Loretta Lynch
"If Loretta Lynch sounds a bit off, it's supposed to; if it doesn't, you're not listening hard enough. Nothing's sacred in modern music, and while this San Francisco quartet holds outlaw country in high esteem, it's not entirely loyal. Loretta Lynch plays the sort of California country-lover's country that has no past, as if it rolled in on a wave one day and set up shop. Buttery vocal harmonies and wary rhythms convey timeless tales about heartbreak, coming home, and growing old that still manage to sound utterly modern." - East Bay Express

The Vultures
"Berkeley's premier purveyors of hokum and old time string band folly and mischief. Our songs range from the sweet and heartfelt to the filthy and frivolous. Mostly the latter, actually."

Mute Socialite
Mute Socialite is drummer Moe! Staiano (Moe!kestra!, ex-Sleepytime Gorilla Museum), guitarist Ava Mendoza, bassist Alee Karim (The Atomic Bomb Audition), drummer Shayna Dunkelman, and trumpeter/electronicist Liz Allbee (ex-Le Flange Du Mal). The music is a convergence of Moe!'s driving post-punk drumming and percussion guitar, Ava's free jazz sensibility and mangled country and black metal riffage, Alee's sub-bass, grinding harmonic interplay, Shayna's prismatic sense of percussive dynamics, and Liz's warped melodicism and seasick textures. Jolting, hocketing rhythms, atonal surf riffs, and blackened salsa grooves combine to create a singular brutal, polyrhythmic spasmathon. A primordial beastie unleashed on the world in fury and love!

Wah Wah Exit Wound
"The quartet's monster guitars, attack-drums, and dramatic tempo changes are mysteriously heavy, darkly psychedelic, and you can actually hear how long the bass player's hair is. The result gratifies audience and musician alike in long, rock-operatic songs like 'Failed Spiraling Majesty.'" -- San Francisco Weekly

"Seattle's Wah Wah Exit Wound are all about bashing their heads on the prog rock, as they liberally grab from the techincal precision of King Crimson and the unfiltered chaos of Japan's Green Milk from the Planet Orange. If prog is your steez, you couldn't pick two better bands to be influenced by." --Portland Mercury

Times of Desperation

Neutralboy

Jack Saints

Punk Rock Sideshow w/DJ Tragic & the Duchess of Hazard, every Monday

Heavy Winged
"...a vast blank wall of a monolithic windowless tower block, seemingly featureless from a distance, but so rough up close that it tears skin from flesh and flesh from bone." - The Wire

Barn Owl
"Unlike Brian Eno's electronics-based tone poems, Barn Owl's West Coast drone is distinctly earthy. It's Metal Machine Music from the organic aisle, with smoky landscapes of guitar and vocals hovering in heated sustain. Though layered effects overlap, the overall sound still bears the imprint of guitar strings, in keeping with predecessors like Charlambides, as well as heavier hitters like Om.

The duo is obviously interested in space, but they also have a natural sense of drama, something left over, perhaps, from their metal days. When a loose drum beat emerges after three hazy tracks of their handsomely designed LP, From Our Mouths a Perpetual Light (vinyl on Not Not Fun; CD forthcoming from Digitalis), there's a sudden focusing effect; when a gigantic guitar chord thunders from out of nowhere a few seconds later, it's seismic. A clear-eyed frieze of acoustic guitar takes on extra potency within the duo's minimalist architecture." - Max Goldberg, SF Bay Guardian

Sex Vid
"Sex Vid is a Sisyphean itch you can't scratch. This stuff will turn your lawn brown. It'll scare your grandma and make babies cry. It's the sound of a serial killer being born. Two years, three EPs, and one live cassingle later, the name Sex Vid is still being whispered with ominous breaths. Maybe it's the cool, determined ruthlessness that lies beneath the surface of a frenzied, chaotic brand of hardcore we haven't heard the likes of since the 1980s. Maybe it's the way the songs seem to be held together with desperate, anguished moans — a tortured sound that almost stares at you with a vacuous gaze. Who cares what it is? The band doesn't. Either way, I've been waiting months for this show, subsisting on a diet of broken glass and battery acid." - SF Bay Guardian

The Freak Accident
Featuring guitarist/ vocalist Ralph Spight from Victim's Family. The Freak Accident sports a crushing bass tone and moments ranging from raging hardcore to shimmering beauty to garagey blues.

