee and recorded using the latest mind-boggling technology. And it’s a bit Oedipal — MTT’s mentor, Leonard Bernstein, who also presented Wayfarer with Hampson, became possessed by Mahler at one point, taking on Mahler’s symphonies as if his life depended on it. To Bernstein, Mahler foretold a century of death and despair and "showered a rain of beauty on this world." That century is over, and Bernstein’s recordings with the New York Philharmonic are gorgeous. So why the redo? Beyond the Freudian hoo-haw, I think MTT, with his ultra-refined yet luminescent interpretations, is moving past it. He’s presenting Mahler not as a turbulent visionary or stereotypical cloud-headed groundbreaker but simply as a glowing green fact, one for a new century, complicated and complex enough already, to chew on but not choke on.
SUPEREGO I had absolutely no idea that there was a hysterical ’90s gay dance hits mashup scene!
This was just one of the many, many worlds that opened up for me as Hunky Beau and I girded our burgeoning loins and embarked one recent Saturday on a whirlwind Castro bar crawl. Despite the nutso economics of late, a large new crop of attractively unpretentious San Francisco nightspots has bloomed, from the odd-but-pleasant hunter-themed Bloodhound in SoMa (1145 Folsom, www.bloodhoundsf.com) and multi-chandeliered DJ paradise Triple Crown in Mid-Market (1760 Market, www.triplecrownsf.com) to Potrero Hill’s underground-minded Project One Gallery (251 Rhode Island, www.p1sf.com), the Mission’s jazz-inflected supperclub Coda (1710 Mission, www.codasf.com), and — hurray? — our first "dessert lounge" CandyBar in the Western Addition (1335 Fulton, www.candybarsf.com). Even a few mainstays have had fresh alt-cred life breathed into them, like absinthe-happy Buckshot Tavern (3848 Geary, SF. www.buckshot-sf.com), classy dive the Hearth (4701 Geary), and reinvigorated Madrone Lounge (500 Divisadero, www.madronelounge.com).
It’s a regular autumn harvest of buzz-heavy embarrassment opportunities — a barvest, if you will. But it’s the Castro that’s seen the most openings in the past few months, so that seemed the logical destination for a night of guzzling look-see.
For the sake of my flawless skin, I try to stay positive. Complaining about the Castro is like crapping on a pigeon: you feel a little vindication, but then you realize, "Wow, I just crapped on a pigeon." So you have to just take our increasingly generic, Kylie-nauseating gay Mecca on its own terms, acknowledging that among the upscale influx there’s at least some crazy drag and heartfelt effort at the Lookout (3600 16th St., www.lookoutsf.com), a very nice overdue remodel of the hip-pop Café (2369 Market, www.cafesf.com), with a lot fewer tiny backpacks in line to get in, even a cozy laidback alcoholic outpost called Last Call (3988 18th St., www.thelastcallbar.com), which slid right into the old Men’s Room space. And Q Bar (456 Castro, www.qbarsf.com) hosts some some damn cute weekly parties.
That hoo-hoo gay mashup scene I mentioned — think Armand Van Helden’s rejigger of "Professional Widow" by Tori Amos overlaid with Deee-Lite’s "Groove is in the Heart" and Stardust’s "Music Sounds Better with You" — was rocking a dance floor of five at the distractingly bright Toad Hall (4146 18th St., www.toadhallbar.com) but the nifty back patio was packed, mostly with amply proportioned women who’d probably wandered over from the Castro Theater’s Erotic Film Festival. I suppose apoplectic owner Les Natali is trying to somehow channel the spirit of the original clone-era Toad Hall bar through a blaze of big-screens and several hot pink waterfalls?
By far the best new arrival to the cologne zone is Blackbird (2124 Market, www.blackbirdbar.com), a relaxed, narrow, and hiply appointed joint around the corner from the former Transfer, now known creatively as Bar on Church (198 Church, www.thebarsf.com). Blackbird has been in the news a lot lately due to the sad death of droll co-owner Doug Murphy from swine flu, eclipsing the happier news that the bar has quickly become one of the city’s more celebrated hotspots. Blackbird’s other co-owner, Shawn Vergara, knows that a few rough edges, a risk-taking cocktail menu — try the sparkling, tequila-based "grape drink" — and a freak-welcoming vibe stick in the mind more than wannabe polish.
As for the rest of the Castro: Is trying to do something different too much to ask? Did I just crap on a pigeon?
