By Stamati Horiates

Born and raised in the South Bay, Montage is a rising young artist you’d better get to know soon. Currently in the midst of recording his second album, The O Album, Montage has performed in clubs throughout the Bay Area as well as at the ESPN Summer X-Games, and has made an appearance on The World Famous Wake up Show with Sway and Tech. He’s also in the process of shooting a music video for the song “Get at Me.” There’s no question this rapper’s journey has taken flight. But how has he come this far? If you ask him, he will tell you straight up: “Persistence.”

Montage, aka Phil Corbin, first developed as an artist by drawing and painting. The walls of his house are decorated with intricate portraits of revolutionary hip-hop stars like Biggie Smalls and Tupac. Although he has enjoyed producing visual art, Corbin soon turned his interests towards other avenues of expression.

Enrolling in a graphic arts college and spending many late nights spinning as a DJ was just the beginning. Before long, Montage found himself flying back and forth to LA at the drop of a hat, recording in studios and working with top professionals in the business. In one year’s time, Montage went from relative obscurity to dropping his first CD, The M Album. “We recorded something like 50 or 60 songs and narrowed it down to just ten,” said Montage. The album was released in January and has since been gaining momentum in the industry.

“It takes me outta the underground and puts me in the forefront. I have a lot of respect for underground hip-hop ‘cause that’s where we all have to start, but I wanna take this to the next level. I wanna win them [Cali Heights Records] an award,” Montage says.

From drawing to graphic arts to spinning to rapping, it appears that the sky is the limit for Montage. The O Album is set to drop in November of 2008 and promises appearances from some familiar voices including those of Linkin Park and D-12.

When asked for the most important piece of advice he can give to others pursuing their dreams, Montage answered, “Make friends and take every opportunity. I don’t care if you’re sick or tired or you have to drive six hours to record in a studio. The first time someone offers to help you and you say no, that door could be closed forever.”

GET AT IT:
-The M Album is available in record stores, on iTunes, Amazon, Napster, MySpace, and at MontageWorld.com.
-Montage formed his own independent label, Cali Heights Records, also featuring artists Punky and Alterego.
-Montage is hosting a remix competition for his upcoming record. More information is available here.

Halou’s roots extend back fifteen years to a chance meeting between future husband and wife Ryan (songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist) and Rebecca (vocalist) in a Santa Cruz record store owned by Ryan’s father. The Cosebooms made music making a priority, and soon headed up to San Francisco to develop what we now know as Halou: a down-tempo/electronica trio dubbed “one the of the best bands in America” by Seattle tastemaker KEXP and “one of the most intriguing groups on the modern musical landscape” by the All Music Guide.

Halou’s third record — responsible for the above praise — was released on Vertebrae Records last May, after a five-year gap. Its predecessor, 2001’s Wiser, marked the introduction of Halou’s third member: a skilled drummer and studio whiz known simply as Count. Count’s pedigree is at least on par with the superlatives lavished upon Halou over the years: he has engineered and mixed in the studio for New Order, Blackalicious, Deep Blue Something, Run-D.M.C., No Doubt, Lyrics Born, the Velvet Underground’s John Cale, and more recently, DJ Shadow for the majority of last year’s The Outsider.

Have we earned your attention yet? Despite Halou’s winning formula and adept execution, the group maintains a low profile on the local scene. What a shame that a group of this caliber is resting virtually unnoticed in our backyard while the rest of the world swoons! You’ve always known the Bay Area harbors some of the best music in the world; here’s a chance to put your ears where your mouth is. Check out their MySpace tracks. If you don’t like ‘em, fine. But if you do, let it serve as a reminder to never stop rifling through the Bay’s nascent pockets of musical genius.

HALOU, HALOU:
-Rebecca and Ryan have also recorded under the names R/R Coseboom and Invisible Ballet, most notably during the span between Halou’s second and third records.
-Halou’s video for “Everything is OK,” from the new album, was featured on Good Morning America under coverage of the very same YouTube Underground contest last fall that catapulted Oakland-based grand prize winner Maldroid to national recognition before it had played a show or released a single song for sale.
-Keeping with the eye-candy theme, Halou performed an audio-visual showcase two nights ago at Mighty in SF as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival.

