Music

SFIFF, day ten: Cachao and the wow of Still Life

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By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Last night, Maria Bello accepted her Peter J. Owens award and hosted a screening of her new film Yellow Handkerchief. I haven’t seen that film yet, but Bello will always have a place in my heart for her fearless performance in David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (2005).

If you saw Buena Vista Social Club at the festival in 1999 and Calle 54 at the festival in 2001, then you may be familiar with the music of Israel ‘Cachao’ Lopez, the great Cuban songwriter and bassist who helped bring the mambo to popularity. The new Cachao: Uno Mas arrives just in time, given that Cachao passed away two months ago at the age of 89. It would be great to report that this 68-minute documentary was a worthy farewell, but it’s far too brief and it breaks the cardinal rule of music films: it interrupts the songs with talking heads.

Cachao: Uno Mas talk at SFIFF

Blazin’ up for UCSC

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Deep Thoughts by Justin Juul, in honor of Cannabis Awareness Day, Sat/3

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The University of Santa Cruz has a long history of embracing pot-heads, communist philosophers, vegans, musicians, artists, and white Rastafarian dudes. That’s why it came as no surprise that The Grateful Dead recently chose the school as the new home for its entire catalogue of music, articles, photos, films, etc. But it was no small feat. UCSC actually beat out bids by Stanford and Berkeley, which, to some, suggests that maybe the world really is changing for the better. Maybe hippies actually are kind of smart. After all, UCSC, a school founded by a roving band of love children back in the early 1960’s, a school that was once featured in Rolling Stone Magazine as “The Best School for Stoners,” a school that David Horowitz singled out on Fox News as “The Most Un-American School in the Country” has become one of the harder schools in the UC system to get admitted to.

The Grateful Dead deal is just another big step in the right direction for all of hippy-kind. But wait. Is the school really that dedicated to its roots or is it just cashing in on them for publicity, hoping that accepting the Dead catalogue will convince the world that hippies are still running the show at UCSC? The truth is they’re not.

Sizzle-shazam: Lazer Sword cuts loose

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In which the breathless writer of this week’s Super Ego column in the paper, laying out the deets on the emerging lazer bass sound, cuts deeper with bass-bangin’ SF duo Lazer Sword (and gets a li’l spankin’ for slapping the “lazer bass” genre header over their sick-ass beats.) Stick it to me! Below is my e-mail interview with swordsters Lando Kal and LL …

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The dynamic duo
Photo by Jordan Fraker

SFBG: So what’s the Lazer Sword backstory?
LL: I’m 26 years old and originally from Portland, OR, back when the Trailblazers were hot, but have been in SF for nearly 5 years now. Before I made the move I was heavily into making hip-hop beats in a rap group called Evil Hands, and when we started getting some shows around town I had no choice but to be the DJ (the guy who mans the CD player and does little scratches over the hook) so I was kind of forced to get used to standing on stage and learn to actually spin records a bit since I wasn’t one of the rappers.

After landing in SF I continued to work on music and started playing around with more instrumental type of shit since I had no homies who rapped in the immediate area. Lando and I had crossed paths a few times in the city before we actually got together on some music, but after an official introduction from our mutual hombre Keenan (2005?) we found many similarities in what each other were doing in our respective studios and how we were both trying to do some new experimental shit as well. For a couple months we dabbled around and got a feel for where things were going, but after some people heard what we were doing there was a bit of force put on coming up with a way to hit the streets, so insert a few more months of hard work and eventually we had a live show.

Lazer Sword rip up Rickshaw Stop, May 2007

LANDO: Well I’m 24 and though born in San Francisco, I grew up in Sacramento. I’ve been back for about 6 years now and still enjoy every bit of it. I’ve been producing/ DJing for about 8 years now, messing around with various styles throughout the years. I met Bryant about 4 years ago here in San Francisco and we’ve been labcolabin’ ever since. We met through mutual friends and through passing at Amoeba records (where I worked at the time), trading thoughts on good records for sample material and what not, and began visiting each others’ respective home studios to jam the fuck out. Noticing we had very similar tastes in music and production styles, we naturally began throwing our ideas together, creating boosty tunes and realizing it all worked well together. We’ve been performing for a little over a year now and the sets have changed quite a bit since the first show. I think we can read each other a bit more.

SFBG: What’s going on up there on stage and how do you work together to produce your sound? Especially, how do you produce your lazer bass sound?

D-Structuring the Antique Roadshow

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By Vanessa K. Carr

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First Fridays aren’t just for Oakland anymore: D-Structure now hosts art openings the first Friday of every month at their boutique in the Lower Haight.

After a successful show last month with painter Aaron Nagel, D-Structure is launching their latest exhibit, The Antique Roadshow, this Friday, 5/2. The launch party also celebrates the addition of San Francisco-based clothing line Correct Clothing to their stock.

According to Correct Clothing co-founder Thomas Lerou, “Correct Clothing is a lifestyle brand, which means we draw inspiration from the music and art that create the lifestyle. Our clothing will always be linked to music and art.”

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Coming Correct

The line keeps it simple – t-shirts and hats only – that they design to be more classic than trendy.

D-Structure’s Antique Roadshow features more than 40 pieces of artwork by local artists Ian Hill, ZenTen, and TenFold, who together are known as the Swedish Milk Toast Collective. In his own way, each of these artists re-envisions the past from a futuristic perspective through the lens of urban and pop art.

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Ian Hill’s “Skeptic”

To make the event “a true antique bazaar and roadshow,” says D-Structure’s Cassidy Blackwell, the store will have “antique trinkets displayed all over the gallery space.”

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Tenfold takes it on the road

Music will be provided by local DJs Bogle, DJ Centipede, and Citizen Ten (a.k.a. artist TenZen).

The Antique Roadshow
Reception May 2, 8 p.m.
D-Structure
520 Haight, SF
415-252-8601

Church lets out with Marty Willson-Piper

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By Todd Lavoie

Marty Willson-Piper, “Questions Without Answers” (1989)

What a treat! Singer/songwriter/founding member of Aussie atmosphere-masters The Church, Marty Willson-Piper, is doing a special solo-spotlight show— backed by the alluringly-named Mood Maidens— at the Great American Music Hall on Sunday, May 4th. As far as I remember, the last time he played here in the city was back in the summer of ’06, with The Church, at the same venue. Ah, what a show that was— ever-genteel bandmate Steve Kilbey joked about spearheading an “Elizabethan Rock” movement, and Willson-Piper obliged by bringing delicate, graceful guitar-dexterity to Church slow-burners and ambience-anthems such as “Under The Milky Way”, “Chromium”, and “Metropolis”. No word yet about whether Elizabethan Rock is still on the front burner for the band, but the charming, quick-quipping guitarist/big-hit-with-the-ladies does have a new album out— entitled Nightjar (Heyday Records), it’s a gorgeous collection of warm-textured folk-rock pushed along by some of the most delicious six string jangles since, well, the last Church album, really.