PREVIEW Repulsion: the name says it all, really. Napalm Death covered them, Darkthrone’s Gylve "Fenriz" Nagell — that eternal beacon of uncompromising black metal misanthropy — has a tattoo of their logo, and countless other longhairs heard something lurking beneath the muffled fuzz of an nth-generation bootlegged tape. The extreme music scene would be a very different place had these Flint, Mich., all-purpose metal dudes never disseminated their meteoric, immaculately shitty demos.
The band came up in a democratic period of heavy metal — which, lucky for us, seems to be on the rise again — where amateurs like Venom and Hellhammer managed to write some brutally effective heavy metal with only the most rudimentary musical knowledge. Thanks to this audacious garage metal sensibility, coupled with the aerobic drive of speedfreak hardcore groups like Siege and England’s Extreme Noise Terror and, of course, ye olde Bay Area thrash, Repulsion’s sound became the manifestation of metal’s thriving tape-trading scene, a rudimentary grindcore and death metal onslaught destined to be way more influential than it had any right to be. Crappy production values and occasionally sloppy playing aside, Repulsion wasn’t entirely musically clueless — careful listeners can pick out some impressive (albeit niche) musicianship, like Scott Carlson’s percussive vocal delivery ("You are! Rotting! Maggots! In your coffin!") and the mythically accelerated drumming of Dave Grave (current drummer Col Jones is no slouch himself.)
Let’s be honest: demigod virtuosity in its most ostentatious expression is part of what makes metal so exciting; it’s a unique bragging right we hold over the heads of our rock fan compatriots ("Let’s see [foppish indie band] shred like that!"). But sometimes the metal muse (I’m visualizing a sexless cross between Dio and a Frank Frazetta barbarianess here) gets the most visceral results by visiting us normals. If I’m losing you here, just listen to the grainy, misshapen, infinitely replayable reissue of Horrified (Relapse, 2003). Or better yet, go see them live this Saturday. For free!
With Reciprocal, Dismal Lapse, Flesh Consumed, Depths of Chaos. Sat/19, 7:30 p.m. (doors 7 p.m.), free. DNA Lounge, 375 11th St. (415) 626-1409, www.dnalounge.com
PREVIEW Root Strata, the San Francisco-based avant/out music label co-owned by Jefre Cantu and Maxwell Croy, has released over 50 records since its inception. Its foundations and mission are humble, but after nearly five years of work, the label has seen fit to celebrate in a quietly extravagant way with the On Land Festival, a two-night event in the city where it initially, um, took root. "This is the first time we’ve collectively tried to do something on this scale," Cantu, Root Strata’s founder and a member of Tarentel (who perform the first night of the festival) explains over the phone. Sure, On Land is relatively small compared to SF’s other fall festivals, but it’s a damned feast for the right audience. Ducktails and Keith Fullerton Whitman at Café Du Nord on the same night? Killer!
Although On Land is not a label showcase per se, nearly every artist on the 21-act weekend bill at Du Nord and the Swedish American Hall has put out at least one record with Root Strata, or will be doing so soon. The label began in late 2004 as a way for Cantu to release a solo CD-R prior to a Japanese tour with Tarentel, but it quickly snowballed into a wide-ranging outlet for artists local and distant, whether they be noisy, pretty, glitched-out, or all or none of the above. For instance, Root Strata recently released Common Eider, King Eider’s Figs, Wasps, and Monotremes, in which core member Rob Fisk’s viola, guitar, and piano meanderings coalesce into a frail, haunting song cycle.
The headliner of Sunday’s bill at the Swedish American is Portland, Ore.-based Bay Area expat Grouper, a.k.a. Liz Harris, whose harmonic haze will dovetail beautifully alongside the sounds of the venerable Christina Carter, the Austin, Texas cofounder of drone-folk outfit Charalambides and superb visual and musical artist. Although a straight-up music festival in most senses, On Land also possesses some cool nonauditory aspects: Paul Clipson will be showing films to accompany several of the performances, and, according to Cantu, Joe Grimm has been generating music by placing contact mics on two 16mm projectors. A handful of other labels will vend their wares as well, including Eclipse Records and Last Visible Dog. Bring a few bucks and an open mind — this is an ideal, totally stacked entrance to San Francisco’s rich underground.
ON LAND FESTIVAL Sat/19–Sun/20, various times. Café Du Nord and the Swedish American Music Hall, 2170 Market, SF. (415) 861-5016. www.onlandfestival.com
SONIC REDUCER Shop girls and Shop Assistants, the Jesus and Mary Chain and Mary Wells, "Da Doo Ron Ron" and Ronettes up-dos. All twirl, as if at a punk-rock sock-hop, around the rugged, vulnerable Vivian Girls. Girl-group songwriter Ellie Greenwich — tragically felled by a heart attack at 68 on Aug. 26 — might have scratched her head upon first hearing the Brooklyn trio’s new Everything Goes Wrong (In the Red), out just this week, but a few songs in, she would get it, fully.