DOWNLOAD CENTER:

Download “Stonefruit” (mp3)
from “Wholeness & Separation”
by Halou
Vertebrae

Buy at iTunes Music Store
Buy at eMusic
Stream from Rhapsody
More On This Album

Golden Birds are still the best Bay Area indie rock band no one’s heard of. And the group’s 2005 LP Carrier is one of the best local CDs we’ve heard in years. You can quote us on that. Although the band has kept a low profile through infrequent shows and limited recordings, especially over the past year or so, what it has produced is pure gold — rhythmic, melodic, entrancing gold. The core of the group — singer/guitarist Webster McBride and bassist Karl Tupper — actually formed as Carrier in 2003, changing to Golden Birds upon discovering another indie rock group of the same name in Colorado.

McBride did something last summer that earned the band its biggest bit of press. He completed a road trip across the country where he played an acoustic set on the capitol building grounds of all 50 states, plus Washington, D.C., in 51 days. That means one show a day, for 51 straight days, with all the driving miles in between. He even flew to Juneau, Alaska, and Honolulu, Hawaii, while a friend drove his minivan to the next state on the route. And he did it all without once paying for lodging. Absolutely crazy, if you ask us, but he pulled it off swimmingly.

The band is currently working on a new EP (possibly called Softwar) with producer (and ex-band member) Hrishikesh Hirway, who now plays as The One AM Radio. McBride and Karl Tupper are joined here by Leyna Noel, Matt Brown, and Will Holtz. This lineup is scattered across the Bay Area and the state, but — and this is not a knock at Tupper’s excellent contributions on bass — its heart resides at Fort Oregon, McBride’s house in Berkeley (if you live around here, try driving by it sometime…).

FLY LIKE AN EAGLE:
-In April 2006, Golden Birds flew to Chicago to play the inaugural Mission Creek Music Festival Midwest (an offshoot of the highly successful Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival, which was founded ten years ago in San Francisco). This coming March 30, the band will travel to Iowa City, Iowa, to play year two.
-New Golden Birds member Leyna Noel is a longtime friend of the band. The 25-year-old released her first solo album in 2004 and has a new one coming soon called From the Mouth of the Jar.
-Drummer Matt Brown also plays in the LA-based band Foot Foot, for which his brother Josh sings and plays guitar.

Hometown: San Francisco
Next local show: 3/22, Red Devil Lounge
Upcoming release: Free At Last, 2007

I had to do a double-take to make sure I wasn’t listening to some lost Queen tracks instead of the full-length debut of 29-year-old San Francisco musician Josh Fix. No kidding. His production values are top-notch, his vocals and instrumental parts fully realized, and his songwriting consistently glorious — replete with melodies, harmonies, hooks, and all the pleasures of grandiose ’70s pop-rock. But unlike Freddie Mercury, Fix never goes over the top — though he has retained the soaring background chorus vocals.

By keeping his tunes rooted in Elton John-esque turns at a Hammond B3 and an antique Emerson upright piano, and by being blessed with a vocal range that doesn’t dare reach Mercury’s heights, Fix has fixed the bombastic ’70s style for the more jilted ’00s. That’s not to say he doesn’t have a ton of fun with it. Just check out the piano ballad “Rock and Roll Slut,” track five on Free At Last: “I’ve been going with a rock and roll slut / At least that’s what she calls herself, I know she’s not / She’s so good she won’t even complain / When I come home late smelling like a drain.”

This record captures the ideal balance of camp and rock. With few missteps, Fix deftly revives an era that he wasn’t around to experience, yet knows just where it went right. Free At Last will be released this summer, and since Fix got hooked up with a pretty sweet distribution deal, the record will be available just about everywhere (“iTunes, Best Buy, the whole shebang, except of course Tower Records, hehe,” he wrote in an email).

