Unpiano | Music Blog

Ventura’s Tall Tales And The Silver Lining have a knack for capturing the sounds of the California coast. Conjuring up the soft sounds of 70s AM radio and the winding Ventura Highway, Trevor Beld-Jimenez and his rotating cast of players deliver a summertime night drive’s selection of jangly, rambling psych-tinged jams with the delivery that matches the best of Vetiver, Wilco and the like.

Tall Tales And The Silver Lining – Collar To The Wind

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//photo by erez avissar

Do I even need to tell you about this by now? DIIV is basically writing new Cure songs, which sounds like a diss but is actually the best thing to happen in a long time. Formerly called Dive and made up of guys like Zachary Cole Smith from Beach Fossils and Colby Hewitt from Smith Westerns, DIIV is relasing their new album Oshin on Captured Tracks (who the fuck else) in June. I missed their show last month in San Francisco because I am no good and their tour just ended, but go see them wherever they pop up next and scoop any vinyl you see real fast.

DIIV – Doused

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//from tespsic magazine

New Twin Shadow from their upcoming release Confess on 4AD. I like what I hear so far. Let’s get super sexy and see what happens.

Twin Shadow – Five Seconds

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//cover art by coL

Yes the Lilys records have the biggest, most unabashed crush of MBV ever and yes their sound has run the gamut from mod revival to shoegaze and just about everything else in between. However the sound they ended up with on 2000′s Selected EP is purely ecstatic and has been described as “watercolors amplified”. Case in point – today I was having one of those days where I was incapable about being excited about anything and all the colors had faded from the scenery leaving a grayness that hung all over everything. Then I put this record on and it was like turning a fire hose on inside my brain. It woke me up, drenched my eyes in color and made me feel okay about the world again. They are just that kind of band and Kurt Heasley is just that type of guy.

Lilys – Won’t Make You (Sleepy)
Lilys – Touch The Water

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Bonus:
Lilys – Precollection (from Precollection)
Lilys – 365 (from Precollection)
Lilys – Ginger (from A Brief History of Amazing Letdowns)

Holy shit, how is Summer not here yet? As maybe you can tell by now, all I like posting about are jams that you can blast at 3am while riding your bike through the warm misty night. I try to be patient and hold these songs until they are more appropriate, but patience is not one of my virtues. Since I have no willpower, your job is remembering to go back and play these songs when it’s time. Deal? Okay then.

David Speck has been hiding out in San Francisco making his synth-heavy classics for a minute now and has had releases on heavy hitters like Mexican Summer and Voice Academy in the last couple of years. There is definitely some Haunted Graffiti in these songs somewhere, but there are so many other influences that it ends up emerging as a cohesive project of it’s own and you forget that reference in seconds. When the guitars drop in and dance around on top of the heavy bass, something happens that you can feel all the way to your fingertips. Now take your fingertips and run them through your hair. Feel that electricity? Me too.

Part Time – Night Drive
Part Time – I Wanna Take You Out
Part Time – In This Filthy City

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The new Beach House album is wonderful. Everything that made you fall for them in the first place is intact and they even dropped some of the pop allure that made some people tune out the last album (check out the staccato guitar on ‘Wishes’). The internet is pretty locked down for the upcoming release of Bloom so I don’t expect these links to be live for very long. But between the officially leaked single ‘Myth’, and the songs below I think it’s safe to say that you should go buy it when it drops on May 15th.

Beach House – Wishes
Beach House – Irene

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Jay Howell has been going on about Cruel Summer since they started playing, and I figured it made sense that he should say something about the best band of the 90′s that actually exists right now. San Francisco is full of jangly guitars, but only Cruel Summer combines it with shoe gaze to sound like your favorite band when you were fifteen. Turns out Jay was a total dick about it and wouldn’t give me anything, so I pasted our chat below and made the post about that instead. How you like them apples?

Jesse: Hey, can you give me a review of Cruel Summer, like whatever your brain spits out right now?
Jay: no
Jesse: I want a quote or a line
Jay: fuckkk
Jay: didn’t they get voted best new sf band or something?
Jesse: just give me something that comes to mind
Jay: do the internet on them
Jesse: no dummy, I can do that but I want you give me something from your brain
Jay: i gotta run
Jesse: ah, you bastard. you say classic shit all the time except when I need you to!

Cruel Summer plays with Pink Films for free on Saturday April 7th for the Hotel Party release show at DAMB on 14th Street in San Francisco. Come by and see why those two bands rule so hard.

Cruel Summer – White Flag

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Bad Weather California has apparently evolved from a solo acoustic guitar project, but my first introduction to them was the current incarnation, a sunny beach party dance soundtrack. Their new record is produced by Akron Family’s Seth Olinsky, and is released on AF’s own label, Family Tree.  The album sounds great, but the live show is so genuinely positive that it’s creepy in a David Lynch sort of way.  They had friends in the audience encourage the crowd to dance by yelling, mere inches from someone’s face, “HEY YOU GONNA SPREAD THE LOVE LET’S GO C’MON DANCE!”  In other words, it was a perfectly deranged beach party where everyone is teetering on the brink of being too drunk, but nobody wants to stop the volleyball game.

Singer/Guitarist Chris Adolf closed the show with these words, “you’re not a fuck-up, you’re my friend.”  Thanks, Chris, I needed that.

Bad Weather California – I’ll Reach Out My Hand
Bad Weather California – Big Yellow Ball
Bad Weather California – I Feel Like Dancing

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Colleen Green used live in the Bay Area for a while releasing awesome lo-fi gems and helped create the Full House House in West Oakland which had a grip on bands play over the years. Then contributing to the Bay Area’s ongoing broken heart, she picked up and moved to Los Angeles where she signed to Hardly Art and just released this perfect collection of covers and pop songs. If you love pop then you will love this for sure. The fuzzy guitar and drum machines are enough to make even me smile on a cloudy day. Like I read somewhere along time ago “This girl could make even waiting in line a the bank seem like a great time”. You can buy it from the Bandcamp here.

Colleen Green – M+Ms
Colleen Green – Just Like I do
Colleen Green – I Am A Girlfriend

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//photo via hearty magazine (click for a review after my own heart)

Really excited about Mac DeMarco’s upcoming EP Rock and Roll Night Club which is due out later this month on Captured Tracks (of course). After performing under Makeout Videotape for a time, the monkier got dropped as did the octave of his singing – which is now a deep, throaty croon. I have heard some Deerhunter comparisons (especially with ‘Only You’) but I don’t find them all that relevant. I am definitely gonna try to catch him next time the band plays in San San Francisco since his live shows are supposed to be a pretty good time. Keep an eye out..

Mac Demarco – Only You
Mac Demarco – Baby’s Wearing Blue Jeans
Mac Demarco – I’m A Man

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Bonus:
Mac DeMarco – Only You (video)