Behind the buzzsaw guitars and lo-fi clatter lie those eternal heartaches, stress-outs, and boy (or girl) troubles that plague every girl, voiced in loose-knit choral togetherness in a way that the Crystals would recognize. The high-drama-mama beats of "Tension" — so reminiscent of "Be My Baby" — hammer the point home, while buttressed by a wall of distortion that Greenwich collaborator Phil Spector could claim as his own.
Onetime Spector client Joey Ramone would have also understood, though Vivian Girls are definitely fixed in a specific girly universe, one forged with the naïveté implied in the threesome’s Henry Darger-derived name as well as the band’s blunt force attack, fed by early punk’s reclaiming of pop. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart and the Darlings — fellow New Yorkers and kindred spirits in twee and garage rock — have a more purposeful grasp of the hook. But Vivian Girls are more infatuated with a purely impure coupling of classic ’60s-derived songcraft — a love that finds its name in "Can’t Get Over You" amid blatantly Shangri-Las-style ooh-oohs — and the one-two-three-four overdrive of American hardcore. Musically they’re trying on the Peter Pan-collar of the tender-hearted Tess on the sidelines of "He’s a Rebel" and the black leather of the reckless tough referred to in the song’s title.
Taking note of perverse souls who have tried on those retro costumes in the past, Vivian Girls use hardcore’s louder-faster-harder heritage as a way to blitzkrieg the ballroom and navigate the storms of girlhood. So the band’s "I Have No Fun" is both more wistful and brisker than the Stooges’ "No Fun." Of course, any combo that has the audacity to pick up where Carole King-and-Gerry Goffin-penned "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)" left off has much to account for: no one will be pushing around these lasses, swathed in a protective, propulsive whirlwind of thrashed-at guitars and primal drums. And Vivian Girls never let up till the closing track, "Before I Start to Cry," when the tempo slows and the thunder clouds tumble into view. It’s crying time. *
VIVIAN GIRLS
With the Beets and Grass Widow
Wed/9, 7:30 p.m., $12–$14
Rickshaw Stop
155 Fell, SF
rickshawstop.com
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FRIENDING THE LOVEMAKERS
Scott Blonde and Lisa Light of Oakland’s Lovemakers could give a fun, breezy university course in pop — or so I gathered hanging out with the friendly exes at Amoeba Music not long ago, on assignment for the late mag Venus. Michael Jackson had just passed, and the pair praised the Bad boy’s breed of pop — something the duo scrambled to bottle on its catchy new Let’s Be Friends. "There’s no guessing what it is and whether it works — that’s what I’m really striving for," Blonde says of Jackson’s chart-topping sound. "I think that’s the ultimate goal. I can dance to it and sing to it, and it’s stuck in my head. It’s hard to do, and there’s only a handful of bands that have done that." For the new album, which the Lovemakers decided to release themselves via Fontana distribution, Light explains, "We changed our attitude a lot, too. I feel like we always have to come back around and realized, Right. It’s about the music. It sounds stupid, but I think we really let go of the business side affecting us. It’s not that we’re not doing it — we’re still doing it all. But it doesn’t piss me off anymore: it’s just a process — it’s not personal anymore. Music is personal, and business isn’t."
With Jonas Reinhardt, Lisa Nola, and DJ Miles. Fri/11, 9 p.m., $15–<\d>$17. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com
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SOULSAVERS
Mark Lanegan growls malevolently on the alternately lyrical and brooding Broken (V2). With Jonneine Zapata and Redghost. Wed/9, 8 p.m., $18. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com
POWER TO THE PEACEFUL FESTIVAL
Michael Franti and Spearhead lay down the welcome mat for Sly and Robbie, an acoustic Alanis Morrissette, and Vieux Farka Toure, then take it indoors for a Saturday night afterparty at the Fillmore and some Sunday workshops. Sat/12, 9 a.m.–5 p.m., free. Speedway Meadow, Golden Gate Park, SF. powertothepeaceful.org
NO BABIES
No breeding, just a Morlock-taking noise barrage when the East Bay four are in the nursery. With 2Up and Afternoon Brother. Tues/15, 9 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com
PROFILE "I love singin’, but I think I’mma call my solo album, ‘Fuck That, Coretta … These Niggas Thaink I’m Soft,’" tweeted Phonte Coleman. "Thoughts?"
The message appeared on the Southern rapper’s Twitter page a day after our interview, when I asked him, "All your projects seem to have a smooth, soulful, almost smooth jazz kind of sound. What is it about that sound that appeals to you?"