HE IS THE CHAMPION:
-In 2004, Fix released a seven-track EP called Steinway the Hard Way. It met with rave reviews tagging him a piano rock revivalist.
-Fix has received coverage in the New York Daily News, the Portland Press Herald, KTVU Channel Two news, the Boston Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, and others.
-Through a hot demo that made its way into some pretty famous hands, Fix has made fans of Lenny Kravitz, Eddie Van Halen, Toto, and the Who (for whom Fix’s previous band the Furious Force opened at a gig in Los Angeles after Adam Duritz of scheduled act the Counting Crows lost his voice).

IMEEM site

Hometown: Berkeley

Next local show: 3/2, Oakland Metro

Recent release: The Get Down, 2006

Believe us, we’d be the first to say we’re done with the whole dance-punk thing. On principle alone, we’re just tired of it. Because face it, most of the bands suck. We get it: You discovered Gang of Four. You have a stylish haircut. You think it’s cute to coerce indie rockers to dance. Done yet? Tempo No Tempo don’t escape the latter trap, needlessly bragging on their MySpace page that they sound like “the first time you danced in public and felt okay about it.” But what makes Tempo No Tempo different from the Rapture et al is that TNT are from Berkeley and obviously not interested in assimilating into the dying dance-punk masses.

How do we know this? Because, for one thing, they have normal haircuts. This is very important. Also, of course, there’s the music. Tempo No Tempo are equally familiar with Wire, Interpol, and the Strokes, crafting danceable rock music as opposed to exaggerated beats with pointy guitar parts. They also cite local post-rock heroes From Monument to Masses as an influence. This doesn’t manifest ostensibly in their tunes, but certainly can’t be a bad thing. It’s also promising that they include an acoustic song on MySpace: proof that TNT are looking more to establish themselves as a legit rock group with strong songs than to merely associate with a subgenre that has attracted so many substanceless followers.

Tempo No Tempo is a young band, formed by four UC Berkeley students in 2004. The songs they’ve churned out so far are promising — especially “Static,” which comes from their debut EP, The Get Down, home-recorded and self-released last year. Sounding both youthfully exuberant and strikingly mature, the song could catapult the band to much bigger things if heard by the right person. Over the last year, TNT has earned the attention of Pitchfork and local music mag The Deli Magazine, as well as an opening slot for LA group Ima Robot.

CONCERT NO CONCERT

-Tempo No Tempo play tonight, that’s right tonight, with fellow local groups Panda and Facing New York at the Metro in Oakland. More local bands should round off the bill. Only $10! Head over if you have the chance.

-For those of you who are busy tonight or outside of the East Bay, Tempo No Tempo has shows coming up at Epiphany’s in Santa Rosa (4/6), the Boardwalk Bowl in Santa Cruz (4/13), and Streetlight Records in San Jose (4/14).

When a local band plays music right up your alley and has been covered by both the SF Weekly and the Chronicle, yet you still haven’t heard of them, does this mean you’ve spent the last year in a cave? In NASCENT’s case, no, unless small apartments count as caves. More likely, it means that there’s so much great independent music going on in the Bay Area right now that even those of us who make an effort to hear as much of it as possible are bound to miss some of the good stuff.

The Love X Nowhere is one of those innumerable mystery bands that play local shows all the time, frequently impress fans and critics, and earn occasional write-ups in local publications, yet still operate off the radar of your average indie aficionado. NASCENT is here to fix that. Psychedelic rock is certainly not nearly as popular today as it was during its late-’60s heyday, but if it’s going to continue to catch on among younger audiences anywhere, it’s gonna happen in San Francisco.

