Following up his debut self-titled EP, Warren Teagarden released his first full-length album, Across the San Joaquin , in mid April. Combining elements of country, punk, folk, and indie rock, his relaxed style is both simple and eccentric at the same time.

Battlehooch’s debut EP OOF OWF has already garnered much-deserved respect within the Bay Area and beyond. It is a self-made wonder-work of psychedelic rock, funk, and unabashed nonsense. All four of the disc’s creations are heavily orchestrated movements featuring all manner of percussion, guitars, and driving bass, with some classy Zappa-inspired horns popping up whenever necessary. Vocals are present but one gets the feeling that the listener is less expected to sing along than they are to dance.

Tom Waits gets all hopped up on some crack, somehow manufactures a lovechild with the likes of Leon Redbone and Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and out pops Jimbo Trout and Fishpeople (JT&F). If you’re not familiar with those artists, I suggest you listen to them before continuing on. [Recommended Listening: Tom Waits – Hold On; Nitty Gritty Dirt Band – Battle of New Orleans; Leon Redbone – Lazybones.]

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s move on to JT&F. Their album of covers, Hillbilly Bebop-Boogie (aptly named no less), transports you onto a railcar somewhere in the Midwest complete with tramp traveling companions. Jimbo’s gravelly twang on lead vocals plays back and forth with Annie Staninec’s fast-fingered fiddle and Greg Laakso’s ’20s-era jazz clarinet and sax, accented by flashes from a little xylophone here, a little cowbell there, and a little kazoo for good taste.

While the band’s lineup boasts seven members on this album, it’s never overwhelming. Organized chaos is perhaps the best way to describe it. On the surface, things seem quite hectic, but just a minute later you see how skilled these musicians are at layering their sound while avoiding drowning each other out.

The album is a great listen, coming in at just under 40 minutes, it’s a nice package. The opening track, “Just Because,” is the listener’s “All Aboard” call for the Fishpeople train. “Sweet to Mama” eases you in with a comfortable groove driven by Jimmy Sweetwater’s harp, allowing him the opportunity to showcase his pipes a bit.

I couldn’t help but love “Sure Had a Wonderful Time Last Night” and its ability to make me remember those nights that I have to ask my friends what happened, and still come away feeling like a champ. Laakso’s sax gets a chance to breathe and lay down some sultry accompaniment. “Travellin’ Blues” shows Jimbo’s best impression of Jimmie Rodgers’ railroad yodeling, and it’s not half bad at all. Wrapping up with “Y’all Come,” JT&F let you know you’re always welcome, and thank you for listening. It’s the bow on the present the Fishpeople call Hillbilly Bebop Boogie.

Solid musicianship, an ability to convey the funloving bluegrass-jazz-country music on a recording, and a voice that you can’t miss make for a great listen any day of the week (although I recommend a Monday morning as it will get your week started right).

By Tyler Corelitz

It seems like only months ago that I first heard about San Francisco duo the Dodos. I felt cool for listening to what I thought was an extremely awesome, but relatively obscure band, that just happened to be playing in my college’s cafeteria. Now, after a year on the road, these Bay Area starlets are gaining national attention on the eve of their sophomore full length release, Visiter, which comes out March 18th on Frenchkiss Records.

The Dodos’ passion for their music is undeniable by the amount of energy they put off in their live shows, which the band has tapped as a major influence for Visiter. Live, it can be hard to tell who is driving who, as the airy vocals and finger-picked guitar of Meric Long mesh with the hyper-rhythmic drumming of Logan Kroeber. Maybe Animal Collective covering Mississippi John Hurt or The Velvet Underground with chops? This formula is showcased on their single “Fools,” as the song alternates between pulsing rim clicks, catchy guitar riffs, and undeniable vocal hooks; all of which can and will be independently stuck in the listener’s head.

As an album, Visiter is truly a nod to the talent of Kroeber, who bills himself as an experimental percussionist. While the experimental nomenclature — for a drummer — can lend itself to self indulgent beats and sounds, Kroeber shows maturity in his ability to play for the song. For the Dodos, this often means creating moments of immense space and tension, by simply alternating accents or textures to highlight Long’s guitar and vocals. This attention to detail can be heard at the end of “Fools,” as Long begins chanting “I’ve been, I’ve been silent,” the listener realizes that the drums have suddenly stopped, only to return in a beautiful pop build that climaxes over Long’s continued chanting.

Through a twist of fate I ran into the Dodos as they were about to film for super-hip French video blog La Blogoteque. As my friends and I followed them through the relatively deserted streets of San Francisco, clapping and singing into a BART station, I realized that I was standing very near to Long; not out of lust or for lack of hearing, but because the Dodos have managed to make music worth getting close to.

