Mark Matos & Os Beaches
Mark Matos & Os Beaches' Words of the Knife' is an album of many moods. It opens with 'Hired Hand,' a wistful road-ready jam that has been embedded in my subconscious since I first heard it last year. There are some bouncier tempos early on, but the group eventually settles into a more pensive mood, colored by the sung-in-Portuguese 'Palavras de Faca,' and similarly downtempo psych-pop nuggets like 'Hold On Tight' and 'I Come Broken.' Os Beaches have something of a forlorn twang, which complements the earnest, heartbreaking quality to Matos's voice. His subject matter, however, isn't traditional country fodder, instead mixing nature- and people-driven poetic fragments joined in a unique mysticism." - KQED

The Blank Tapes
"Matt Adams has one of those semi-one-man bands: It’s called the Blank Tapes, and a lot of people wonder why it isn't more famous. The music is rompy-stompy folk rock one minute, and stretched-out, sunwarmed balladry the next. Adams is a hip hipster hippie — he is, and his band is, implicated in the zeitgeist of interest in the music and culture of the 1960s counterculture. But a lot of people look only to the stereotypes of those times, and miss what was important about them in the first place: culling from the past, invention, an emphasis on joy to spite joylessness. Adams gets to the heart of a certain kind of '60s sound by leaning on the strong talents around him in the Mission District music scene, including Indianna Hale, Josh Bruner, and recently, the returned-from-Portland Sean Olmstead of Fpod Bpod. The recent self-released record, Home Away from Home, is a document of a man and a scene well worth hearing, whether you’re a hippie or a square." - SF Weekly

Dan Sartain
Busting outta Birmingham, Alabammy, Dan Sartain plays ramshackle, bent, rock n roll, combining aspects of punk's forefathers/mothers with the greasy mind of a fourth generation coal miner, to beautifully sparse arrangements of eloquent... despair, to downright perverse inclinations. Sounds as if Jonathan Richman wanted to be Hank Williams instead of Lou Reed or if The Voidoids were fronted by Hasil Adkins. Don't get me wrong. This ain't country-fried, barroom, pap that reeks of the post-punk midlife crisis. This is the true voice of a man/boy searching and unaware. (bio)

Leopold & His Fiction
"Groovy ‘60s bop...sung by James in a hard-edge haughty voice somewhere between Van Morrison, Jim Morrison, and Eric Burdon being channeled by Jeffrey Lee Pierce. Straight-up rot gut." --Big Takeover

The Twinks
Rock and roll roots, call and answer vocal harmony, interweaving vocal harmony, major key tonality, fresh and sweet and upbeat.

Adv. ticket link here!

Hounds & Harlots

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

Fracas

Hashshashin

Greg Davis (Kranky)
"These days, drone is a dirty word. What started as a term for a specific musical device became, in the hands of the likes of LaMonte Young and Giacinto Scelsi, a rigorously defined compositional form, one taken up by successive generations, in particular the horde of CD-R artists eager to jack into the form’s surface promise of immediate, ecstatic transcendence, often through intense volume and density alone. It’s this last fact that has raised the collective critical hackle, turning the term into critical shorthand for lazy experimentation and tedium.

Greg Davis, however, seems blissfully unaware of the drone’s demise and has turned in an exquisite example of the form. On the two 20-minute-plus tracks here, Davis puts on a hyper-focused display of two classic approaches. Using only synthesizers (a Korg Mono/Poly and a Crumar Stratus), effects pedals and computers, he lays out two extended pieces of immersive head music.

Over its 27 minutes, “Cosmic Mudra” starts with a nearly inaudible purr, gradually introduces complementary tones and finally manifests as an ecstatic roar of a chord. Davis aranges it all deftly, taking advantage of the sheer surface of the swelling cluster, teasing out all sorts of hallucinatory overtone detail. In contrast, ”Hall of Pure Bliss” is lighter, floating your brain like a buoy instead of splitting it with a laser beam. The bright, undulating chords give off a halo of harmonics that flickers in and out of visibility. The tense, heightened awareness achieved in the build-up on “Cosmic Mudra,” evaporates in the gravity-less drift of “Bliss.” The contrast makes for a perfectly balanced record, something much more careful, more considered and deeper than its monotone surface suggests." - Dusted

Moholy-Nagy
Jefre Cantu, Trevor Montogmery, aka Lazarus & Danny Grody

The Lickets
A luminously beautiful mini-orchestra.

Odd Owl

Tied to the Branches

Ttotals
"Nashville duo Ttotals may not be of classic mold but their psychedelic and shoegaze influences permeate all 18 minutes of the band’s official debut, annimal skkulls. Release via Tennessee 3-inch specialists, Kimberly Dawn, the 4 songs that constitute annimal skkulls demonstrate the continued power of rock and roll. Granted, Ttotals rip asunder the old blueprint with a stoner cool and a punk aggression that any grizzled rock vet can appreciate but underneath the recognizable exterior lays a beast of an unidentifiable stripe. The lazy grind of “Portrait of a Man,” the sloppy grunge of “Take Care of Me,” and mathematical kraut of “Upon Some Action” are all comforting touchstones that also prove out as fantastical portals to territories left untouched by the history of rock; lands ready for the caress of Ttotals." - KEXP

Dadfag

The Morlocks
"The razor’s edge of that overloaded, screaming 60s punk made famous on 'Back From The Grave.' - Lost in the Grooves

Hot Lunch

Slang Chickens
"Slang Chickens tastefully merge the two worlds of punk rock and country into what seems like their own seamless party of sound. I’m talking about the kind of party that you’d find Neil Young arm-wrestling Jeffery Lee Pierce (The Gun Club) while Hank Williams, The Flying Burrito Bros, Talking Heads and Credence Clearwater Revival play poker and on the other side of the room The Meat Puppets, The Cramps, The Misfits, X and Devo play beer pong. A sausage fest for sure, but a rad party none the less." - Buddyhead.com

Man/Miracle

Yellow Dress