The Love X Nowhere’s sound is more akin to Pink Floyd than the Grateful Dead, but the idea is the same: trip out to long, nearly formless songs that allow the mind to wander and the body to relax. At live shows, the band projects colorful — shall we say, LSD-inspired? — visuals on a giant screen behind the stage to facilitate the whole tune in, turn on, drop out experience. Yet all these associations with ’60s counterculture bely the group’s firm grip on ’90s indie- and post-rock. TLXN fans are not aging hippies (well, some may be), but moreso hipsters and indie rockers who like to spin My Bloody Valentine and Cocteau Twins records late at night. It may be too easy to declare that this is a talented, psychedelia-inspired SF rock group for the 21st century, but that’s the truth.

THE LOVE X TIMES THREE:
-TLXN have released three EPs to date, and may be releasing their debut full-length within the year.
-The first EP, self-titled, came in 2004. It contains six tracks and charts the progress of founding members Gabriel Leis and Michael Chulada from their previous band, space-rock outfit Muad Dib.
-The second EP, Odyssey, was released in 2005 and featured six new songs.
-The third and latest EP, Into the Fire, was released last year on vinyl only.

Looking at the above picture of Maldroid, you may be asking yourself: What’s up with the brown suits? And the painted briefcase? And why is the band posing in front of a row of Gibson guitars? Good questions, all…good questions with very good answers. To find them, we direct you to this cover story on Maldroid that was published today in the East Bay Express.

The EBX story will tell you all you ever wanted to know — and didn’t realize you needed to know — about Maldroid, an Oakland rock group that in the last three months has taken an utterly unique path to success. There may be no other band quite like it in the history of the music biz, and that’s no hyperbole.

The short version? After two years of planning and preparation, Maldroid was launched to national success — including being interviewed on Good Morning America and meeting with major labels — before it had played a single live show or released a single song for sale. This may sound like an anomaly or a stroke of luck, but it’s neither: Founder and lead singer Ryan Divine planned at the band’s conception three years ago to build Maldroid on music videos. YouTube, the platform that would eventually put the band before millions of eyes (again, no hyperbole), didn’t even exist at the time he started working on his first video.

To read more, and to check out some great photos of the band, read the Express story.

BY THE NUMBERS:
-Maldroid’s first video, for “He Said, She Said,” has earned over 700,000 views on YouTube since early October. Most of those came after the contest win was announced in late November.
-Its second video, for “Heck No (I’ll Never Listen to Techno!),” has earned over 900,000 views since January 1. The majority have come since early February, when, in the span of five days that the video was posted on the YouTube homepage, its view count totalled 700,000.
-Maldroid’s digital EP, Malfunction, has sold over 800 downloads through the iMusicast website.
-News 3/30/07: Maldroid signs to SF indie label Fuzz.

Hometown: Alameda
Next local show: 2/7, The Uptown Nightclub
Recent release: For Better or Worse, 2005

We don’t have many Heartland rockers here on the West Coast, but East Bay native Paul Manousos is definitely one of ‘em. “Something caught me,” is all he can say of his lifelong connection to music. Five years of incubation in a music-loving household led him to sit down at the family piano and play. By age sixteen he was writing songs on guitar — moved to make his own racket by eternally influential rock ’n’ rollers like Mick Jagger, Elvis Costello, Roy Orbison, and Bruce Springsteen.

From 1999 to 2002, he played in blues-rock quartet Power 13, which released two albums on Manousos’ own label, Shock and Fall Records. In ‘03 he embarked upon a solo career; his debut, For Better or Worse, came in ‘05. Since then he’s been touring like mad, embracing the publicity side of things, and finally looking to sign with a label — all evidence that his sophomore solo album may be his biggest yet. We don’t have any information on it yet, but for a career musician like Manousos, it’s gotta be in the works.

For Better or Worse is a collection of modern Americana that’s refreshingly loyal to pioneers of the craft, yet sharing in the progression of second- and third-generation roots-rockers like John Hiatt and Ryan Adams. Manousos knows the genre doesn’t thrive on new ideas so much as naked talent, and his music teems with earnest familiarity.

