Blog Archives

January 13, 2012

The Daily Choice: Surf Club – Lonely Days

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Former Craft Spells member Frankie Soto snatched up a few new band-mates and started churning out material as Surf Club. Thank god for second chances huh? Surf Club’s new track “Lonely Days” reminds me of the sweet-toned songs of Beach Fossils, but with a bigger, noisier back drop. I almost passed it by this morning, but the vocals, quiet and pretty amongst a throbbing ocean of sound, drew me in.

Surf Club’s new album Young Love comes out on February 14th.

Surf Club – Lonely Days

January 12, 2012

The Daily Choice: Donovan Quinn – Shadow On The Stone

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There’s a small part of me that loves a good, well-picked, well crooned bit of singer-songwriter release. The part that rapidly devoured Case Studies album last year. The part that can’t believe he called his brother a ‘puss’ for years because he loved Kris Kristofferson and Bill Callahan. It’s not a huge part and as I get older, I find more and more it’s drowned out by the fuzzy, sweaty, spit-soaked garage portion of my mind, but it’s there and still holds court once in a while.

Donovan Quinn, a large part of San Francisco’s Skygreen Leopards, has a robust solo career under his own moniker (two solo releases, hanging out with Ben Crasny, and so on), a solo career I’ve been completely ignorant of until this morning.  ”Shadow On The Stone” is twangy and soft and slow, and Quinn sort of slurs his way above a wash of picked guitar and a slide’s melancholy elongation. His vocals lead the charge, just sad enough to give Quinn’s mellifluous delivery an edge of somber.

Donovan Quinn’s new album Honky Tonk Medusa is out on Northern Spy Records on V-Day.

Donovan Quinn – Shadow On The Stone

October 7, 2011

The Daily Choice: Positive Destruction

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Let me pull the curtain back from the magic show for a moment.  When it comes to music and me passing music on to you, I’m less a bold explorer and more an aggregator.  I’m internet obsessive.  My girlfriend, sweet patient woman that she is, has to pull me back from the webs more times a day than I care to admit as I can’t stop digging through the digital crates trying to find new music, movies, whatever.  Thus the music I present to you is less a product of my own adventurous exploration and more so the end note of a lengthy bout of scouring the choices other, possibly more talented, individuals have presented.

I’m a cherry picker and I’m not ashamed to admit it.  Hopefully my cherry picking gets picked over by some other aggregating young mind and then passed along to another and another and all of us can enjoy this fucking fantastic music being put out all over the world.  It’s way it works, no?

That said, I’d like to shower love on my new favorite website crush: Positive Destruction.  Named after a recent Pitchfork article on the exploding garage scene that’s been fermenting in San Francisco for years now, Positive Destruction focuses almost primarily on the more garage-y aspects of the San Francisco music scene.  It’s a pretty deep bowl right now, and somehow the PD kids manage to highlight only the very best of the bands currently destroying basements and house parties city wide.  I get the feeling that Positive Destruction is a one-man/woman endeavor at the moment, which makes it even more impressive that they’re able to hit the musical nail on it’s wavering sonic head over and over and over again.  Burnt Ones, Terry Malts, Wax Idols, new shit from Thee Oh Sees, new shit from Eddy Current Suppression Ring – every track seems hand picked to make me squeal with delight.

Look at Positive Destruction and then look at my Daily Choices since I discovered them and you will see parallel after parallel after parallel.  Positive Destruction feels like a website built for my music taste, and the more I visit it, the more excited I am to be living in San Francisco right now at the crescendo of this beautiful music scene and have a guide with taste like PD to lead me through it.  And that’s what a music site should do – shower love in a discerning way to remind the most cynical of us how lucky we are to be right here, right now.  It’s what we hope we’re doing at Sound on the Sound, and if my Daily Choices can inspire the sort of love that Positive Destruction does for me for other people, then I can sleep a little better at night.

Go, right now, and start reading Positive Destruction.

Or get a taste of their style from this amazing mixtape.

September 13, 2011

The Daily Choice: Colleen Green – Rabid Love

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City-dwellers are wont to admit it, but every major city has its scrappy sibling that’s taken the impressions of its older, more polished kin and turned it in to an approximated slash of strangeness.  Seattle (reserve your anger) has Portland’s titschy noise scene; New York City has Brooklyn and the amalgamations of sound that are constantly streaming out of there; LA has nothing because it is a sprawling wretched mess of heat and concrete; and San Francisco, San Francisco has Oakland.  Big and industrial and blanketed across an unending stretch of East Bay real estate, Oakland takes the increasingly polished (and increasingly similar sounding) garage rock scene and stuffs it with noise and fuzz and avant-pop and industrial tones and everything else I often wonder if straight-up San Francisco artists have left in the rear-view.

Colleen Green is a lovely example of this.  You can hear the echoes of garage-rock in this noisy track off of her Art Fag debut Cujo, but it’s only the barest of outlines.  Instead Green twists and tweaks it until it sounds like an eleven year old girl with a tape deck, a mic, and a bag of helium, getting down in their pink-highlighted room.  A collision course of 80s DIY pop and garage bundled together by the tenuous vocals of a pre-pubescent.  Gorgeous in its oddity.

Colleen Green’s Cujo is out October 4th on Art Fag.

Colleen Green – Rabid Love

Colleen Green – Worship You

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Colleen Green will play San Francisco October 4th (w/Dum Dum Girls and Crocodiles) October 4th.  With a Seattle trip to Neumo’s planned October 9th.