While I don’t know if my question prompted Phonte’s subsequent post, it’s clear that Leave It All Behind (Foreign Exchange Music), his 2008 album with Nicolay as the Foreign Exchange, charts new depths of mellowness. In person, Phonte is a hilarious, extremely un-PC wisecracker, as subscribers to his Twitter account (and, back in the Stone Age, his MySpace page) will confirm. However, Phonte’s turn as sincere loverman simply explores a side of his personality already revealed in his work as one-third of Little Brother, the hip-hop group for which he remains best known.
For the moment, let’s dispense with the clichés about smooth jazz and neo-soul, because that would distract from Leave It All Behind‘s lushly romantic longings. As one of the better hip-hop producers of the moment, Nicolay knows how to mix dynamic drum tracks — check the hard-stepping rhythm on "All or Nothing" — with sweet yet funky keyboard melodies. At his best, he makes beats filled with uncompromised beauty, from the airy blasts of "Daykeeper" to the clipped, jazz-fusion workout, "House of Cards." "I’ve always had a deep affinity with hip hop and R&B," says Nicolay, who has a formal music education and plays multiple instruments.
Meanwhile, Phonte has an unmistakably memorable tone, one well suited to the album’s suite of tumultuous, make-up-to-break-up songs. Sometimes he flattens his voice too much, thinning it out. But he can carry a tune, and his harmonic style fits Nicolay’s melody-rich sounds.
Phonte says, "I did grow up singing in church, as did most black kids in the South. With a Christian grandma, you really didn’t have no muthafuckin’ choice. [But] I didn’t really start taking it seriously until 2005." Once he did, he adds, "I started developing my voice, doing vocal exercises, taking piano lessons and doing voice lessons, little stuff like that." With Little Brother, he mostly stuck to hooks and elaborate chitlin’ circuit in-jokes like Percy Miracles. Leave It All Behind marks Phonte’s formal singing debut.
Nicolay and Phonte met in 2002 on Okayplayer.com’s message board. Since Nicolay lived in the Netherlands and Phonte lived in Durham, N.C., the two collaborated virtually, sending tracks back and forth via the Internet. Released on U.K. major-indie BBE Music — and costarring Phonte’s rap friends Tanya Morgan, the Justus League and Darien Brockington — the Foreign Exchange’s 2004 debut Connected drew comparisons to The Listening, the 2003 debut by Phonte’s other group Little Brother. Both albums sounded like down-home jam sessions, with backpack MCs blacking out in freestyle ciphers and sticking to a true-school aesthetic.
"We were trying to give the Foreign Exchange its own sound, rather than it being another Little Brother record," Nicolay says. "I’ve been more on the R&B side of things. That was only part of the equation with Connected, and it was much a bigger part of Leave It All Behind." It also helped that, with Little Brother disbanded (Phonte says they’re "on hiatus"); Leave It All Behind focuses primarily on Nicolay and Phonte. (There are a few guests, chiefly rising L.A. artist Muhsinah.)
Nicolay, who recently moved to North Carolina with his wife and business partner, Aimee Flint, released Leave It All Behind through his independent company, Nicolay Music/The Foreign Exchange. Despite modest publicity via a few respectful online reviews and banner ads on indie-soul friendly networks like Fusicology.com, Phonte says "the demand for it has been high." It has sold nearly 20,000 copies, solid numbers for a solid indie release.
This unusual (albeit increasingly common) approach to issuing Leave It All Behind has only enhanced its intrinsic preciousness. For all its depth, the Foreign Exchange’s music is very slick and clean. One of Nicolay’s inspirations is Coldplay, which has reduced U2 arena rock theatrics to a hard science. Yet Nicolay’s music isn’t as cold; it burns with intensity. People who listen to Leave It All Behind without someone to hold them may feel weird and self-conscious.
Neither Phonte nor Nicolay can explain why they’re drawn to such lush soul. But they won’t apologize for it, either. "It seems to be a recurring theme throughout my career," Phonte says. "Those positive vibrations … it just makes me feel good."
SUPER EGO "My mission is progression," says BBC 1 Radio’s Experimental Show host DJ and left-field electronic music goddess Mary Anne Hobbs. "Everything should point to the future. If there’s any reason I’m here, it’s to build new causeways beyond classic sounds toward symbiotic textures. I cannot hang in suspended animation."
