Unpiano | Music Blog

After winning The Strangers’ poll for worst album cover last week, the new Carletta Sue Kay album finally sees it’s it’s official release tomorrow. While I can’t defend the cover any further then this sentence, the album itself more than makes up for it. It got an early release at Amoeba so perhaps you’ve heard some of the songs already and understood that this is not the raw, shrieking CSK record you may have been expecting. It’s a different feel than the video for ‘Get Along’ I posted earlier, but that hardly matters. Capturing the intensity of the live show and a voice like Randy’s on a studio recording is a tall order and these songs instead need to be appreciated on a different level. You don’t hear the “less bitter Nina Simone” in the recordings but instead get a healthy dose of Magnetic Fields style ballads, whose new album featured Carletta’s vocals on the track ‘Andrew in Drag”. Strong songwriting and glossy production is what’s going on here and with CSK release I’ll take what I can get.

Carletta Sue Kay – Joy Division
Carletta Sue Kay – Pretty Inside

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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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Tonight at Dreamers and Make Believers in San Francisco. Hotel Party zine release with Pink Films and Cruel Summer playing music around 9ish. Get there early since it’s so small in there. There will be zines for sale at a special price and I will be there looking riddled with anxiety. I know you think that a show at a hair salon is just some photos on a wall, but I assure you it’s not. There are close to 150 images in this show and after I finished the install last night I realized that there is not way this will run for very long in it’s current state, so come see it before they make me take it down.

DAMB – 487 14th street between Guerrero st & Valencia st

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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Shakes Gown, who we mentioned a while back, have released a new album entitled Nikko’s Cafe and are playing tonight at The Knockout. It’s always fun to watch such an indie-rock-centric city like San Francisco get freaked out when these guys start playing and realize that it won’t be as easy to digest they thought it would be. Sort of like when you get 10 pages into Tolstoy and you’re like “fuck, I actually have to try here”. Anyways, keep an eye out for the new songs to start popping up and go to this show and get weird.

Crocodile Nest by Shakes Gown

//live @ kino metropol, sovenia with the sandwitches

I have been waiting so long for a Carletta Sue Kay LP that I can’t even stand it anymore. After releasing the occasional gem and opening for GIRLS during their appearance at GAMH, we all know San Francisco’s own Randy Walker is sitting on something big. We even just heard that he sings on one of the songs for the new Magnetic Fields release. I think the rumor about the album was that there were some label disagreements and what was supposed to be released is now up in the air. But either way, can someone please put this record out? I promise to buy you a drink and maybe we can talk about other stuff too. All kidding aside, the song above is phenomenal and if someone doesn’t put it out, then I guess I have to do it. (Kitten Charmer, we are talking to you *cough cough*.)

Carletta Sue Kay – Get Along (rip from video)

Some places just have a “sound” and San Francisco is one of them. Its not just a group of related people consciously borrowing from each other, its a subtle line of connectivity that transcends generations and scenes and finds its way into recordings, most of the time without the musicians even noticing. There’s something about smokey voiced S.F. folky Norma Tanega’s first LP from 1966 that I hear in everything from The Aislers Set, to Romeo Void, to Deerhoof, to Jefferson Airlplane, to Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, to the Sic Alps and so on. I can’t put my finger on it exactly, its a sound, a small guitar lick, a chord progression, a quirky lyric, but as the record moves from track to track I find myself thinking “that sounds like (insert any S.F. favorite here)”, and even more so, “that sounds like a wall of fog pouring over the Golden Gate into the bay”.

Norma Tanega – Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog
Norma Tanega – A Street That Rhymes at 6 A.M.

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While every other blog is talking about how Switfumz sounds like R Stevie Moore, Ariel Pink and John Maus (are those really the only people to ever record in their bedrooms?), all I hear is Ween and maybe the Busy Signals – but with leather jackets sporting patches from The Damned. I hear a Ween record that has been elevated to a different level by vocals that were held under and drowned in sticky sweet reverb. Add some tough melodies and picky guitar that finds all the right notes at the right times and you have Chris McVicker’s newest project – released on Holy Mountain. He has managed to create a record that sounds like the crispness and excited energy of Autumn, just in time to watch the leaves change. Also, and in a somewhat unrelated fashion, he has the funniest Twitter of any musician we have ever talked about on here.

Swiftumz – Angelita

Stream the rest of these tracks by scrolling through the Flash Player below:
Swiftumz – Day We Met
Swiftumz – 4EVA
Swiftumz – Tuff Guy

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Like a beat up old Mustang whipping around mountain curves at midnight, Pink Films floors it hard on each and every song. Wow, that sounded much cooler in my head, but the point is that this band makes me think of driving. Fast, loose and probably through the desert like all good garage should. Tim Tinderholt, who has fronted and played in a slew of San Francisco bands over the last couple years (Snakeflower 2, Countless Others, SF Water Cooler), takes the hint from his influences and nudges the guitars deep into the red. Fuzzed-out almost to the point of obliteration and picky in all the right places, the tracks take you back to garage in it’s prime and make you thank God that some musicians remember that dirty harmonies still have a place in rock n’ roll. They just released a new 7″ which you can probably pick up somewhere in the city and which you should do now.

Pink Films – Can I Get Lost
Pink Films – Pay A Price
Pink Films – Wrong Direction

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Tycho is one of the few solid hold-outs from the late 90′s / early 2000′s downtempo hey-day.  His last (and only) LP, Past is Prologue (previously released as Sunrise Projector), is a cult favorite that fits in perfectly next to Kruder and Dorfmeister and Boards of Canada.  The difference is that Tycho came out of nowhere, and receded back into the shadows shortly after.  About 10 years ago, his album came out with little fanfare, and was later re-issued by Ghostly International, giving it a little more exposure, but Tycho has remained in the underground for the better part of a decade.  We’ve all been waiting patiently for a follow-up LP, and we’re finally about to get it!  Ghostly recently posted the new song Hours on their Soundcloud page, and if it’s any indication, Tycho’s second LP, Dive, will be another downtempo cult classic.

P.S. This is not Chillwave, okay?  Dude’s been doing this for years and years, please let’s not say Chillwave in here.

Tycho – Hours

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Bonus:
Tycho playing “Coastal Brake” with his live band! (video)