June 23, 2011

The Daily Choice: The Sandwitches – Sirens & Bells

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I’m late to the party on this.  I’m dressed badly and didn’t bring a gift.  I haven’t spoken, even slightly about the San Francisco-centric release from the new label City Limits. They’re goal is to release capsules of music that reflect that scenes from a variety of cities ’round the nation (perhaps the world).  Up first, current baseball world champions – San Francisco.  The Soft Moon, Tim Cohen, Young Prisms – this is a lovely selection of Bay Area musicians sure to draw you in if you aren’t already one eyeball to the scene down here.

Gorilla vs. Bear was nice enough to premiere a track off the album by the beguiling, bewitching lasses of The Sandwitches.

City Limits: San Francisco is in stores now.

The Sandwitches – Sirens & Bells

The Sandwitches play The Funhouse next Tuesday with fellow Daily Choice Favorites, Sonny and the Sunsets.

December 16, 2010

The Daily Choice: Sic Alps – Do You Want To Give $$?

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All month, each and every day, I’m tossing you a big old bag of San Francisco/Bay Area love.  Nothing more, nothing less.  Enjoy with wool socks on.

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At this point in San Francisco music, Sic Alps are pretty much local legends.  They’ve toured with Sonic Youth, they’ve played free shows at bowling alleys, they continue to challenge the status quo of just what they’re making from album to album.  They’re Slumberland single for “L. Mansion” was a sort of hazed-out bit of 60s pop, a truly hip-shaking bit of rock and roll that seemed completely out of the blue after the distorted, near experimental lo-fi sound of U.S. EZ and their monstrous singles collection.

You know what?  With the amount of enjoyment I find in digging in to a new Sic Alps album, this track “Do You Want To Give$$?” peaks my interest all the more.  The track strays drastically from the glowing pop of “L. Mansion” harkening more to the sludgy repetition of their earlier work.  Yet the add in of the rolling tom, the jangling acoustic, the whistling chorus – it’s an undefinable beast in the best Sic Alps sort of way.

Their new album drops on Drag City in January.

Sic Alps – Do You Want To Give $$

December 15, 2010

The Daily Choice: Brilliant Colors – You Win

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Keeping it Bay Area for another couple of weeks. Consider it my Christmas present to you.

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Brilliant Colors are just one of the handful of amazing lo-fi, DIY-style girl groups that started springing out of the Bay Area sometime last year.  They maintain the same sort of harmonic, thrash so popular in the garage girl set right now, but there’s a certain up-beat spunk to the whole thing, a melodic sort of cooing happiness that distracts from the rest of its ilk.  Oh yes, there’s fuzzy guitars and sugar sweet guitar licks, just pushed a bit farther.

This track “You Win” is out on a split 7″ with Girls Names out on Slumberland now.

Girls Names/Brilliant Colors split single by Slumberland Records

December 13, 2010

The Daily Choice: Bare Wires – Don’t Ever Change

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I’m writing about Bay Area musicians, all month long. That’s it, get use to it.

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Bare Wires are making quite a name for themselves right now, what with a free show with The Black Lips and Thee Oh Sees this last weekend and a new single dropping on Robot Elephant Records and a new LP. I’m quite entranced by their sort of stoned Ramones’ sound.

It makes me want to smoke a joint, pop the collar on my leather jacket and cause a ruckus.

December 10, 2010

The Yester-Daily Choice: Tiny Tim – Sunshine

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For the next month, The Daily Choice is going completely Bay Area.  Nothing else will pierce these sonic walls except for these sounds.  Well, unless something outstanding melts my face to the floor, ’cause you know I have to share a face-melter …

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Secret Seven records, the great people behind this San Francisco compilation amongst other amazing albums, have put out a fantastic collection of Tiny Tim’s early work.  Tiny Tim of course being the ukulele loving songster who recorded a massive slew of traditional and original work up from the late 1960s until his death in 1996.  His early songs, many of them unreleased, are simplistic and full of joy in a way I don’t believe music achieves very often anymore.  Tiny Tim simply plucked his ukulele, pounded on his keyboard, and let that deceivingly silly little voice of his lift up in to the sky.  It’s a beautiful thing to behold, music sans pretentious noodling and ego, just a funny man with a tiny guitar.

Secret Seven will release the album January 11th of next year.

We’ll be doing a full label write-up next week as well as giving away a few delicious little treats from these guys in the weeks to come, so please, keep your eye out.

Tiny Tim – Sunshine

December 8, 2010

The Daily Choice: Grass Widow – Fried Egg

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For the next month, The Daily Choice is going completely Bay Area.  Nothing else will pierce these sonic walls except for these sounds.  Well, unless something outstanding melts my face to the floor, ’cause you know I have to share a face-melter …

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Grass Widow sort of redefines the notion of grimy girl garage rock.  You usually think a lot of treble-y vocals, a sea of fuzz, a simple pounding drum beat, voila, every girl garage group that’s poked its head in to the sonic scene in the last five years.  Grass Widow, with a new release on Kill Rock Stars this past August, don’t play by those rules.  Instead they string together a series of disparate rhythms with haunting vocal harmonies and a thrumming bass attack that gives me the urge to sit down.  I’ll say this, there recent signing to Kill Rock Stars frightened me.  I find the label, in its older age, has the tendency to pop-out their signees (The Thermals anyone?) but my fears were to no avail.  Grass Widow continues to merge the thrashy girl groups we as a indy-rock loving community have become obsessed with an art-rock tableau that pushes them far above the rest.

Grass Widow – Fried Egg