Happy Fangs is San Francisco’s war-painted and wiry rock trio poised to release their first LP, Capricorn on January 27, 2015. Happy Fangs is a band of three front-persons. Vocalist Rebecca Bortman, formerly of My First Earthquake & guitarist Michael Cobra, formerly of King Loses Crown, played their first show as Happy Fangs in 2012. She brings her high-energy vocals. He brings his grit-pop guitar. Together they make punk anthems to make The Beach Boys, Blondie, & Bikini Kill proud, Happy Fangs’ live shows juxtapose strong black and white visuals with their contrasting pop meets rock sound. Each show is a flurry of enthusiasm, loud guitars and hard-hitting drums—the trio writes an original song at each show based on an audience’s suggestion. Some people say rock is making a comeback. Happy Fangs is proof that rock-n-roll is here to stay.
January marked the one-year anniversary of the addition of drummer Jess Gowrie of Sacramento’s I’m Dirty Too, a duo with Tycho’s Zac Brown. Together, the band creates rambunctious anthems, which SF Weekly describes as “insanely fun riot grrrl ferociousness.”
Two Gallants performs “Some Trouble” live in Studio A. Recorded 2/12/15. On February 3rd, the San Francisco based guitar-drum duo Two Gallants are set to release their 5th studio album, We Are Undone, on ATO Records. While singer and guitarist Adam Stephens and drummer Tyson Vogel have stayed true to the two-person format since their acclaimed 2004 debut, The Throes, their sound has evolved considerably over the intervening years. Following 2012’s The Bloom and the Blight, We Are Undone is the band’s second release on ATO. Thematically, the album ranges from songs that attempt to make sense of the dramatically shifting social landscape of their home town, to the illusion of authenticity, impending environmental collapse, and romantic estrangement. Sonically, the thrash blues of songs such as “We Are Undone” and “Some Trouble” is balanced by the austerity of ballads such as “My Man Go” and “There’s So Much I Don’t Know.”
San Francisco electro dream-pop duo Cathedrals fuses music and visual art for a multisensory experience. Singer Brodie Jenkins grew up on a Sonoma county apple orchard and played in a touring family folk band. Multi-instrumentalist Johnny Hwin, meanwhile, grew up on classical music in a Northern California suburb and later toured for a short stint with indie-electro group Blackbird, Blackbird. On their can’t-miss single, “Harlem,” there’s a beautiful balance of Jenkins’ carefully layered vocals and Hwin on the guitar. Although the drums and effects make it seem like the song is heading in one direction, an alarming guitar solo punctuates the confluence of sounds and the listener can’t help but smile at the unexpected deviation. With new videos and songs on the horizon, the fusion of music and art never vanishes as the central theme of their creation
Gorgeous track from the terrific album “Flowers Of Ours” from the Philadelphian band Asteroid No4 dreamy shoegazey pop mixed with 60’s pscyhedelia and Latter day space rock, taken from the bands fifth album stoked with reverb, echo and tremelo “Let It Go” echoes the carefree pop of sixties Britain Having released more than half a dozen albums to date since 1998, featuring Gram Parsons Cosmic American with 1960’s British Invasion the band now live in the San Franscico bay area,
Five piece The Asteroid No 4– once of Philly and now relocated to San Francisco have been conjuring this kind of cosmicness since the mid-Nineties. Over a period of eight albums, including a 2013 collaboration with psych royalty Peter Daltrey of 60’s acid prog act Kaleidoscope (who’s ’67 classic Tangerine Dreamnamed that band), they’ve peddled a krautrocky, proggy, psych sound throughout. Unfashionable for many of those years, and always slightly overshadowed by Anton Newcombe’s Brian Jonestown Massacre, the timing is perfect this time. Krautrock’s re-emergence as a favoured sound is in turn leading to a slow re-acceptance of kraut’s much unloved cousin, prog rock, and this self-titled release has them excelling in such sounds.
Ranging from grimy Spaceman 3 influences (note their influence on their name) and stoner rock to Asian vibes and metronomic rhythms, “The River” even takes in Deep South country rock andThe Beta Band’s baggy shuffle, with backwards guitar and sitar sounds. This ain’t Kasabianwe’re talking about – a far more hippyish air pervades the whole affair. The grungy “Rukma Vimana” is driving psychedelic rock with quasi-mystical lyrics referencing a Sanskrit text about flying machines which will “Take you to places that you’ve never seen”, and “The Windmill of the Autumn Sky” is lovely, lilting country-tinged Americana, taking references from Gram Parsonsand Fleet Foxes and encasing them in a smoky fragrant fog. It’s the least ‘out there’ track, but it nonetheless proves to be a highlight.