Sisters
Olympia punks on tour with Sex Vid. Forthcoming record on Parts Unknown, home to insurgent stars such as Billy Bao, Snake Apartment, Homo Stupids, and Never Healed.

Modey Lemon
"Somewhere around Curious City, the Modey Lemon made a shift in direction, smoothing its rackety, blues-drunk grooves into a Krautish, hallucinogenic trip. You could pin it all on Jason Kirker, who joined after Thunder + Lightning, but the shift is equally evident in Phil Boyd's vocals, no longer abrasive, and mixed substantially lower in the fuzz. About the only thing that hasn't changed on Sweets is Paul Quattrone's ferocious drumming – and that's a good thing, because the Modey Lemon just wouldn't be the Modey Lemon without it.

Quattrone is one of three or four really distinctive, noticeable drummers in rock and roll right now. At SXSW, someone behind me murmured, "He's like Bonham," in a break between songs, and yes, he hits as hard and as heavy as the Zeppelin drummer. Still there's an element of chaos, of rickety, boxy, falling-down-the-stairs abandon that distinguishes him from all the classic rock guys (except maybe Keith Moon). You watch him (or listen) because it seems like he's going to have to fall off the stool at some point, as fast as he's going. But he doesn't.

What's interesting is how the Modey Lemon incorporates this brutal, chaotic element into a set of songs that are, on balance, fairly tuneful. In opener "The Bear Comes Back Down the Mtn,” the drums give guitar-clanging riffery an almost ritual heft, pounding like a procession of soldiers under the song's slow-churning mysticism. "It Made You Dumb," the album's most immediately accessible cut, submerges 16th notes and slashing cymbals under pop keyboards and vocals. It's a lot like Oneida in spots – placid and dreamy on top, explosively rhythmic and aggressive underneath." - Dusted

Lou Lou & the Guitarfish
"Rumored to have multiple members with familial ties to fabled SF punk forefathers Crime, Lou Lou and gang are the new true heirs to the throne of teen punk royalty.
Rightly deserving of this bottlecap-encrusted crown (the young Red Kross would be proud!), the Guitarfish blow the fenders off any other band in today's 13-17 year-old band race. And though that snob at the bar is sure to pride himself on yet another tired Old Skull crack, have no fear -- this is NOT some gang of junior high talent show squirts propped up with dad-sculpted mohawks, and his brief moment of self-satisfaction will shortly be drowned in their
singalong punk snot! With a young Penelope Houston (Avengers, dope!) in frontgrrrl Lou Lou, and with an undeniably startling display of hooks, and yeah, chops (!), this band of young destroyers is just getting started." -
Matt Roberts, Noise Pop

Fauna Valetta

Battlehooch
"Their performance is nothing short of insanity and is more art than rock ...... pure sunshine." - Rock Insider (LA)

"... the six members of Battlehooch create a fantastic racket that makes you want to scream your way right into a straightjacket." - SF Guardian

"Battlehooch sounds like an ungodly jazz beast, loose and furious at a summer music festival, tearing up some punk band and maybe half of !!! in its horrible jaws.... {they sound like} what the Mars Volta might have been like if it had no money..." - Willamette Week (PDX, OR)

Capt. Ahab
Antics-ridden primitive beat raveplo from the Southland.

Bryan Lewis Saunders
Standup tragedy.

60 Watt Kid
The San Francisco trio simultaneously pays homage to the culture of stripped-down rock n roll while abusing it irreverently, tweaking it with wacked out of time beats and infinite reverb. They blend psychedelic experimental pop with electronic glitches and old rock n roll chops. (bio)