Hobbs is on the horn from Britain, and her droll Lancashire accent and signature breathy enthusiasm, combined with my wet-pantsed fanboy palpitations, is making it hard for me to keep up. I’m gushy, y’all. Because basically Mary Anne Hobbs is one of the coolest people on the planet, not only dedicating her considerable charisma to bringing challenging sounds to a wider audience and galvanizing a disparate community of bedroom knob-fiddlers — but also able to instantly conversation-hop from Kawasaki motorcycles (she’s made a multipart documentary about riding through Russia) to late Bay jazz oracle Alice Coltrane (the title of Hobbs’ excellent new Planet Mu platter of twisted audio thrills, Wild Angels, was inspired by a meditation on harpist Coltrane’s "cosmic arpeggios").
Although she’s been closely associated with dubstep and future bass, Hobbs eschews core genre sounds, yet she recognizes her role in helping dubstep become such a mainstream phenomenon in her native land. "I look after my small country of artists, and if extraordinary talents like Benga or Burial break through, I’m enormously pleased. But there’s still so much out there."
Mary Anne Hobbs, Wild Angels preview
Hobbs laughs when I mention her maternal reputation, but when I bring up the glaring invisibility of women on the scene, she says, "People just aren’t looking in the right places," and launches into a list of about 20 favorite females, including Vaccine, Blank Blue, and Ikonika before deftly nipping my typical American multiculti soapboxing in the bud. "I think many of these artists prefer not to be viewed through the prism of sexuality."
Wild Angels, Hobbs’ third compilation, moves away from dark dubstep toward the esoteric, sticky-starlight synth sound of Scotland’s LuckyMe collective (represented here by Hudson Mohawke, Mike Slott, and Rustie) with some West Coast rep coming from Nosaj Thing. More Cali cuts may make it onto future releases. "I’m so excited to be spinning in California again," Hobbs says. "The energy is incredible. I really feel that’s where it’s at right now." Agreed!
Get Freaky Afterburn featuring Mary Ann Hobbs Fri/11, 10 p.m.-3 a.m., $20/$25. 103 Harriet, SF. www.1015.com
BEAT DIMENSION
Synapse-melting live electronic showcase hosted by NYC’s Soundpieces, with the Austria’s Dorian Concept, Cinnaman, Flying Skulls, E Da Boss, and more…
Thu/10, 10 p.m., $5–$10. Paradise Lounge, 1501 Folsom, SF. www.paradisesf.com
HONEY DIJON
The scandalously fun transgender DJ brings her bubbly brand of runway house hoo-hoo to Temple’s main floor. Solid Bump Records electro-hosts the basement.
Bass-heavy Brooklyn rave revivalist — with a light touch and some Bmore beats — has scored bigtime with his crazy "Mindreader" single on Fool’s Gold. Can he keep it up?
It’s a 10-year reunion for groundbreaking turntablist trio Vinroc, Shortkut, and Apollo — could it herald a return for actual vinyl skills? Sure hope so.
Sat/12, 10 p.m.-3 a.m., $15. Mighty, 119 Utah, SF. www.mighty119.com
a&eletters@sfbg.com
When there is no firm ground, the only sensible thing to do is to keep moving. Lester Bangs wrote that, but countless wandering souls have lived it since the first humans stumbled across the continents. Long after land bridges dissolved and the great cities of the world were mapped, San Francisco — the legendary land’s-end haven for dreamers, kooks, and hedonists — became a butterfly net for the world’s drifters. Prismatic crowds have come and gone through the decades, helping to grow one of the world’s great music scenes.
"There’s just a certain point where you realize that nothing is going to satisfy you all the time," muses Christopher Owens, one of two masterminds behind the SF band Girls. "The solution is to be a person who’s always looking for the next thing. Oscar Wilde said that the meaning of life is the search for meaning of life. But there is no meaning to life — it’s just never laying down and accepting your surroundings, even if they’re comfortable. It’s like the Rolling Stones song, "(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction." I think I’ve always felt like that, and always will be like that."
Girls, “Lust for Life”
Looking up from peeling the label off a kombucha bottle and blinking his big eyes, Chet "JR" White nonchalantly nods: "I’m really never content, hardly ever happy, but every once in a while I’m both. Everything’s about getting somewhere else, I think."
While most bands fade slowly or implode, ever so rarely one explodes into something transcendent because it’s hit a nerve or two and tapped into the human experience in a profound way. Girls is that kind of band. Owens and White have been around for years, playing raucous live shows while quietly perfecting their imminent debut LP, Album (True Panther/Matador). A collection of glam-pop with that genre’s flair for artifice, it also — unlike traditional glam pop — possesses an emotional authenticity absent from so much music being churned out today.