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

Thee More Shallows is a band NASCENT’s been wanting to cover for quite some time; we were just waiting for the right moment. With the quirky San Francisco indie-pop group’s third album — and anticon Records debut — out last week, now is definitely the time.

anticon fans will recognize whisps of Why? in the new record, particularly in Dee Kesler’s vocals. There are also overtones of Grandaddy, the Flaming Lips, and even a little Bowie. Anyone familiar with these four artists’ catalogs knows they are fine company, yet Thee More Shallows’ proximity seems to be more organic than calculated, as if TMS stumbled upon the realization themselves only after finishing the album: “Hey, this sounds a bit like the Lips!” The six-year-old band seems to have absorbed many of the same influences and impulses as its labelmate and big brothers — krautrock, neo-psychedelia, instrumental and experimental rock, art-pop — and arrived at basically the same place.

Thee More Shallows’ liason with Oakland-based artists’ collective anticon evolved just as naturally: when Kesler learned that anticon artist Odd Nosdam was a neighbor of his, the two realized they shared common musical interests and began to collaborate on projects such as a remix (with Why?) on TMS’ 2006 EP Monkey vs. Shark, a Boards of Canada remix, and joint contributions to both Nosdam’s 2005 release Burner and Why?’s 2005 LP Elephant Eyelash. Multi-instrumentalists Chavo Fraser and Jason Gonzales round off the TMS palette, and on Book of Bad Breaks the trio sounds right at home at the esteemed, yet perpetually underground anticon. Perhaps that’ll change a bit with Bad Breaks; besides being Thee More Shallows’ finest moment yet and a stab at the sound the band seems to have been approaching all along, it also rivals the best releases in the label’s nine-year history.

WHAT’S IN A NAME:
-Thee More Shallows are known — by us, at least — for using very creative names on their records.
-The band’s nicely named releases include A History of Sport Fishing, More Deep Cuts, Monkey Vs. Shark, and Book of Bad Breaks.
-Thee More Shallows actually began as Thee Shallows, but changed after receiving a cease and desist order from another local artist using a similar name. Around the time they printed the inserts for their first CD, the group heard from a San Francisco musician named Brian Gregory, who was already performing as The Shallows (with one ‘e’). The group was at first reluctant to change the name, but they were hardly invested in it (beyond a grand or so spent on the inserts), and a legal order from Gregory convinced them to find a new name. After auditioning a few possibilities (Thee Original Shallows, Shallows Jr., etc.), they settled on Thee More Shallows.

DOWNLOAD CENTER:

Download “Night At the Knight School” (mp3)
from “Book of Bad Breaks”
by Thee More Shallows
anticon

More On This Album

“Like an open-mouthed kiss from God” is how a friend once described the experience of seeing From Monument to Masses live. Not having ever made out with God, it’s hard for us corroborate that statement. But it’s even harder to dismiss it; From Monument to Masses are unequivocally incredibly fucking awesome.

The backbone of FMTM’s musical style is a compromise between the tranquil beauty of instrumental post-rock and the rhythmic energy of post-punk. This underpinning sound is composed of layered guitar lines (sometimes as many as five at once), relentlessly shifting drums, and warm, lively bass. Branching from here are excursions into dub, hardcore, world, and electronic. The variety never exists for variety’s sake, but rather to serve the purpose of the song. At the beginning of “Sparpshooter,” for example (the first song on the band’s breakthrough, and to date only, full-length, The Impossible Leap in 100 Simple Steps), the trio downshifts from brash, chugging post-hardcore to intricate, hypnotic instrumental rock in order to represent the shock and solemnity of the events of 9/11.

This leads to the other primary element of From Monument to Masses: political and social awareness. All three members — Matthew Solberg (guitar), Sergio Robledo-Maderazo (bass, synth, samples), and Francis Chuong (drums, synth, programming) — are passionate about and actively involved in political activism and social change on various fronts. The band’s name reveals its central philosophy, which played as much of a role as music in bringing the members together in the first place: a conviction that power must be transfered away from figureheads and toward the people. It’s a revolutionary message that, despite the band’s success, Matt, Sergio, and Francis refuse to back away from.

This also explains the motivation behind the band’s decision to weave sound bytes of a political and social nature — culled from a wide variety of sources including news broadcasts, the movie Dr. Strangelove, and speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr., George Bush, and Noam Chomsky — into almost every one of its songs. The samples are not scattershot, but grouped and ordered thematically within and between songs. This approach cements the relationship between From Monument to Masses’ progressive politics and progressive music.

But the real test, the real proof of this band’s success, is that it makes some of the most beautiful and powerful music you will ever hear.

AND WE’RE NOT KIDDING ABOUT THAT
-The group came together in 2001 in Oakland, signing with Los Angeles’ Dim Mak Records shortly thereafter — right around the time it played its first official gig.
-FMTM’s debut release came in 2002, a five-track album on Dim Mak that’s now out of print.
-Its third and latest release was called Schools of Thought Contend, a collaboration in which the band invited other artists to remix a number of its songs. Participants include Thunderbirds Are Now!, Loquat, and Amundsen. The 15-track CD also features two new FMTM songs.
-In October of 2006, drummer Francis Chuong moved to New York City, but the band avowed to continue working as a bicoastal project. A new record and extensive touring are promised in late 2007.

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).

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.

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.