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Is an introduction to The Church necessary? Probably not, so how about a reminder, then: ever since releasing their debut Of Skins and Heart (Arista/EMI) back in 1981, the band has released well over a dozen albums and EP’s matching (frequently) melancholy neo-psychedelic atmospherics with mystical subject matter, and Willson-Piper has, along with lead singer Kilbey, been a constant in their two-decades-deep career. Much of their success should be attributed to his ability to float just the right color of aura to their formidable mood-making; it’s tough to imagine the smoldering majesty of Church classics like 1985’s “Myrrh”, 1988’s “Antenna”, or 2003’s “Sealine” without Marty’s sublime textures. Then, of course, there’s the perennial crowd-fave of “Spark”— the taut, sneering Mod stomper from 1988’s Starfish (Arista) gave the band’s usual backing-vocalist a truly inspired turn at the lead mic. Two particularly fascinating recent-additions to the band’s catalogue— 2004’s El Momento Descuidado and 2007’s El Momento Siguiente (both Liberation Music)— both offer exquisite “unplugged” revisits to career-highlights, and here, free of feedback and pedal effects, one can gain a whole new appreciation for his intricate guitar-work. Perhaps they also had an effect on the recording of Nightjar, as this new solo jaunt seems to share a kinship with the lush folk ambience of both albums. Granted, the disc does indeed have its electric moments— it even occasionally rocks out in that slow purposeful grind associated with latter-day Church recordings— but it’s easy to imagine Nightjar as a younger, rougher-around-the-edges sibling to the Momento twins.

Smells like imposter rock

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By Justin Juul

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Rock and Roll bands are rad and all, but truth be told, I’d usually rather just listen to their music on my iPod. That said, I still crave a good show every now and again, The thing is, since the urge to go out on the town strikes so rarely, I’ve become rusty at the whole procuring-concert-tickets-on-time thing. I always miss my favorite bands when they pass through because I either log on to ticketmaster too late or I mistakenly think no one else gives a shit and I’ll be able to buy tickets at the door.

No big deal, really. Most of the bands I’d actually pay to see are all dead, or too old to look at, anyway. Which is why I think cover bands are where it’s really at. I mean, why pay a million dollars for the Motley Crue reunion, when you can pay ten dollars to see dead on impersonations of Ozzy Osbourne, Tesla, Whitesnake, and Motley Crue all at the same time? You just can’t ignore the economic value of cover bands, but the best part about them is that they only play the classics. No more sitting through Tommy Lee’s lame ass DJ set just to hear Shout at The Devil. No more wondering if Ozzy’s gonna sing Ironman. At a tribute show, you get to hear the good shit straightaway and then you just move on to the next awesome band.

Most tribute shows feature three to four bands in one evening, which is great, but there’s a show coming up in the first week of May during which you’ll get to hear almost all of your favorite buttrock anthems. It’s Lynda Mortenson’s Second Annual Cinco De Mayo Bash , with tributes to Tesla, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Dio, Motley Crue, and more. Rock out with your cock out. Jam out with your clam out. Get ‘er done.

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Lynda Mortensen Presents The Second Annual Cinco De Mayo Bash
May 3rd, 2008. 5:00 pm – 2:00am
Free Until 9:00pm, $3.00 after 9:00pm
Saint James Gate
1410 Old County Road, Belmont, CA.
(650) 592-5923

I hear a symphony named Kimya Dawson

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By Alex Felsinger

When the Moldy Peaches became increasingly popular in the ’90s, Kimya Dawson decided she wanted out. She hoped to avoid the mainstream music industry and its managers, bookers, and publicists. Her band-mate Adam Green continued within that realm, and has even been known to sell-out stadium concerts in Europe. Dawson, however, latched onto the growing global do-it-yourself punk scene, booked her own shows, and released all her albums on small, independent labels.

In the past, Dawson has always performed in smaller Bay Area venues. Two years ago, I booked a show for her at a Haight Street coffee house that could barely seat 40 people, but it was canceled at the last minute along with the rest of her tour.

Then Juno happened. It put Dawson back in the spotlight, even more than before. Her last stop in the Bay Area, at 924 Gilman Street, reflected an attempt to hold on to her underground ethos. But when it sold out in less than an hour, it was clear (at least for the time being) that she’d outgrown the facilities that the Bay Area punk scene has to offer.

So, a couple months later, what was the next logical step? Maybe the Independent? Slim’s? Nope — Dawson was asked to play the Herbst Theatre. Yes, the famous seated venue where the United Nations Charter was signed in 1945, a place typically reserved for classical music performances, theater, and dance.

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A spoonful of Kimya Dawson helps the Juno hype go down

But Dawson’s down-to-earth demeanor turned the room’s paneled mosaics into finger paintings and shortened the figurative distance from seat-to-stage to mere feet. She knew that she was out of place, and she didn’t mind saying so. “I’ve never played a show in the Bay Area that cost more than five dollars,” she said to the crowd, who’d paid $20 per ticket. “Next time, it’ll be free.”

Cover me

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Cover albums — critics stuck on music-maker-as-auteur theories, singer-songwriter elitists, and band-as-prime-mover rockists have long believed them the easy way out. Cat Power has succumbed twice, Dirty Projectors once, Scarlett Johansson completely surrendered to the mix of her forthcoming Tom Waits covers long-player — only to be upstaged by the production of TV on the Radio’s David Sitek. Still, despite the presence of so many tuneless, karaoke-jacked wannabes ready to grab their 15 minutes, even the talented are tempted to linger in the shadows of giants, bringing their own ideas and sound to a few of the many great, perhaps forgotten, songs and stories swirling in the ether. Why look down on the cover disc?

San Francisco songsmith Andy Cabic, who plays Great American Music Hall with his band Vetiver on May 6 for the first time since August, dusts his shoulders of such snobbery. "I don’t know why there would be a critical bias against cover records," he opines outside Sacramento at the Hanger studio where he’s three days into the next Vetiver album of original numbers. "Maybe a critic should try to do a covers record and see how good it comes out before they say there’s something wrong with it."

Cabic’s not ashamed to point out that "throwback is all over" Vetiver’s new collection of offbeat covers, Thing of the Past (Gnomonsong). The retro album art depicting a pretty girl studying old vinyl was shot at Cabic’s Inner Richmond flat, highlighting just a fraction of his impressive stash of records — and the music was made by the band a group of old friends from North Carolina that Cabic assembled to tour Vetiver’s To Find Me Gone (Dicristina Stair, 2006).

Wasn’t it Bob Dylan and the Beatles who triggered so many critics to privilege songwriters over interpreters? "I was just having a conversation with someone about what caused it," Cabic says. "I think you’d have to attribute it to Bob Dylan. The Beatles’ first two records had covers. I still love those records that were put together by the whole machinery of an A&R person, a singer, and songs by the great writers of that moment. But I chose songs that weren’t of the moment — songs that were timeless or not easily heard today, songs I thought we could do well." Well is an understatement: Thing is a lovely, tenderly rendered amalgam of the band’s distinctive sound, Cabic’s hushed voice, unusual covers — which run the gamut from Biff Rose’s "To Baby" to David Brock and Hawkwind’s "Hurry on Sundown" to San Jose mystery songwriter Dia Joyce’s "Sleep a Million Years" — and guest turns by underground folk luminaries like Michael Hurley and Vashti Bunyan. "The interesting aspect of doing covers is that there’s a mixture of restraint and freedom in doing them," Cabic muses.

Another recent notable cover project is Shelby Lynne’s sensuous dust-up with Dusty Springfield’s catalog, Just a Little Lovin’ (Lost Highway). Lynne, who plays the Fillmore on May 1, has caught her share of acclaim for this spare collection — sans the plush arrangements of Springfield’s versions and teeming with Lynne’s tremulous, haunted soul. So why covers, apart from the fact that Lynne’s chum Barry Manilow suggested it? "I think people want to hear good stuff," she says from her Houston tour stop, with sharpshooter directness and the twangs of a tempestuous girlhood spent in Alabama. "Not a lot of good out there. I’m talking about if you wanna listen to classic music, you always reach back."

