Ghost & Gale is a dreamy folkrock duo based in the San Francisco Bay Area. A whiskey-warm baritone and a buttery alto, their music lends itself to golden evenings around a crackling campfire. Their debut EP, coming soon, will be an amalgam of living room sessions, where songs were born over late-night conversations and countless cups of tea. “Take Me to the Fire” is the first single the duo is releasing into the wild. Though Kickstarter, Ghost & Gale were able to raise enough money to make the music video for "Take Me to the Fire." The result is an epic tale of magic and survival, intensified by breathtaking visuals. Keep watching until the end -- the story takes an unexpected turn! -(from the Deli Open Blog)
The San Francisco based indie pop band, The Aerosols are performing live tomorrw night at Hemlock Tavern. Sugar Candy Mountain and Pale Blue Dot will be sharing the bill. The Aerosols have also announced that tomorrow night's show will be their last live performance before they begin to concentrate on finishing their upcoming album. If you're an avid follower of any of these bands, make sure you make it out to the show. For more details, and to RSVP, click here.
Like contemporaries The Black Keys, The Steepwater Band, and The Black Angels, SF’s The Stone Foxes summon the days of hard-driven blues-rock.
Their full-length album Small Fires, set to release February 12th, is suffused with fuzzy guitar riffs, heavy, seductive vocals and dark, simple choruses. Their single “Everybody Knows” alludes to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” weaving a sinister theme into a hard-hitting, disconsolate song. Small Fires delivers as pure a dose of rock as can be found today—gritty, spacious, and to-the-point.
Check them out at Amoeba Records on the 12th or in Oakland at the New Parish Music Hall on the 13th. - Tina Aita
Fun Fun Fun Fest 6 is fastly approaching and you may be wondering what band or comedian will grace the stages this year.
Master of Ceremonies for Tranmission Entertainment, Graham Williams, will award sweet prizes for anyone who correctly guesses the lineup for the winter festival invading Auditorium Shores November 5th - 6th. Got a hunch? Go to www.guessthefest.com to enter. Last day to submit is July 4th.
We didn't get into a hotel until 4am. Not because of Rock and Roll reasons, we just didn't make reservations and every hotel around the area was booked. Sunday at the B.O.M.B fest was WAY more happenin' than Saturday, not talent-wise, there were just a lot more people there. The two best local acts we saw on Sunday were back-to-back: Cosmic Dust Bunnies followed by The Backyard Commitee. The Cosimic Dust Bunnies live up to their name. Spacey and other-worldly with a gentle jam-band-esque demenor. The Backyard Commitee (New Haven, CT) is more roots heavy rock with a blues attitude. They were widly buzzed about. Here's some shots of The Backyard Commitee.
The atmostphere at the BOMB festival was probably one of the more calmer but still high-energy, less-douchebaggy ones (more love, less violence) that I've experienced in a festival atmosphere. Covering two days at the Comcast Center in Hartford, the BOMB festival featured a great varitey of acts from Weezer, to Snoop Dogg to Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros.
One of the great things about the BOMB festival were the featured local acts. I have a suspicion that the venue sold much less tickets then it was counting on. Which is a shame, and this is all on assumption, but they did a really good job collecting and promoting acts regional and national. I was reluctant to go to The Comcast Center. I don't really like the corporate festivals. They seem to be doused in product placement, etc. This is the first time The Comcast Center has hosted a non-profit event -- all the proceeds went to The Hole In The Wall Gang Camp and Connecticut Children's Hospital.
We got there a little late on Saturday, around 4pm, there weren't many people there, but the bands were still giving their all.
The first band that really caught our ears was Forget Paris out of Derby, Connecticut who won the crowd with their feirce power-pop melodies. We got a chance to hang out with them backstage, share some mini-Budweisers and chat it up.
Low fidelity swagger. That's what Laughing Man's debut album, The Lovings ('63-'69), exudes. It's a short album that spans only seven tracks, but it is dense with artistic potential. The first thing you will notice when listening to this album is the unique sound of the production. The vocals of singer Brandon Moses are quivering and distorted, hiding just below the surface in a way that convinces your ears they are listening to antique vinyl. The guitar and drums manage to be both tastefully understated and sonically raunchy. The song structures are simple but based around the sophisticated voices of jazz chords and a wide range of tonality.
I feel tempted to write about this album in a way that suggests that its very genius is founded on a perfectly balanced merge between classic blues and soul and the leading edge of rock music; that the juxtaposition between post-modern soundscapes (such as the lovely minimalist droning on "Swirl") and dripping-with-attitude blues manages to adeptly cross musical boundaries in style as well as in the audience that appreciates and supports it. I'd like to go on and on about those things - about how a whole history of music that has thrived in D.C. is somehow apparent in seven short songs. I'd really like to point out that the last track on the album, "Mood and Dress," manages to consolidate all of those points the strongest. This is possibly the most self-aware track on the album with Moses's emotion filled vocals ringing in the fuzzy background as bubbly supporting voices are brought to the very front of the song in perfect clarity.
However, I feel pretty sure that the band would cringe at reading that sort of review. Getting back to my original thesis, I'm reasonably confident that Laughing Man really just took all the music that they grew up loving and stirred it up into a really great debut. It's lo-fi without pretention and an homage to the early days of soul without sounding geriatric (despite what the album's aging title may imply...)
On April 5th, Scattered Trees will release their full-length record, Sympathy, via Roll Call Records/EMI. In anticipation of the early Spring release the band has released a new track from Sympathy called “A Conversation About Death on New Years Eve”.
The band will also be performing on January 21 at Schubas.
