Conceivably you could experience all three versions of the Freelance Whales today–the recording, the busking and the staging–in San Francisco.

Their record Weathervanes has been out since April and it’s available on their site, where you can also indulge by downloading their single free. Busking (in their case, “freelance” busking?) in New York subways has allowed them to bare down the sound to acoustics and try out new songs on charmed strangers. They’ll be doing a free live set at Amoeba Records on Haight Street at 7 p.m. Finally, they will stage an opening act (in support of The Shout Out Louds) in full plugged-in splendor with synths, harmoniums, drum kits and waterphones on the gilded stage of the Great American Music Hall at 8:30 p.m.

For Chuck Criss, one of the many multi-instrumentalists in the Freelance Whales, the GAMH show is another homecoming (just two months after their Bottom of the Hill gig). He was raised in San Francisco, attending St. Ignatius Prep in the Sunset before taking his banjo-playing chops to East Coast schools, Great Lakes territories and finally to Queens, New York where the wonder of (irony, O, irony) San Francisco-founded craigslist.com put him in contact with the Freelance Whales.

Here Chuck Criss tells the story himself and talks about long bus rides, cold toes, musical friends, vinyl comebacks and, when pushed, gardening.

Chuck Criss: When I moved to New York I was looking for like-minded people. I think I typed in, like, “banjo” on craigslist and then it kind of went from there.

Perry Shirley of MuseZu: It’s that simple, huh, to find band members?

Yeah! [laugh] Well, yeah, in retrospect, it’s that simple. It was a long process. There was a lot of hit-and-miss. I was actually the last member to join the Freelance Whales. They were kind of recycling and going through a lot of members that didn’t exactly fit right so it was pretty serendipitous. We hit it off really well. They were looking for a banjo player and multi-instrumentalist and Judah [Dadone] had put some demos up online that were just great. It was just like, “I have to be part of this. It’s going to be a really great record.” Even from hearing the demo I could tell.

There’s also a visual side. There’s these videos of you guys playing in this strange place on Staten Island…

It’s like an abandoned farm colony slash hospital. It was our photographer friend Kendall [Mills] who had taken some shots there. That was really early when we first got together. We wanted to get some video content so we rearranged some of the songs acoustically, went out there. Took the ferry over there and then like another bus. Got to the middle of the island where it is and just filmed us playing song acoustic and put it online and stuff. But I mean the coolest part of our experience was it kind of encouraged us to arrange more of the songs in an acoustic kind of format and really start going on the streets and more like busking on subways which is a great way of meeting people–which is tough to do in New York

So the setting directly influenced the sound of your band… that you kind of kept with

You’re talking about the performance?

Yeah.

Yeah it defintely did and it really encouraged a group vocal energy which kind of translated to our live set we have now.

You’re going to be going on tour with the Shout Out Louds. First of all how did that come about? Is it your label that paired you guys together?

Yeah, our booking agent put us together. It was a band that I’ve definitely listened to before and admired. We played a show with them at the Music Hall in Williamsburg and met those guys, played with them and kind of of hit it off. We wanted to stay busy ’cause our record came out pretty recently, like April 13th, so we were trying to find something where we could go and tour that record a little bit.

And along the way there you get to play a few shows, like the May 25th UC San Diego show at The Loft, where it’s just your band headlining.

Once we get to California after those two shows in L.A. we are going to break off and do our own thing just to do some more shows in California ’cause we have Sasquatch coming up on the West Coast at the end of May so we’re going to go up there and do the Sasquatch [Music Festival] thing which we’re real excited about that, to get some to play a really huge festival like that.

You recently did SXSW also.

Yeah, that was really great. It was really busy; we played 12 shows in four or five days so it was pretty chaotic. It will be nice to go to Sasquatch and just be able to play one show and actually get to go around and camp out and watch all the other great bands on that that show.

Soak it in a little bit yourselves…

Yeah Pavement’s playing the night that we are playing.

You’re telling me! I’m the biggest Pavement fan [complete loss of professionalism]

Yeah, me too. I was really excited for that too especially since they are only playing big festivals. They’re not really touring properly.

They did the Coachella show; they exorcised their demons, after getting mud slinged on them the last time. But talk about that what have you been listening to. What would you say are some of the band’s influences as far as other bands go?

We have a pretty diverse taste in music but I guess you could say as far influences that plugged their way in the record: Broken Social Scene, Stars, Sufjan Stevens, bands like that. One of the influences is this band, you know “Le Loup?”

Le Loup. Yeah, uh huh…

They’re great. Judah’s kind of good friends with them. That’s probably one of the biggest influences on the record, I’d say.

The viral videos of you guys playing in subways in New York remind me a lot of this girl, Lykke Li.

Oh really?! [genuinely excited]

You know what I’m talking about?

I’m not familiar with her viral videos. I know her music and it’s great.

They do a lot of these outdoor performances where it’s a lot of her with musicians playing just sparingly.

Thanks, man it’s fun to do stuff like that. Keeps the songs interesting. Well, thanks that’s a compliment to be compared to Lykke Li.