What Lynne loved about Springfield was "the song selection — and she was a great honest singer. The production I love — it was Jerry Wexler and the Memphis sound," though she quickly adds, "I was trying to stay away from that. That’s why I left it bare."

The woman who played Johnny Cash’s mother in Walk the Line isn’t a vocalist to be trifled with. A survivor to the core (her father shot her mother and then killed himself when she and sister Allison Moorer were teenagers), she may have been, in her words, "too young to understand the heaviness" of duetting with George Jones on the same mic when barely 19 with producer Billy Sherrill behind the board, but she does know "it doesn’t hurt to have a Grammy," as Lynne says of her 2001 Best New Artist award.

And she knows she doesn’t want to collaborate with her sister — yet. "We have two very different kinds of things — I tell her maybe when she’s an old lady," Lynne drawls firmly. So listen closely to her turn on Springfield because next, Lynne says, "I’m gonna be writing songs. I’m not going to be doing covers again for a long time — if ever. This is it. I think you should be allowed one cover record per career." *

SHELBY LYNNE Thurs/1, 8 p.m., $25. Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. www.ticketmaster.com

VETIVER Tues/6, 9 p.m., $16. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.gamh.com

PETER BJORN AND JOHN’S PETER MORÉN BREAKS FROM THE PACK

The Last Tycoon, the title of the new solo full-length by Peter Morén, one leg of Peter Bjorn and John, is only that — not a way of life, despite the omnipresent whistle of the group’s "Young Folks" last year. Morén swears that he’s no mogul — he just wants to gently mock the solo project conceit while referencing the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. "I thought it would be funny to have a grandiose, pretentious title for a homey album," he tells me from Montreal. Tycoon, which Morén describes as "low-key and folky," came about when he brought a song, "Le Petit Guerre," to the rest of his longtime band. "The other guys wanted to take it in a more German kraut-rock direction, but obviously with the French refrain I thought it should be more melancholy, chanson-like, dreamy, like it is on the record now. That’s what started the project." And the rest of the band approved. "I needed another outlet," says Morén, "because I’ve been playing with the boys since I was 15. So it’s nice when you have to make all the decisions yourself, even though it can be a little bit scary."

PETER MORÉN With Tobias Frobert and Big Search. Thurs/1, 7 p.m., $15. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com

Chefs that go crunch

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Watching people cook provides its share of voyeuristic pleasures while also, in theory, offering bits of edification. It’s far easier to learn how to make a dish by watching somebody else make it than by tip-toeing your way through a recipe’s thicket of words, and this is true whether you’re watching in person or via television. In the 1980s I was a faithful viewer of Jacques Pépin’s cooking shows on public TV, and I still use several recipes he demonstrated offhandedly.

But those were the old days, when the point of putting chefs on the tube was to transmit knowledge, skills, and confidence to the viewing public. Today’s chef shows are quite different. Recently I spent a long, not-quite-voluntary interval watching several episodes of Bravo’s "Top Chef," and was reminded not so much — or really, not at all — of Jacques Pépin but of "The Real World" and "Survivor." The themes are pressure, ruthlessness, panic, and triumph, leavened with desire. Ancient Rome had its gladiators, and we have this. And is this, I wondered, any way to treat food and the people who make it? You scorch your broccolini and are voted off the island by a celebrity tribunal to the strains of Wagnerian doom music? And what about your crush on one of the judges, not to mention some of the other tasty chefs? Emotional confusion and torment must make for high ratings, if "Top Chef" is any indication. Still, I’m not sure they conduce to a better world, or even a better-fed world.

It isn’t surprising that cooking has become an occasion for competition in America. We turn all subjects, no matter how inappropriate — even poetry! — into competition. We hallow competition and competitive people, particularly when televised, and don’t seem to recognize that civilization is, at its core, a cooperative venture. Competition is no better than a necessary, well-regulated evil in a civilized regime, and the unthinking American exaltation of it is, possibly, part of the reason we are a warrior society rather than a civilized one.

What happens to the dismissed? I wondered. Do they fall on their knives, one by one, alone and unmourned, off camera? Or do the survivors conspire to cook the lost a send-off meal, in which food is a gesture of love rather than a commodity?

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys

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PREVIEW Imagine an entry called "Hillbilly Music" on the Web site "Stuff White People Like." The lexicon of that sage barometer of upper middle-class culture might render something like, "Old-timey string band music, especially when performed by specimens plucked from unsophisticated rural communities; appeals to white people’s yearning for authenticity with the promise of a true white folkloric inheritance." Well, forget all that. It’s true that one of the most transparent examples of institutionalized segregation exists quite happily in the "traditional" aisle of your local record store (if you still have one) where soul and blues mean black; country and folk, white. Needless to say, our heritage of "string bands, songsters, and hoedowns," to quote a Rounder release of music by black Appalachian performers, is a glorious amalgam of Celtic, English, French, African, and Native American cures for hard labor, heartbreak, and hard times. Luckily, the Coen Brothers and their team knew that when they looked to the legendary bluegrass artist Ralph Stanley to provide the weight and pathos at the core of O Brother Where Art Thou (2000) with his startling a capella rendition of "O Death." Sure enough, "O Death" has shown up in both Anglo and African American traditions, folklorists say. And at the tender age of 81, Stanley still delivers a timeless performance that puts the soul in bluegrass and the country in the blues.

RALPH STANLEY AND THE CLINCH MOUNTAIN BOYS Fri/2, 8 p.m., $49.50. Also Sat/3. Freight and Salvage Coffee House, 1111 Addison, Berk. (510) 548-1761, www.freightandsalvage.org

Dance, horn dogs and damsels, dance

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Warning: listening to the Brass Menazeri is addictive — once they start, you can’t stop. After a sold-out show at Ashkenaz in Berkeley last month, the band of nine was dragged out for an encore or six — not an easy feat for an exhausted group of horn players. Meanwhile, the crowd got busy losing their minds the old-fashioned way: dancing and moving any way they knew how.

Though unquestionably exciting, brass band music from Serbia, Macedonia, and Greece sounds exotic to most American ears. But vocalist and baritone horn player Rachel MacFarlane isn’t concerned about being written off as an novelty act.

"It’s not a flash in the pan," she says of the growing interest in Eastern Europe and Romani, or Gypsy, culture in the wake of successful acts like New York City’s punked-out, spectacle-oriented Gogol Bordello. She sees the band’s success as part of a wider public engagement with cultures of the world, with roots in the folk revival of the 1970s.

Not that Balkan brass music has become mainstream, exactly. When vocalist Briget Boyle signed up for a college course on music from the former Yugoslavia, she says she had never even heard of the Balkans. Then she listened to the music. "Once I got it in my head," she remembers, "I couldn’t stop." Boyle developed a serious cultural crush, not just on a collection of poignant melodies, but on a way of life in which music, rather than being a commodity, represents a "life-giving force."