Owens and White first united as roommates in San Francisco, but their lives couldn’t have started out more differently. While White was playing in punk bands in his parents’ Santa Cruz garage and going to recording school, Owens was growing up as part of the Slovenian sect of the Children of God cult, where secular music was forbidden unless one of the cult’s adults decided to indulge the younger members’ desire to learn the occasional Beatles or 1960s folk tune.
Owens broke away from the Children of God at 16 to live with his sister in Amarillo, Texas. Everything the rest of us had heard a thousand times before we were teenagers was a revelation to him. "When I learned to play the guitar, I was still in the cult and I didn’t really know anything but their music," he says. "When I turned 16 and left the group, it was like the whole world was in front of me. I got the Cranberries, the Cure, Black Sabbath, Sinead O’Connor, Michael Jackson, and the Romeo + Juliet movie soundtrack, and I’d play them on my stereo in my room and learn them and play guitar. The next wave was pop music. When I turned 18, I had become an American teen."
Owens was quickly engulfed by the small town’s punk scene: "I threw away seven years of my life there. All I have is tattoos from Amarillo." He played in a few punk bands, the music drawing him in because it was "really angsty." But after a few years, he felt the itch to do something new. "There wasn’t really anything in particular that drew me to San Francisco," he says. "I made a commitment that I was gonna leave Amarillo on New Year’s Day in 2005. All my friends moved to Austin, which I thought was the lamest thing in the world. I wanted absolute change. I wanted to totally reinvent myself and leave all those people behind."
Shortly after he landed in the Bay Area, Owens was asked to join the L.A. band Holy Shit. "I only played in the band because I was totally obsessed with Ariel Pink and Matt Fishbeck," he says, referring to the band’s underground-hero founders. "I started to write these songs to impress them and to vent my feelings, but the main driving force was that I wanted to be like them so much. I kept thinking I’m gonna make something that’s gonna blow their minds. I wanted to make something really classic that everyone could say they liked."
And that’s what he did. Owens wrote dozens of songs inspired by his friends, ex-lovers, and San Francisco itself, and recorded them, guided by White’s keen ear for grandeur. After scrapping song takes recorded on a four-track, the pair spent money on a proper tape machine and used only a few microphones to keep Album crisp and clear.
"I like big, amazing sounding records," says engineering wizard and bassist White, who counts Wrecking Crew bassist Carol Kaye as an influence. "I hate lo-fi music. Early on, people would call us lo-fi and I would take it kind of hard. We were just attempting to make the best-sounding thing we could with what we had — as good as any big record that had a lot of money put into it. I always like records that are made under some sort of duress. I think those records are great, if you can hear it. When I hear ours, I can hear the moments that go along with the music."
With Album, Owens and White edge closer to timelessness than any of their San Francisco contemporaries. While much of the city’s rock scene is embroiled in a hot and noisy love affair with psychedelic garage music, the boys of Girls have come up with something different: classic melodic songs for a restless soul in search of freedom and purpose in this whirlwind world. It doesn’t hurt that behind Owens’ lyrical pearls one discovers lush and unadulterated arrangements and majestic Wall of Sound-esque moments.
Album‘s magnum opus, "Hellhole Ratrace," is a plaintive hymn about the urge to cut loose and live. It starts off with simple guitar strumming, which in turn is soon immersed in a mesmerizing swell of buried organ work, slow hand claps, and trilling guitars that elevates it into an anthem. "I don’t wanna die without shaking up a leg or two /I wanna do some dancin’ too," sings Owens. "I don’t wanna cry /my whole life through /Yeah I wanna do some laughin’ too / So come on, come on, come on, come on and dance with me."
This year has already been one hell of a ride for Girls, which now includes guitarist John Anderson ("He’s the best guitar player I’ve ever played with in my life," says Owens) and drummer Garett Godard. The group has been on tour nearly constantly for several months across America and Europe. For a pair of nomads like Owens and White, it seems like the perfect gig, at least for now. Both harbor dreams of being thrust into the canon with the rest of the greats, and that reality may not be so far off.
"I want to write a song that’s as good as "Let It Be" or "I Will Always Love You." I want to write a song that everybody in the world knows," says Owens, glancing at his bandmate.
"I just want to be one of those bands that becomes culturally ingrained, one of those bands that’s unavoidable," echoes White. "One of those bands that is larger than music itself."
Impassioned youth, existential wisdom, and stories of aching romance weave together to make Album a slice of true Californian pop that never stops hitting home. When you hear Owens’ voice, unshackled by fuzz or distortion, crooning about the fear of dying before ever accomplishing anything, you remember that you’ve felt the same way dozens of times too. And when he starts chirping, "I wish I had a suntan /I wish I had a pizza and a bottle of wine," on the sarcastic, ecstatic opener "Lust for Life," you want to drop everything and run through the streets to join him.