Their Americana and Asian influences are most apparent on the Rickenbacker and sitar-led “Ropeless Free Climber” – which manages to contemporise the raga rock of a late 60’s Byrds – and “Mount Maru”, a lysergic piece of 5am desert rock and wordless chants augmented by tabla, sitar and a spooked-out spoken word passage which indulges their passions of bothSyd Barrettand a 1968 George Harrison to eerie, bummed out effect. It’s not all looking at the castles in your cortex or whatever – they operate just as effectively when they come across as snotty. The grinding riffs on “Back Of Uour Mind” (yes, really), give the album a much welcome kick ofThe Stooges‘ rock swagger, and “Revolution Prevail” is a welcome break from all things double denim led, sharp, oppressive and druggy.
Through dogged determination, The Asteroid No. 4 have continued down their particular path, managing to avoid being written off as revisionist. It’s encouraging that the success of the likes of Tame Impala and Ty Segall has led to precursors such as these also getting a look in guys have been doing it for so long now that they could, certainly on the evidence of this album, be cast as one of the originators of the new psych scene.
TRACKLIST
The River – 0:00
Rukma Vimana – 5:45
Ghost of Dos Erres – 12:33
The Windmill of the Autumn Sky – 16:49
Mount Meru – 22:54
Back of Your Mind – 26:37
Ropeless Free Climber – 31:09
Ode to Cosmo – 36:08
Revolution Prevail – 38:05
Yuba – 41:37
It’s of no shock that AMillion Billion Dying Suns come from San Francisco, home to the Summer of Love and Haight-Ashbury. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the group is psychedelic necessarily, there’s a certain fuzzy interstellar overdrive groove to this material – think of the Flaming Lips if they were floating in space – that some may consider to be such. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the experience of listening to the group’s new album is heightened by ingesting a handful of magic mushrooms before putting this one on the turntable.
First song and promotional track “The Garden” blazes a trail through the atmosphere and rocks out in a distorted fashion. “Real Life”, meanwhile, is what you’d get if T. Rex slashed their speakers. “Afterall” has a baroque style with an introductory harpsichord figure and reverby guitars that bring the song right into the soft rock ‘70s. Basically, what you get with AMBDS is a musical adventure, a trip into the heavens and the inner mind. Even when it doesn’t quite gel, the sheer scope and ambition of this album raises it a notch or two above the standard garage rock or psych rock fare. Smash your heads on the psychedelic rock to this, my friends. A Million Billion Dying Suns are out to expand your consciousness.
The Family Crest’s Liam McCormick. Since forming the band with John Steerlin in 2009, he’s expanded the SanFrancisco group to a six-piece. Then when it was time to record an EP, he invited all his friends to come play on the record. But that still wasn’t enough. He ended up putting an ad on Craig’s List inviting musicians throughout Northern California to contribute, getting 80 people to play on “Songs From the Valley Below”.
This year the band released its first full-length album, and the number of contributors was up to 400. I joked with McCormick that he’s going to need to hit 1,000 next time, and he responded with all seriousness that that was the goal. It all might feel a little gimmicky if the music wasn’t so great. Even with just six people on stage, The FamilyCrest’s sweeping orchestral pop can hardly be contained by the small clubs the band is playing. It feels like bigger venues are just around the bend.
In short, Al Lover is a producer from San Francisco, but there’s more layers to his wall of sound then meets the ear. Over the last few years he has gained much notoriety for his melding of contemporary and past garage and psychedelic rock into harsh yet spacey abrasive beats. Influenced as much by The 13th Floor Elevators as DJ Shadow, Al Combines crunchy drums, shaky percussion, chopped samples and layers of textured effects to create an unexplored path for psychedelic music, offering an earthy and loose approach that sounds more like you’re listening to a DMT fueled psych band than a beat made on an MPC.
Bay Area bred band Happy Diving as one of our Best New Artists of the year and “Big World” was a huge part of that. Splashed with humid riffs and bright melodies, Happy Diving’s sound is beautifully bittersweet; a marriage of power and pretty reminiscent of Ovlov and Tony Molina. “Big World” is a must hear sludge pop record that’ll have you singing along to some of life’s most disappointing and unnerving moments. Adding more body and oomph to their sound, producer Jack Shirley (Deafheaven, Joyce Manor, Whirr) took all of HD’s bubbling energy, potential, and power oozing out of their EP and doubled-down on it all, channeling it into a stunning debut full of heavy, unrelenting guitars that will pound your head into your intestines.
The Fat Angel Sings 