I knew what she meant that evening at Ashkenaz as I unselfconsciously sang along to refrains in the Romani language, without a clue as to what I was saying. That vitality, though, is part of what makes the flair and pathos of native Romani and Slavic performers so hard to replicate. Though band member Peter Jaques has cultivated phenomenal stylistic command on both trumpet and clarinet, he’s the first to admit this. In his efforts to learn from some of the region’s master musicians, he resembled a nonnative speaker trying to shed a foreign accent: "No one needed to tell me that there were nuances I just didn’t have," he explains. Still, Jaques says his teachers encouraged him, sending the message: "This is our music. We love it. You should play it, too!"

Moving toward a musical identity of their own, the Menazeri plans to include original tunes alongside the traditional picks on their second, still-untitled CD, which is slated for recording in May. It seems the group is feeling justifiably emboldened by steady support from wildly disparate Bay Area audiences, from folk dance enthusiasts and Balkanophiles to supporters of Romani culture and urban tastemakers like the Monterey Jazz Festival and Amnesia proprietor Sol Crawford.

Indeed, every band member I spoke with singled out Amnesia as a tinderbox for just the kind of music-driven near-rioting Brass Menazeri encourages. And it turns out the song I joined in with, "Opa Cupa," translates as a colorful invitation to work it out on the dance floor. So whether or not you can find Serbia on a map, the rat-a-tat of the tupan (a Balkan drum) mixed with sparkling, agile trumpets, unabashedly soulful vocals, and the gut-rattling throb of the low, low sousaphone is likely to send the same unignorable message as a New Orleans brass band during Mardi Gras. That message is: no matter who you are or what you know, dance!

BRASS MENAZERI

With Rupa and the April Fishes

Sat/3, 1 p.m., free

Yerba Buena Gardens Festival

Mission and Third streets, SF

(415) 543-1718

www.ybgf.org

Also the Herdeljezi Roma Festival

Sat/3, 6:30 p.m., $15

Ives Park, Sebastopol

(707) 823-7941

www.voiceofroma.com

Unlock your Sons and Daughters

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Raw, skin-glistening sensuality and brooding, lip-curled menace — ah, what a combination at the club. There’s something to be said for straddling the edge of a knife like that, simultaneously titilutf8g and unsettling those witnessing the spectacle onstage. When my partner and I first caught the fearsomely hot ‘n’ bothered Scottish quartet Sons and Daughters at a music-shop appearance in their hometown of Glasgow back in 2005, we were spellbound, rendered immobile in a mighty glue of arousal and trepidation. It felt wonderful.

Despite the bright lights and merchandise displays, the foursome had cloaked the room in lurid, late-night basement ambience: nothing but broken bottles and dark-corner encounters to be regretted the morning after. Force-of-nature vocalist Adele Bethel brandished the mic cord like a whip, lashing away at the floor like a bedroom punisher as her bandmates stoked rockabilly wildfires behind her. The powder keg at their core, shrapnel-blues guitarist Scott Paterson, provided the perfect sparring partner for Bethel’s tales of scary love and lusty violence, his soulful baritone bellow and spiked riffs further elevating the drama. Then there were the rhythms of drummer David Gow and bassist and occasional mandolinist Ailidh Lennon — alternating between deathly lurches and full-blown Sun Records shuffles on speed, their purely primal, low-end grind hit squarely between the gut and the groin. We were transfixed. And so the love affair — sordidness and all — began.

To locate the first strokes of desire, one must consult Sons and Daughters’ 2003 debut, Love the Cup (Domino), for answers. A seven-song collection of murderous urges and dirty romances, the mandolin-blazing mini-album threw fevered glances in the direction of X, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and as the song title "Johnny Cash" would suggest, the Man in Black himself. Offering both sweltering come-ons and skin-burrowing creep-outs, the highlight arrived with the ominous chug of "La Lune," in which Bethel offered some small comfort for listeners’ inevitable sneaking feelings: "The fear’s making sense."

The courtship blossomed with 2005’s The Repulsion Box (Domino), a continuation of the Glaswegians’ frenzied rockabilly trawls through id territory. But my head officially tumbled over my heels with the arrival of the recently released This Gift (Domino). Produced by former Suede guitarist Bernard Butler, this third outing is an immense leap forward, heaping compellingly glamorous levels of reverb-heavy drama to the band’s more tightly focused explorations of the dark side of the pleasure principle. "Living’s so dangerous / Try to conduct yourself," Bethel counsels on the twisted soul rave-up "Darling." But somehow I have to wonder whether Sons and Daughters follow their own advice. Meanwhile, I seem to have fallen a bit deeper.

SONS AND DAUGHTERS

With Bodies of Water

Fri/2, 9 p.m., $15

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.musichallsf.com

Talking ’bout pop

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Ah, to be young and in love. Or out of love, for that matter. Or maybe even charting the leaps and wobbles of the heart up and down the romantic continuum, wondering all the while if this romance thing ever gets any easier. The drama, the pure blazing surge and spark of it all. Every smile, every stumble, every stuttered confession and misinterpreted admission consumes the entire universe with its deafening acknowledgment of what you knew all along: each emotional episode between you and your special one is the most earth-shattering event in all of human history.

Therein lies the pulsing, burning, white-hot core of any good old-fashioned no-nonsense pop song. It’s no secret. Take a trawl through the annals of ear-sticking melodies and you’ll follow Cupid’s arrow, soaring in a straight line from the Brill Building to the Beatles all the way to Natalie Portman’s starry-eyed assertion, "The Shins will change your life," in Garden State (2004). Follow that arrow a bit further, and you’ll find your heart racing to the love-is-all indie-pop of Berkeley’s Morning Benders.

The Morning Benders, “Waiting for a War”

The quartet’s debut, Talking Through Tin Cans (+1), chronicles the highs and lows of young romance in exuberant three-minute bursts bubbling with guitar jangles and winsome harmonies. Largely indebted to the sunny sounds of 1960s songwriting, the Morning Benders craft teenage anthems dedicated to the giddy wonders and tongue-tied stammers of the heart. Recalling moments of the Shins and Sloan in its indebtedness to classic pop, Talking is a remarkably confident debut, especially for a bunch of guys barely in their 20s.

"It’s the stuff we were raised on," says vocalist-songwriter Chris Chu of the Phil Spector, Beach Boys, and Beatles references that appear so boyishly and exhilaratingly updated on Talking. Chu, along with drummer Julian Harmon, met me at the Mission District studio where the disc was recorded. Sitting across from me, both positively vibrate with youthful optimism and boundless enthusiasm, not just for their latest accomplishment but for music in general.

For all of their cheeky grins and waggish humor, this is a band that takes its work seriously: during the past two years, the Morning Benders self-released two EPs (2006’s Loose Change and 2007’s Boarded Doors) and played extensively in the Bay Area, opening for everyone from Yo La Tengo to MGMT. While Chu was rushing to finish his degree at the University of California at Berkeley — "school was getting in the way of what I really wanted to do," he confesses — he orchestrated a work/share arrangement with the studio, thus learning the ropes of engineering and production. It was time well spent, as evidenced by the Chu’s thoughtful reappropriation of the group’s beloved decade on Talking. Throw in the bonus of an upcoming nationwide tour as the openers for the Kooks, and we’ve got pretty compelling proof that the Morning Benders carry much more spark than their layabout moniker implies.