So between the bigger stages when you’re playing with the Shout Out Louds and the smaller stages you get to play later, what’s the ideal setting for someone to hear your music?

The band’s kind of got three different sounds going for it. The acoustic thing to do on the streets and stuff and then how we sound on the actual recording and then our live set. I think they’re all great experiences and good ways to try to listen to and understand and enjoy the band and what we are doing. All three of them. It’s just a matter of preference, I mean. What we are doing more than anything is playing live, full, proper shows with all the instrumentations and full kit and a more brash setup than it is on the recording. I’d say to come to the live show, on a proper stage I guess. It’s good clean fun.

And you bring all these instruments with you on tour?

Yeah. Us, the banjos, the harmonium, the guitars and the synthesizers, it all manages to fit in our 15-passenger van. It gets there. We definitely carry a lot of fragile things with us.

Yeah have you ever had any trouble with that? If something breaks down are you going to have to bring it to some old repair place in town?

Yeah, things break. We broke the banjo but we were in Nashville so there was a shop practically on every block. That was a very fortunate place to have to restock on gear If we broke a synth that would be a bummer just ’cause we have a lot of presets on there. If we ever broke a harmonium that would be really tough too because Judah ordered that I think from India. But I think we can find them around. We would make do. We know how to play a lot of instruments so could cover it up but it would be a bummer yeah .

You know, you mentioned bands like Broken Social Scene and Stars of course there’s a girl singer and a guy singer in those bands. and you have that in you theres a chase or love story going

It was kind of based off… Judah had doing some dream-logging for about a year just writing about his dreams and we kind of pieced together this love story between a ghost and someone living in a house and we just kind of ran with it. There’s definitely some romantic elements. There’s a lot of life and death stuff. The whole albums goes into different elements of energy transference whether it’s body heat or electricity or passing from life to death. It’s all in there. All the lyrics are based off a dream kind of scape.

And in the video for Generator 2nd Floor, you guys kind of recharge this body…

Yeah, that was a fun video to shoot. It was probably one of the coldest days of the year and no one could feel their toes. It was like in Pennsylvania somewhere at the video director’s. Near his house. His dad had some farmland. It was freezing. Luckily, we were somewhat warm but the girl in the video, Alicia, she’s in it pretty briefly but she’s in nightgown and had to lie down on the snow. It’s only like 20 seconds of video but she was probably there for about an hour. So she took one for the team but she did a good job.

So, does the director kind of come up with the idea and you go “Meh, well okay that fits” or do you get to say “Here’s what we were going for…”

In this case we had to do that really quick. We had gotten back from a short tour just around the Northeast and we had a couple days off before we went out on the road again with Cymbal Eat Guitar and Bear in Heaven. So in that case, I mean… Eventually we’d like to get to the point where we kind of mock-up our own ideas for the videos. In this case, it was like we really want to have a video to coincide with the album release and the director had kind of sketched out some ideas for what he wanted to do and we just kind of showed up, praying it would be good and it turns out well. And that’s how it is most of the time. Normally you can give a little direction but there’s the directors and the artists. But yeah that was a fun first video to do

Okay so arguably one of your more popular songs is the next to last song on your album. I feel like other bands would be tempted to put it right there at the top of the tracklist, just say, “Screw it, we’ll give the people what they want.” Did you feel firmly about the story-telling process?

The way the album is track is very intentional. That’s the order we want and that’s what we intended to have. It woudn’t have really made sense to come after one because Generator 1st Floor opens the album and it’s about revving up a house and waking up. The end of the album is a little darker. Generator 2nd Floor is very funeral like, about putting a body into the ground. So there’s a whole story in between.

I get frustrated by how many people just want to hear singles.

Yeah. I mean most people just listen to their iPod Nanos or whatever and maybe listen to one song. We all love listening to an album in its entirety. I think it’s coming back. A lot of people are getting into vinyl. [Even the founder of Amoeba records said so]. Sales are up and listening to vinyl you can’t skip songs. It’s an experience. You have to listen to it and flip it over. A lot of time people will find the single and hopefully they will gravitate towards the album and listen to it order, the way it’s supposed to be. It’s out of our control, you know?

Yeah I was doing some gardening this weekend and i played your album through a couple of time. It works really well for that.

Nice. “Music For Gardening” that will be the name of our next album.

What’s the weirdest story you’ve heard about the band?

Rumors spread in weird ways. A lot of people think that we were kind of busking to make money which isn’t true. It was just a way to meet people it wasn’t like we were professional buskers. A lot of people think that we were all street musicians that all met up and happen to be in a band.

Do people in the subway ever join in on your playing?

Yeah that’s happen a few time–a kid with a harmonica will jump in. The subway is pretty rife with crazy stories. We’ll play and then some crazy homeless guy just likes stands in front and start yelling nonsense. It’s like a free for for all. It’s definitely a much more eclectic audience then playing at, like, the Great American Music Hall.

Are you going to have to give that up at some point if you start headlining more shows?

