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The
Cuts The Cuts, Oakland's answer to the current proto-punk wave, philosophize about bands today, the weirdness of rebelling against rebellious parents, obscure pre-80s vinyl ("Uh... my CD player is broken"), and general paranoia/conspiracy theories. "We just want to let it be known that the name, 'The Cuts,' and the band has existed long before any of those guys (White Stripes, Strokes, etc.). It's a valid comparison but not educated... I don't think we have anything to do with any kind of pre-fab, 60s garage-revival thing that might be happening... We'd still be doing this if it was the squarest thing in the world..." |
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Charmless Though relatively new, the East Bay group, Charmless, is part of a rising crest of Bay Area rock bands that are trying to rejuvenate the scene and put the focus back into songwriting. Describing themselves as "Minneapolis indie rock circa 1986, with a little bit of LA, paisley underground," their varied influences are described by the ever-eloquent guitarist Jeremy Hainline: "It's like each of us is a square: we're a square divided into four squares. Then you put a square in the middle, so we have this section where everybody intersects and is on the same page. Then there's these other three-fourths of ourselves where we have different things." |
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Porn
(The Men Of) Led by Tim Moss, Porn (The Men Of) draws from some of the dirtier aspects of the human experience and channels it through a gigantic amplifier with plenty of low-end distortion to create a dense sonic texture of feedback and loopsÑa blissful groove of defiant stoner rock. "Basically my aim is to make a fucked-up record. Some people really like it and other people just can't fucking stand it. But you gotta admit, there are a couple things on that Feedback record that are just completely fucked. And that's kind of the point." |
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Scrabbel Dan Lee is one half of San Francisco's dynamic pop duo, Scrabbel. A patchwork of musical elements can be expected from the Scrabbel sound, based on the collaboration of two longtime friends. He and Becky Barron combine guitars, bass, drums, organ, Speak-and-Spells, shakers, movie dialogue, sweet harmonies, and more for a dedicated and ever growing listenership. "They way our love is expressed comes out through music. Some people like to hang out, go to restaurants, go to the movies: we like to sit in a room with all our instruments and bang away. I feel like it doesn't exist without her. Being in a band is a relationship: the closer you can get it to feeling like family, the better it will be." |
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The
Bellows As frontman of The Bellows, James Oakes writes acoustic guitar-pop tunes that harbor strains of The Smiths and The Blue Nile. "For me, growing up with bands like The Smiths, The Chameleons, Joy Division, and Blue Nile, I wanted to give my music to the people who inspired me, and I basically got to do it. And whether they responded or not didn't matter. I just wanted to share, and most of them actually responded to me and liked it, so that was more than validation for me to do it." |
| Plus... Reviews of live shows: Queens of the Stone Age/Trail of Dead, Azure Ray, Clinic, Six Eye Columbia Buzz's Bands To Watch: The Rum Diary, Dave Gleason's Wasted Days, Petrol, The Embers CD reviews: Beck, Beef, Camera Obscura, Mellow Drunk, Hem, Jets To Brazil, Jim Yoshii Pile-Up, Garth Steel Klippert, One Step Shift, Papa Roach, The Pattern, Queens of the Stone Age, The Rum Diary, Scrabbel, Slow Gherkin, Slow Poisoners, Sonny Smith, Sparta, Tin Hat Trio, The Warlocks |
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