Speaking of sparks, Talking creates plenty of them, thanks largely to Chu’s impressive whisper-to-yelp acrobatics and Joe Ferrell’s frisky guitar work. "Loose Change," with its soaring, sweet-release cries of "Why can’t you say what you mean?" over Harmon’s and bassist Tom Or’s rumbling, tumbling rhythm, will surely connect with fans of the Shins, while the melancholic double-punch of "Wasted Time" and "Chasing a Ghost" bristle with guitar bluster worthy of Built to Spill. Mostly, though, the disc revels in the sweeping melodrama of young love with playful arrangements laden with tambourines, piano twinkles, and room-warming organ whirs.

"We were listening to Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited [Columbia, 1965] a lot at the time," Harmon explains of the homage, and the addition lends tremendous intimacy to the confident cover with which Chu frequently masks vulnerable confessions. "Patient Patient," for example — a fetching doctor-prescribing-love metaphor sprung along by a boing-boing rhythm — pairs soulful Rhodes with earnest pleas of "All it takes is a little commitment / I’m a patient patient." Then there’s the elegantly understated "Crosseyed," a simple construction of strummed guitars and tambourine in which Chu ruefully observes that "our empty promises keep us from bearing our hearts" over the subtlest black-and-white-keyed sighs of agreement.

The kicker, of course, is being able to make all these admissions of weakness and fess-ups of lovesick anxiety connect with listeners — and the Morning Benders have done exactly that, having amassed a devoted following in relatively little time. Mercifully, with so much else in the world constantly in flux, there’s still comfort to be taken in tightly written, hook-loaded pop songs. And personally, I can think of few acts better prepared to provide the comforting than this outfit.

THE MORNING BENDERS

Tues/6, 7 p.m., free

Virgin

2 Stockton, SF

(415) 397-4525

www.virginmegamagazine.com

Also May 9, 9 p.m., call for price

330 Ritch

330 Ritch, SF

(415) 541-9574

www.mrrobotopresents.com

A time to kill

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS It’s a question of balance. If I brag, it’s because I also put myself down a lot, and I wouldn’t want anyone to think me insecure. That’s not it at all. I am capable of saving the day, but probably more likely to trip over a milk crate with a crunched, empty can in it. My fuck-ups are occasionally spectacular and always well documented. You don’t have to read Cheap Eats. Just look at my shirt.

I mean, read Cheap Eats, by all means. The thing about failure is that it makes better copy than success. That almost has to be a saying already, and I’m either an idiot for repeating it or a genius for inventing it — in which case I’m a braggart for pointing it out and an idiot for bragging. It’s a question of balance.

For some reason there was this idea afloat that, if the puerco pibil came out great, we would have no choice but to kill Earl Butter. I know, I know. It didn’t make sense to me either, because he was the maker of the pork — and the chief advocate for killing the cook.

If it was a suicide attempt, it failed. Maybe a cry for help?

I think not. It had something to do with bisexual people’s favorite film ever, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, starring Johnny Depp and Salma Hayek. I never saw it.

My favorite movie is Vernon, Florida. Still! Almost thirty years later! I’ve worn out two video tapes already, and it’s the only movie I ever made a CD of, so I could listen to it in my car, the visuals having long since been stamped onto my brain. Some day, after I finish film school, I’m going to do a remake of Vernon, Florida starring Johnny Depp and Salma Hayek as the couple who sits on their steps and talks about sand. Nobody ever does remakes of documentaries, I’ve noticed. Why is that?

Don’t think too hard. That’s my job. And you can rest assured I’ll do it. As soon as every other restaurant reviewer in the world is writing about movies, their friends, cars, sports, and chickens instead of restaurants, I’m going to go to film school and start making remakes of all my favorite documentaries.

The beautiful thing about Once Upon a Time in Mexico, according to Earl Butter, isn’t Johnny Depp or Salma Hayek. It’s pork. Specifically, puerco pibil, the marinated, slow-roasted pork dish that Johnny Depp’s character just loves. And, if you think following Cheap Eats can be tough, check this out: apparently if a chef’s puerco pibil tastes too good, Johnny Depp kills him.

I never understood why people complained about violence in movies, until now. You can’t kill someone for cooking something real good! Not even in real life. I just saw No Country for Old Men. Didn’t like it, but I have to admit that you can kill someone for losing a coin toss, pissing you off, trying to kill you, being married to someone who pisses you off, just for fun, or for no reason at all. But killing someone for cooking something too good, that crosses the line. I didn’t even see Once Upon a Time in Mexico and I’m going to have nightmares about it.

Well, Robert Rodriguez — writer, director, producer, editor, music maker, cutie-pie, and complete bastard for making me have nightmares — puts on a little cooking show at the end of the DVD, according to Earl Butter. You also can watch it on YouTube. That’s what I did.

Earl Butter followed the director’s directions, I believe, except for the banana leaves. He invited seven people over for dinner: one was me and none was Johnny Depp.

But he’s out there somewhere, you gotta figure, and for all we know he reads Cheap Eats as faithfully as everyone else in the world. So at the risk of reviewing my best friend’s cooking, the pork was quite … hmm, good? But not great. A little dry. And perhaps not spicy enough. Middle of the road. I say this for your own protection, Earl.

———————————————————————-

My new favorite restaurant is Thai Noodle Jump, mostly for the name, and because it’s on my way to the bridge from pretty much anywhere. Sometimes I need a bowl of duck noodle soup. Can’t recommend the grilled beef salad, though, because the meat was way overcooked. But the soups … big bowls, decent prices. Small, cozy place. Great name.

THAI NOODLE JUMP

560 Balboa, SF

(415) 379-6422

Daily: 11 a.m.–10:30 p.m.

Beer

MC/V

Future blaps

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› superego@sfbg.com

>>Lazer Sword sizzles — read the interview

>>Lazer bass-ics: view the vids

SUPER EGO The Millennials have landed on the dance floors, and they come bearing lazers. Electro bangers are raving tecknotik. The blipswitch just got flicked. Hard is the new soft is the new pink is the new blog.

Stay with me, I got breakfast.

The past few years have seen the largest graduating classes in US history, and fresh, fizzy kids are flooding Clubland. They’re cranking full-tilt volume and lobe-throbbing loops, tinged with aggressive glamour. Good for them. A little hyperactive angst to soundtrack that stunned gazelle look so in vogue these days seems perfect for the new electorate. The next few Super Ego columns are gonna get wonky on the youthful nightlife sounds and styles already exploding for summer, so push up your super-flat Takahashi Murakami bifocals, slip on a virtual mindpod, and let’s get kinetic. I’m a hype machine!

First up: Canada. No shit. The Great no-longer-so-White North’s on fire right now, following its recent indie rock onslaught with a tide of dance music innovation. Somehow, dubstep’s abstract rhythmic dynamics, the paranoid wooze of crunk, and the ghosts of the unjustly smacked-down ’90s glitch and IDM scenes have outsourced to Montreal, spawning a kickass, woofer-blowing bbbrrraaa-aaappp!

That’s the sound of Turbo Crunk, the MTL’s superinfluential monthly party and underground movement, which filters hip-hop thumpers through a fuzzy pair of Korgs to spit out jittery ragga and zipper-ripping beats. Last month, New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones dubbed the cataclysmic sound "lazer bass," which fits, since the prolongated sizzle of the low-end slices through your innards like a subsonic chainsaw. Live performers and remixers Megasoid, Blingmod, and Mofomatronix are a few of the Turbo Crunk prime movers, but they took their cue from the genre-bending Bounce Le Gros party thrown by totally crushable speaker-wobbler Ghislain Poirier from 2005-07. Poirier, who blew through San Francisco on tour last September and scorched many a virgin ear, records for Ninja Tune and does to dancehall riddim what labelmate Amon Tobin did to Brazilian samba more than a decade ago — chomp and warp it inside out — and there’s your Turbo family tree.