DEFINITELY FOR BETTER:
-For Better or Worse was produced by Steve Fisk. The Seattle-based songwriter/producer has also worked with Nirvana, Soundgarden, Beat Happening, and Screaming Trees. Manousos doesn’t fit into that alt-rock/grunge mould, but says he and Fisk have been friends for years.
-Manousos has received positive press in the Oakland Tribune, PopMatters [scroll down a bit], and HARP Magazine, among others.
-His album’s leadoff track, “Another Day in the Life,” has been added to college radio and commercial stations across the country.

Hometown: San Francisco
Next local show: 3/1, Rickshaw Stop
Recent release: Lonely Road Revival, 2006

We’ve heard a lot of good country-punk-rock coming from San Francisco in the last few years, and this is the absolute best. No kidding. We would go so far as to say we like Trainwreck Riders more than Two Gallants, with whom they completed a major tour last summer and fall. Now don’t get us wrong, Two Gallants write some great songs with excellent lyrics. They’re intense as hell, and for a duo, hard to beat. But as far as pure listening enjoyment goes, Trainwreck Riders have more to offer.

Here’s the deal: listening to Two Gallants makes you think “Damn, these guys are awesome!” (which they are). You’ll tell your friends about them, play a couple cool songs off the record, and feel good about it all. But listening to Trainwreck Riders really makes you feel. It moves you to get up and dance, sip some whiskey, ride a train (if you’re from Oakland, ghost-ride it), fire a rifle, then sleep with someone wearing 19th century getup…or pan for some gold, march in place, tap your toe, bang your head, and throw your elbows in the pit. While Trainwreck Riders’ lyrics can’t match Two Gallants’ literary quality, their music has a more palpable energy. Where the Gallants have grit, the Riders have spit. It’s alt-country out of the box, old-fashioned punk rock. It’s grey, it’s old-timey. It’s San Francisco on a silver disc, and you won’t find much better rock music in the city right now.

BFF’S:
-Trainwreck Riders and Two Gallants sound similar, have toured — and been arrested — together, and are both from San Francisco. Yes, they’re friends.
-Don’t forget to catch Trainwreck Riders co-headlining the Rickshaw Stop with labelmates Langhorn Slim on March 1 for Noise Pop. That’s gonna kick some ass.
-A cool new video for the song “Christmas Time Blues” is available here.

Hometown: San Francisco
Next local show: 10/19, 12 Galaxies
Upcoming release: Trumpery Metier, 2006

[This post originally published 8/22/06.]

Ahhh…beautiful. Instrumental prog-rock. Crime in Choir play it as well as anyone you’re likely to hear — anywhere. NASCENT got its hands on the band’s upcoming 10/31 release, and it’s a doozy: a cinematic, technical, aggressive, utterly imaginative and flawlessly performed doozy. Trumpery Metier is the band’s third full-length in six years and first with Gold Standard Laboratories.

On the surface, Crime in Choir may seem like just one in a gang of instrumental prog/post-rock groups in San Francisco. The passive observer may struggle to avoid pat comparisons to local standouts like Continental, the Ebb and Flow, the Rum Diary, and Audio Out Send. But that’s a big mistake. The new album, which improves upon an already strong formula, contains not a dull moment — a certain accomplishment in the genre, achieved through creativity that knows no limits. Drawing heavily on math-rock and avant-garde jazz, Crime in Choir deftly violate the already broad boundaries of instrumental prog- and post-rock. And they do it with an energy that is instantly contagious. Grand, baroque, and utterly pretentious: we fuckin’ love it.

INCESTUOUS A-LIST LINE-UP:
-Famed Hella drummer Zach Hill co-founded and just recently departed from Crime in Choir.
-New drummer Tim Soete also plays in the equally rad Fucking Champs.
-Pianist/keyboardist Kenny Hopper, the other CiC co-founder, also co-founded At The Drive-In.
-CiC Guitarist Jarrett Wrenn was another founding member of At The Drive-In.
-Fucking Champs guitarist and local studio maven Tim Green produced Trumpery Metier.