PREVIEW Most Bad Brains fans can remember where they were the first time they heard the DC hardcore legends’ self-titled debut (ROIR, 1982.) For me, it was during an extended drive through Utah with my parents, a trip made memorable by a fortuitous stop at a strip mall with a Sam Goody. (My Damaged story is a lot cooler, I swear.) The album did nothing to improve my PMA during the car ride, but I vividly remember finding Bad Brains’ sheer unhinged speediness awe-inspiring, and not a little disorienting. Though somewhat of a cliché at this point, it bears repeating that Bad Brains — all 34 breakneck minutes of it — started an arms race of speed and aggression that would germinate into the hardcore movement. The other side to the record, however, was the handful of incongruous reggae/dub tracks, measured interruptions to the album’s typical rock ‘n’ roll onslaught. By their third album, I Against I (SST, 1986), Bad Brains had begun mixing the two genres more fluidly, resulting in what would become the band’s trademark style.
Aside from establishing themselves as genre pioneers too singular for flat-out imitation, Bad Brains have also gained the reputation of being some of rock’s most volatile live performers, with all the pros and cons that title carries. Stories of vocalist (or "throat," as he’s memorably identified as in the liner notes) H.R.’s epileptic stage presence are the stuff of punk rock folklore, making concerts unpredictable affairs to be sure. Lucky for us, he’ll be anchored by the original lineup: Darryl Jennifer on bass, Earl Hudson on drums, Dr. Know on guitar, natch. Our Summer rager-mode has deactivated; it’s time for reignition.
BAD BRAINS With P.O.S., Trouble Andrew. Tues/15–Wed/16, 8 p.m. (doors 7 p.m.), $26, all ages. Slim’s, 333 11th St. (415) 255-0333. www.slims-sf.com>.
PREVIEW Inevitable vocal chord-corrosion aside, many of death metal’s earliest bands have managed to stay exciting for a remarkably long time. Working within a genre that tends to shift toward increasingly challenging frontiers, an elite corps of older acts seems to find inspiration in recent innovations, or, conversely, forgotten older tropes due for a nostalgic revisiting. So how do we account for the enduring relevance of Obituary, a group known for its unwavering devotion to metal at its most primal essence?
Obituary’s legend began in Florida, 1985. Playing under the somewhat hokey moniker of Xecutioner (imagine how badass that would look scrawled in a spiral bound notebook) the band soon rechristened itself with its current nom de metal, and released a string of landmark records. With Slowly We Rot (Roadrunner, 1989), Obituary introduced a heavy bottom end stomp to the still-nebulous genre, a rancid meatiness that imbued its thrash metal foundation with Sabbath-like authority. On standout cuts like "Intoxicated," Donald Tardy’s punky upbeats propel the crunchy bass and rhythm guitar forward with manic intensity — before plunging them into one of the single greatest breakdowns ever recorded, a dumbass berzerker groove unmatched in hypnotic power. (Gorilla Biscuits’ "Big Mouth" [from Gorilla Biscuits, Revelation, 1988] and, perhaps, Suffocation’s "Liege of Inveracity" [from Effigy of the Forgotten, Roadrunner, 1991] come close.)
Obituary has consistently explored the power of steamroller directness laid down in the musical DNA of its first release, allowing monolithic power chords to resonate in ways a thousand sweep-pick solos and orchestral flourishes — full of sound and fury but signifying nothing, as the poet says — never could. Oh, and John Tardy’s voice? Just as offensive as always.
OBITUARY With Goatwhore, Krisiun, The Berzerker. Thurs/10, 7:30 p.m. (doors 7 p.m.), $28–$30, all ages. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. (415) 255-0333. www.slims-sf.com
SONIC REDUCER We all have fantasies, and considering the fact that he happily goes to the sick, hilarious places only you and your silliest, closest pals go, comedian Brent Weinbach’s is remarkably simple. He’d love to drive you … no, not insane, but around in a cab. Of course, when the dream sort of came true — he got to tool around with a cabbie-curator for "Where to," a 2007 art show of taxi-related art at the Lab — one bubble was brutally burst, spurring a joke, of sorts.
"Not a lot of people got it," confesses the longtime SF comedian, now based in his native Los Angeles and back in town for his Outside Lands fest performances. In the cab, he says, "I met a wide variety of people: I met two yuppie girls, a yuppie guy, and more yuppies — and a stripper. A yuppie stripper.
"The point was," Weinbach continues, "I thought it was going to be more like New York City, where all kinds of people take cabs. But that’s really what it was — a bunch of yuppies and a stripper. It turns out the only people who ride around in taxis in San Francisco are yuppies."