Lazer bass has originators in the states, too, especially on the West Coast. L.A. is repped by protean producer Daddy Kev, cosmic dubster Flying Lotus, and poster-boy hip-choppers Glitch Mob, a quartet of DJs and knob-fiddlers — comprising Ooah, ediT, Boreta, and Kraddy — that’s managed to appeal to both the gangsta rap and Burning Man crowds. So yeah, the apocalypse is upon us. Grab a fruity cocktail.

The Bay seems exceptionally lazerable, even though there’s no regular party yet to slice up the glow. Glitch came of age here — howdy, Kid606 — and Club Six’s sprawling techno-ragga club Surya Dub has become the epicenter for the kind of dread bass antics that lazer bass takes to a gut level. Montreal is Canada’s Silicon Valley, so the demographics of pan-global, tech-savvy immigrants and natives matches up. And despite its mechanical logistics, the lazer bass sound has a certain grinning innocence to it. These are kids whose dads turned them on to Star Wars, probably. The low-tech skronks and squelches riding high atop that neato bass blare — and those pixellated CMYK Space Invaders graphics — aren’t ironic comments, they’re a great space coaster to the electronic womb. The recent bathhouse hi-NRG, Italo disco, and minimal techno revivals shared a similar ga-ga exploration of the synth-driven mysteries of the cosmic past.

Local duo Lazer Sword, a.k.a. LL and Lando Kal, are our gunners for the scene. (Ethereal wunderboy Ghosts on Tape and trancey duo Hours of Worship deserve mention as well). LL describes what he and Lando do when they’re bent backbreakingly low over their displays as "future-blaps." Yep. The two hit hard on the hip-hop side: their bastard detonation of 50 Cent’s "I Get Money" and live robo-raze of Lil Wayne and Birdman’s "Stuntin’ Like My Daddy" torch floors, while their own stuttery blowout "Gucci Sweatshirt" (from Oakland label Pish Posh’s 2007 comp Got Howls) is a c-c-cult classic. Lazer Sword’s got an EP dropping on the B.E.A.R. label this spring, they just headlined Turbo Crunk April 26, and you can catch them twice in May. Who’s up for sonic bikini waxes?

LAZER SWORD

With XO Skeletons and VC4

Fri/2, 9 p.m., call for price

Balazo 18

2811 Mission, SF

(415) 255-7227

www.myspace.com/lazersword

GLITCH MOB

With Lazer Sword and Flying Lotus

May 9, 9 p.m.–3 a.m., $20

Mighty

119 Utah, SF

(415) 762-0151

SFIFF, weekend one: city songs and auteur-itis

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By Jeffrey M. Anderson

The first Saturday of the SF International Film Festival is usually loaded. This year, the broad array of movies included some disappointments: the documentary Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts showed that Phil’s a genius with wide-ranging talents and interesting friends, but it lacked drama; Ermanno Olmi’s One Hundred Nails was a letdown from the director of the masterpiece The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978).

The Castro had the day’s best films, starting with Carlos Saura’s magical Fados, so far one of my favorites in the festival. Fado has recently come back in a big way and Saura does little more than stage several music videos back-to-back with no commentary. But each segment overflows with its own narrative and emotional power, aided by Saura’s expert staging and cinematography (the screen fills with huge squares of bold colors).


Carlos Saura’s Fados completes a trilogy by the director

SFIFF, weekend one: Dario, Black Francis, and Roy Andersson

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By Jeffrey M. Anderson

I found it vaguely irresponsible, and perhaps even cruel, that the festival programmed its two most high-profile horror pictures on the same night at around the same time. Dario Argento’s Mother of Tears and Paul Wegener’s 1920 film The Golem both played Friday night between 9 and 11 p.m. I managed to see the Argento film in advance: Mother of Tears is the third in a trilogy that Argento began with Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980), but unlike those two this one is laughably awful. Written and performed in stilted English, it’s filled with continuity gaps, logic holes and otherwise unmotivated behavior. But its use of gratuitous nudity, gratuitous gore (much of it actually done with latex rather than CGI!) and gratuitous random acts of cruelty make it a hilarious, MST3K-style cult classic keeper. Not to mention that Asia Argento, though not exactly deserving of an Oscar, manages to inject enough sheer animal presence into the movie to make it worth sticking around.

Mother of Tears is supposed to get a theatrical release in June, while SFIFF’s particular version of The Golem was a one-time deal. The screening boasted a live score by none other than Black Francis (once again going by his Pixies-era moniker, rather than Frank Black or Charles Thompson). The good news is that it was a great Black Francis show, but the bad news is that I’m not sure the songs actually synced up with or enhanced the movie in any way. For the most part they actually rubbed up against the movie, competed with it for our attention. In 2005, American Music Club’s score for Frank Borzage’s Street Angel (1927), was pure genius, absolutely mesmerizing. Francis’ The Golem played a bit more like syncing up Pink Floyd to The Wizard of Oz (1939); sometimes something magical happened, melding music and film, but other times, you were trapped in some netherworld between the two forms.

Anti-folks get together for Kimya Dawson

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Kimya_DannyDawson2.jpg

As you’d expect from her brainy, rambling songs, Kimya Dawson is a pleasure to chat with. Here’s more from a brief chat; she performs tonight at Herbst Theatre with her friend Matt Toby on ukulele.

SFBG: So your life must have really changed after the Juno soundtrack?

Kimya Dawson: I love the movie and I love everybody that worked on the movie. I know that for a lot of the other people who worked on it that I liked and for my family it’s super-exciting and that makes me happy. It’s just one of those things, where this was never the goal for me. I never made music thinking someday I’m going to make it big.

SFIFF, day two: A golem on the horizon

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By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Tonight, I’m off to see Roy Andersson‘s You, the Living and then Frank Black‘s live accompaniment to 1920’s The Golem. Three years ago at SFIFF, I saw Frank Borzage’s 1927 Street Angel with a live score by the American Music Club, and it was one of the great movie nights of my life. I hope this one comes close.

living.jpg
Word has it that Roy Andersson’s You, the Living blows — in the best possible sense

golem2.jpg
The Golem will soon be hit with a wave of Frank Black’s sonic mutilation

Ramblin Jack and Country Joe

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Here’s a press release on an unusual coupling of musical legends as put together by Lee Houskeeper, press agent and worthy keeper of the flame for rock and roll music from the l960s and beyond:

Ramblin Jack Elliott And Country Joe McDonald
An Evening of Song, Stories, Wit, Wisdom and Much More . . .

Living Legends Share Stage for the
First Time in Berkeley April 25 & 26th

WHERE: Cafe de la Paz 1600 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, CA
WHEN: Friday & Saturday, April 25 & 26th -7:30 PM
TICKETS: $40 in advance (100 seats per night) Cafe de la Paz (510) 843-0662
http:///www.cafedelapaz.net

I first met Country Joe on stage at Woodstock a few years after he recorded a Woody Guthrie tribute LP in Nashville. In 1976 I met Ramblin Jack Elliott at my buddy Phil Ochs memorial in New York. Jack had introduced Dylan to Woody and has performed Guthrie songs his whole career. When I caught Jack at the Noe Valley Ministry earlier this year I was amazed that he and Joe had never met and got them together for this historic union Friday and Saturday in Berkeley.