A disappointingly homogenous experience for a comic who has found plenty of very specific and strange black, queer, Chinese, Russian, Mexican, and just plain twisted voices to filter through his hilariously stiff, straight-guy comic persona — and despite the perk that, as a Travis Bickle manque, one would have a captive audience in the backseat. Still, cabbing it provided a theme of sorts for the wildly diverse array of live performance recordings, studio-recorded skits, and Weinbach-penned tunes and video game-inspired backing sounds making up the comedian’s second album, The Night Shift (Talent Moat), the focus of a release show at the Verdi Club on Sept. 11. Weinbach sib and comedy co-conspirator Laura of Foxtail Brigade opens, along with Moshe Kasher and Alex Koll.
The tunes on Night Shift are a new touch, setting me off on a daydream about Weinbach doing the duelin’ piano (and laughs) routine with Zach Galifianakis. (Weinbach once teased the ivories professionally in the lobby of Union Square hotels like the Mark Hopkins.) "Sometimes I close my set with one of those songs," Weinbach says. "After hearing the word ‘penis’ a bunch of times and talking about poo-poo, it’s kind of funny to end the set with a sweet old-fashioned song." He worries, though, about the track-by-track re-creation of the album at the Verdi Club: "I hope they don’t kill the momentum of the set."
Yet Weinbach is game — the ex-Oakland substitute teacher has had to be (memories of the letter from a student apologizing for calling him a "bitch" ghost-ride by). He dives into a rapid-fire, impassioned discussion of his comedy, which rarely discusses race directly, yet clearly emerges from the mashed-up, pop sensibility of a half-Filipino, half-Jewish Left Coast kid.
"The only time I’ve ever talked about race is right after the presidential election, when I wrote this: ‘On Nov. 4, 2008, history was made’ … — I usually get a little applause here — ‘It was a remarkable thing to see so much of the black community come together and deny gay people their civil rights. So now that the black man is keeping the gay man down, that means gay is the new black. And that means suburban teenagers will have to get used to a whole new way of acting cool.’"
Weinbach pauses, then explains heatedly, "I was really upset that 70 percent of black voters in California voted against gay marriage, when this whole election was about getting a black president into office. It just blew my mind." As for the joke itself, well, "It gets a good response, though sometimes people think I’m making fun of gay people or black people. I don’t even know what’s going through their head, actually. I do remember doing the joke once and hearing people hissing. It was like, ‘What are you hissing at? Are you glad gay people were denied their rights or are you a snake?’ And if you’re a snake, that’s OK … ‘" *
The cute couple loves their bubblegum and Casio-pop on Hi, We’re Jonesin’ (Telemarketer’s Worst Nightmare). Thurs/3, 9 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com
AL GREEN
The rev has his finger on the holy trigger. Wed/2, 8 p.m., $56–<\d>$85. Warfield, 982 Market, SF. www.goldenvoice.com
SF CENTER FOR THE BOOK BENEFIT
Literati party down at a book arts-zine exhibit, with dance sets by Vin Sol, Honey Soundsystem, and Pickpockit. Fri/4, 9 p.m., free before 9 p.m., $7–<\d>$10. 111 Minna Gallery, 111 Minna, SF. www.111minnagallery.com
TREATISE If, 20 years from now, recumbent in your easy chair with your slippers and favorite bong, some snot-nosed younger sibling should ask you about the zeitgeist of late ’00s underground metal (apparently the kid took an art history class), you might consider introducing the shaver to San Francisco’s Black Cobra, a two-piece that almost certainly could not exist at any other point in time.
From the tarry primordial soup of Cobra’s cavernous low-end emerge the various slimy, naked hallmarks of an increasingly protean metal scene — unapologetic Sleep worship, reverent nods to punk and hardcore cross-pollination, and a healthy dash of retro-metal swagger inform the band’s gargantuan riffs. Nothing about this approach feels like it’s been calculated for maximum relevance; instead, Black Cobra’s molasses-thick sound comes off as the happy end result of two longtime fans who came to the conclusion that they could, and should, create the music they wanted to hear. And while the band — Jason Landrian on guitar/vox, and Rafael Martinez on drums — has become more professional-sounding over the course of three full-length releases, the same caustic resin hit of recklessness permeates their newer material.
Black Cobra may not be High on Fire-monumental, or as thought provoking as Stephen O’Malley’s latest art-drone opus. But if nothing else, Landrian and Martinez are doing their part to wrestle metal from the clutches of lifeless robo-shredders, and making some damn heavy music in the process.