This one time only get together will be a rare and historic treat for the lucky 100 per performance. There has been no advertising and I would be forever in your debt if you would let folks know about the show. The following is a

Two of Music’s Living Legends

and long time evangelical Woody Guthrie devotees Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Country Joe McDonald recently broke bread together for the first time at Cafe de la Paz

…and something special happened. Jack picked up a guitar and started playing Woody Guthrie’s Ladies Auxiliary and Country Joe, who has been performing his critically acclaimed tribute to Woody: This land is Your Land (premiered at Cafe de la Paz, dropped his jaw when Ramblin Jack sang some long forgotten stanzas to the popular old Union ballad. After hours of swapping lies, stories and lessons on text messaging, the two decided to do an intimate one-time only show right in Cafe de la Paz’s intimate (100 seat) Fiesta Room.

Lee Houskeeper
Managing Editor
San Francisco Stories
(415) 777-4700
newsservice@aol.com

“Fox in the Mirror”

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REVIEW When artists speak of found objects, they sometimes mean found — in a marketing plan. But Liliana Porter is different. The Argentine artist is the real thing, hopelessly devoted to convincing us that something is missing, not from her impeccable arrangements of miniatures and figurines — or the potent, often-hilarious feelings they invoke — but from our too serious attitudes toward the private parts of our lives.

Porter’s 2007 video Fox in the Mirror, presented in a show of the same name at the Hosfelt Gallery, reveals the artist to be a sculptural Gertrude Stein. Stein gave language body — undressed it, laughed at it, cried for it, and cuddled it. Porter does the same with Fox, manipuutf8g small, signature objects to Sylvia Meyer’s arresting musical score, which varies from lush tangos to symphonic yet anticlimactic movie-trailer music. "Oriental" pentatonic melodies are thrown in ironically to match Porter’s musical and military Chinese figurines.

The video begins with a series of vignettes more powerful than the following narrative sequence, which is eerily conducted by a well-dressed fox. They sparkle with sex and sadness as a white candle resembling a man and woman dancing in formal wear spins into tears, a bright yellow chick encounters an emotional storm, and a duo of Mao wristwatches move one tick forward and a lifetime of ticks back to Meyer’s electro remix of a song from The Sound of Music (1965). Sketches named after types of punctuation stimulate feelings of expectation as a turbaned musician seems about to swallow a bird alive. Javier Marias wrote that the present is a curse because "it allows us to see and appreciate almost nothing." He has a point, but the beauty of the statement outweighs the sadness of its meaning. The same could be said about Porter’s transcendent art.

LILIANA PORTER: FOX IN THE MIRROR Through May 3. Tues.–Sat., 11 a.m.–5:30 p.m. Hosfelt Gallery, 430 Clementina, SF. Free. (415) 495-5454, www.hosfeltgallery.com

Mad jags

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER "That was just a major experience that I’ll never forget and I never, ever want to have again."

So sayeth 60 Watt Kid’s Kevin Litrow of the mind-render that occurred shortly after he moved to San Francisco from Los Angeles in 2006. "I was contacted — or I might have contacted them. I’m not really sure." He goes on to tell me of being visited one night by a "tornado" of energy that swirled fiercely through his room and knocked him "out of tune," while talking to him in his head. After his guest finally departed, Litrow says he was limping on one side. Finding no corollary for his experience among other UFO reports — "it physically didn’t look like the typically oval-shaped-face kids," he says — he discovered that, nonetheless, the experience "physically and mentally opened some doors." Can the glitch-garnished, knocked-askew psych of Litrow’s band 60 Watt Kid — captured on their intriguing self-titled Absolutely Kosher debut — be partially credited to a brain-tweaking twister from another dimension?

Alien visitations, madness, rehab, and Libya — last week I was lost on a vapor trail, looking down from a star called Planet Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder, and waltzing to a psychogenic fugue only I could hear. But now I’m found. I’m told it’s in the water. One moment you’re staring at the cover of Us Weekly, wondering how onetime pedophile’s-wet-dream Britney Spears came to be transmogrified into Our Lady of Mental Health Issues. The next you’re waking up, kicked to the curb with surgical staples where your kidney once was. The price of gas is high, but tripping — and sometimes falling — through the mind’s eye, gets you even higher. April gusts have blown in a slew of artists, spinning yarns of spirits and out-of-body travels. They lived through this. You will, too.

PROVEN GILTY Free Gold (We Are Free) is the name of Indian Jewelry’s forthcoming recorded game, so surely IJ honcho Tex Kerschen knows how to get baby some bullion. "You’ve got to go and roll the rich," says the Houston experimentalist. "You gotta catch ’em leaving restaurants and saying goodnight to their chauffeurs. Wealth liberation has come to rest in our minds as the answer, since we personally slave for oil barons." Kerschen knows: he says he spent the last year working in a refinery while Indian Jewelry took time off to regroup and record. So Free Gold is simply wishful thinking? "You get pummeled with wealth here in Houston," he explains. "They’re building continuously — literally, gilded fortresses. I’ve had to hang terrible art for terrible people. We decided we’d gild the lily ourselves."

REHABIT IT "It’s nice that people are into it," Kimya Dawson says sweetly about the chart-topping Juno soundtrack that hurled her into the consciousness of the mainstream — or at least that of National Public Radio listeners. "But I’m not really the kind of person who keeps track or cares about numbers and sales. I make music, and it’s just kind of what I have to do. It’s what I’d be doing regardless of who was listening." The Olympia, Wash., artist started crafting tunes as part of Moldy Peaches in 1994, and she’s still writing — albeit with less introspection since the birth of her daughter Panda (she just completed a children’s album). Songwriting has been an outright necessity since she drank herself into a coma and entered rehab more than nine years ago.

"I popped out of rehab, and I was depressed and on medication, and I didn’t know how to function on this planet, and I picked up a guitar, and it made me feel better," Dawson explains. The first Moldy Peaches show happened two weeks after she got out. "It’s always been mutual therapy for me and the people listening to my stuff. I always figured if I stopped doing it I might go crazy."

LIBYA LIBERATION How can a stellar Oakland combo like Heavenly States top their last heroic act as the first US rock band to play in Libya after the lifting of a 30-year travel ban? To start, they spent about a year working on a film about the experience, relying on puppet reenactments and animation, before they woke up and asked themselves, why aren’t we making music? After selling the rights to their Libya adventures (producer Jawal Nga is writing a script tentatively titled Rock the Casbah), the band has come up with their most eclectic and confident recordings to date, Delayer (Rebel Group). The group’s next act? "We got asked to play in Iran at this music festival," vocalist-guitarist Ted Nesseth tells me. "But Genevieve [Gagon] couldn’t sing in public. Then someone e-mailed to say her friend was a journalist living in a North Korean village filled with musicians, so we have to figure out a way to go there and record. There’s absolutely no way any of that crap is going to happen. I think we have a lot of touring to do supporting this album, and then we want to make another one."

SPIRITED "You know," announces Triclops! guitarist Christian Beaulieu, apropos of neither the group’s new CD, Out of Africa (Alternative Tentacles) nor what vocalist John Geek describes as their "bung load of shows," "Sonny [Kay] from GSL recently called me the ghost of Dimebag Darrell."

"It’s really kind of impossible because you were born way before he died," I venture.

"Well, I told my friend I was the ghost of Steve Vai," Beaulieu continues, "and he said, ‘Holy crap! That’s the best news I’ve heard all day: Steve Vai’s dead!’ I’m just trying to figure out how to put a handle on my Telecaster." *

INDIAN JEWELRY Thurs/24, 9:30 p.m., $8. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

KIMYA DAWSON Fri/25, 8 p.m., $20. Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness, SF. www.ticketmaster.com

TRICLOPS! Fri/25, 6 p.m., free. Amoeba Music, 1855 Haight, SF. www.amoeba.com

HEAVENLY STATES Sat/26, 10 p.m., $10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

60 WATT KID Sat/26, 9 p.m., $25. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

Do you know the way to Plug?

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"Honestly, I’ve found a lot more talent in San Jose than I have up here in the city." Plug Label boss, MC, and producer Kero One (né Mike Kim) isn’t afraid to call it as he sees it from his San Francisco studio. At the top of the list of South Bay talent sits kindred SF transplant King Most, a producer and DJ otherwise known as Patrick Diaz, whose palette ranges from this year’s Genius Music mixtape, built from rare tracks by mainstream producers like Kanye West, Timbaland, and the Neptunes, to his upcoming Kingstrumentals album, which promises to honor influences as diverse as Alex Attias’ broken beats and Donald Byrd’s jazz fusion.

Kero sees the foundation for King Most’s talent in the knowledge gleaned from a ridiculously large record collection. "I remember going to his house and he’d have records in the bathroom, in the hallway, in the garage. You’d open the fridge and a record would fall down from the top. Production-wise, he has all the chops, the samples, and he knows how to work it."

Party people regularly get a chance to hear selections at Uptempo’s How We Keeps It, a monthly gig that finds King Most and Kero One rocking electro, disco, and a little hip-hop at the Madrone Lounge. Some fans of Kero’s debut, Windmills of the Soul (Plug, 2006), which mined a solidly jazzy hip-hop vein, might be surprised to hear a house set when he’s behind the decks. But the sprightlier pace and broader range of genres reflect the direction Plug Label is heading with its upcoming releases.

This year will see albums from Greentea, Kero, and King Most, all designed to cause consternation among record store clerks who have to decide where to file music that swerves between hip-hop, disco, Latin, and electro. Reflecting the listening journey that he and King Most have made over the years, Kero says he wants to blur the lines. "One of my biggest goals is to turn heads and open eyes for people who are not just into hip-hop. I wanted to make an album for someone who used to be into hip-hop and now is into something else to go back and say, "Oh, I can listen to this."

KING MOST AND KERO ONE

Fri/25, 10 p.m., $10

Pink

2925 16th St., SF

(415) 431-8889

www.pinksf.com

Les Savy life lessons

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› duncan@sfbg.com

When I call Tim Harrington, he’s in a meeting. It’s 6 p.m. in New York, and for some reason, I guess because he’s Les Savy Fav’s vocalist, I assume this is some kind of band meeting or rehearsal. When I call back in an hour, he’s still in the meeting.

"Do you want me to call back tomorrow?" I ask.

"That’s OK," he says. "I have just declared my professional day over." His professional day, it turns out, ends in a meeting room at VH1 headquarters in Manhattan, not in a practice space in LSF’s native Williamsburg. In addition to doing graphic design at VH1, he’s pushing for "interactive TV-type things," like e-cards you can design online and "schedule times you want them to be on TV so you can tell your friends, ‘Tune in and see that I’m breaking up with you.’"

The job isn’t what I’d expect from a manically animated frontperson, but Harrington, who attended the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design where the band formed in 1995, could give a fuck about giving people what they expect. After three long-players and an EP of dissonant, angular, twin-guitar rock with pop sensibilities and cutting, insightful lyrics — culminating in 2001’s Go Forth on bassist Syd Butler’s French Kiss label — the group took six years to release a new album, last year’s Let’s Stay Friends. The declaration of an official hiatus in 2005 led fans to believe it might be the end.

Instead they opted for restructuring: "It was really hard to explain without sort of tearing the whole thing apart and putting it back together again."

Gone are the incessant van tours; in their place are what he calls "guerilla touring": fly out, play a few select shows, and return to Brooklyn and "real life," which, for Harrington includes a wife and a son, Benji, who’s not yet two. "It’s the best way to tour," he says, "but totally unprofessional."

The outfit’s "unprofessional" attitude, coupled with Harrington’s interactive ideas, led to an online video contest for the Let’s Stay Friends track "The Equestrian," a fetishistic pony-play barnburner: "How many times did you think you could canter past my house / Before I called you to my stable for a little mouth-to-mouth?" In between shots of My Little Pony make-out sessions, the winning video — chosen by YouTube viewers — showcased a pink-haired eight-year-old named Bunny rolling around on the ground and dry-humping a stuffed horse like a prepubescent version of "Like a Virgin"–era Madonna. Was it weird having a little kid lip-synching such an overtly sexual song?

"I love that kind of complicated double energy — the tension of two things competing with each other," Harrington says. "In our live performance that happens a lot." Live, the singer runs around the stage, bearded, bald on top, a little chunky, and manically energetic — often shirtless or changing costumes during a song, perhaps into a sequined cape, while the band plays calmly around him, seemingly oblivious, all the while cranking out fierce squalls of noisy rock that are clearly the force driving the madman in their midst. "I think that people who don’t like us, don’t like us because they’re like, ‘I like one side of it or the other, but I can’t understand how they both can be happening simultaneously.’"

Harrington is not at all the picture of your typical floppy-haired waif of an indie impresario, embarrassed to be on stage and kicking the mic stand. He’s open and enthusiastic on the phone, sounding slightly out of breath, like he just remembered "one more thing" to say. He uses the word "passionate" a lot, and it’s clear that feeling is the key element in his art.

Without taking away from the rest of the group, it’s the cognitive dissonance Harrington creates with his stage presence and lyrics that make Les Savy Fav so powerful. Let’s Stay Friends opens with a track about an only partially fictional band called the Pots and Pans, "who made this noise that people couldn’t stand." Despite their audience’s protests, the unit sticks it out, realizing on some level that they know what’s good for the listeners.

Harrington doesn’t particularly care what you expect, yet he’s not simply adopting a world-weary pose. Instead he’s exhorting you to want more out of music — and out of existence. Nowhere is this idea more apparent than in the album’s final track, "The Lowest Bidder": "We’ve been bought and we’ve been sold / They try but they can’t keep hold / We burn, but we don’t turn to coal / We’re hills all filled with gas and gold / Take the trigger from the lowest bidder / Take the bargain back again." Don’t settle for less.

Listening to Let’s Stay Friends reminds me that there’s more to life than the quotidian world of work meetings, parking tickets, and paying the rent. "Music is the food of love, but reality is waiting for the bus" is a Subhumans lyric I can never seem to forget. For Harrington, reality is passion and waiting for the bus. "An area of interest for me lyrically," he explains, "is to be able to address whatever the harshest and most negative elements are in life and society and defy that, not with a pie-eyed optimism, but with a really cold-hearted optimism.

Don’t expect the world to change. Change yourself. Change your perception of it."

LES SAVY FAV

With the Dodos

Sun/27, 8 p.m., $18

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750, www.gamh.com

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