You know, it’s not about giving it up. It’s a good place to try out new material. It’s more just [about the] time. We don’t have a lot of time, which is great. It’s good to be busy. The time off between tour is much-craved time off where we tend to go home and sleep and water our plants.

“Water our plants”? I guess the Freelance Whales really is good for gardening. [Pay no mind: this is only the lame joke send-off I should have made but didn't think off at the time]

DO play mind, however, to the Freelance Whales. They released this album essentially on their own and, if it’s a sign of things to come, they’ve reached the right balance of talent, they should be lauded for sticking to their guns with running themes (a la Decemberist’s The Hazards of Love or The Antlers’ Hospice) and should be nothing but bigger their next time around on your radar.

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David Duchovny’s sex-addled auteur drives away in his beat-up Porsche to end an episode of Californication. Show’s over.

But wait… what’s that kick-ass song playing?

Over on Grey’s Anatomy, McDreamy is lovesick over Meredith but paralyzed by his emotions. Voice-over does a play-by-play but you’re tuning out because, in the background, there’s a song you gotta have playing.

Great pop songs have long been TV show mainstays, but mostly it’s been for the opening credits. Sometimes there were annoying but you knew them: think of ”I’ll Be There For You” by The Rembrandts, kicking off Friends for a decade. Or, before that, Gary Portnoy’s charming “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” at the beginning of Cheers. I’ve always been a fan of Malcom in the Middle’s explosive opener “Boss of Me” by They Might Be Giants.

More and more today’s series are stocked full of good (and sometimes really obscure) tunes. Cable TV, in particular, seems to push the creative envelope sonically, even if it is a 15-second sample. On Showtime a recent Weeds episode ended with a cool little cucumber called “Thank You For Making Me Feel Better” by the otherwise unknown Linus of Hollywood.

How did I know that? Because you can look it up.

So, you like your shows, whether it’d be some House or reruns of Six Feet Under (some of the best music in there) or another endless plot twist in Lost. And music that makes you go, “Hey, that’s cool” plays on them. Then, you should probably be aware that a quick little visit to the networks sites for those shows will give you full listings of those cool songs.

For example, on ABC (home of Grey’s Anatomy, Lost and Desperate Housewives) you can even download right then and there any song screened on any episode. Same thing with Showtime (Californication, Nurse Jackie, Dexter). Ditto for Fox (House, Glee, Hell’s Kitchen).

That’s all. I just wanted to let you in on that.

Surf’s up, you got shows to watch and music to discover.

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We’ve seen the kind of hubub American Idol can create so it’s no surprise that the fame-by-committee format would pop up elsewhere. Even in the world of punk rock and skateboarders. The annual Ernie Ball Battle of the Bands on the Vans Warped Tour has become an internet voting behemoth. As of this writing there were more than 16,000 bands fighting for votes to play at one of the tour stops.

And if you’re a local unsigned band, what’s not to like? It’s free to enter, there’s a site Toolkit any lunkhead can use to make a very decent band page and, if you got the fan-vote power, you got at least a fighting chance to get reviewed by some Old White Guys (read: industry professionals) who decide if you’re going to play when the tour goes by your home town.

It works just like a regular Battle of the Band, only bigger. Of course, hundreds of bands try to get a spot and four for each tour stop make it. The contest is open to all genres from Ska to Hip-Hop and Blues but the Punk/Rock/Metal bands dominate the scene, by far. I guess there’s always Freestyle Rap Battles and summer Bar-B-Qs for the rest.

MuseZu caught up with Matthew “Zippy” Zipkin, guitarist for the Metal/Prog-Rock San Francisco outfit The Illness. The band is vying for a slot on the Vans Warped Tour Ernie Ball Battle of The Band’s stop at The Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View in June. Zippy talks to us about the sudden exposure, the ethical weirdnesses of internet voting and what makes them a band bound for the big stage.

If you want to see what The Illness has to offer before you cast your vote, see them live this Saturday May 8th at Kimo’s Bar & Penthouse Lounge on Polk Street in San Francisco at 9 p.m. for the one-year anniversary of their first ever show. Opening for them are local bands No Captains and The Wasteland Saints.

Perry Shirley of MuseZu.com: Your band, The Illness, is currently 11th out of nearly 500 bands vying for a spot on the Warped Tour show at the Shoreline Amphitheatre on June 26th. Nearly two thousand votes have gone your way. How does that make you feel?

Matthew Zipkin of The Illness: I am excited to the point of jittery about the Battle, and about our upcoming 1-year anniversary show at Kimo’s this Saturday. The Illness is overwhelmingly confident, and the feedback from our fans is incredible. It feels great. It feels like yes, we are awesome, and yes, we will play our music for thousands of people at Shoreline — even if its just some side-stage in the parking lot!

The grand prize of the contest – playing at Shoreline – is exposure the magnitude of which local bands rarely ever score, and we are very grateful to Vans for the opportunity to get really crazy about this game.

The contest is free and open to any unsigned or indie-label band with at least one recorded original song. Is it cool that there’s opportunities for “the little guys” to get on a big stage like that?

The biggest benefit of the Warped Tour “Battle” is, right away, the networking. We’ve already gotten in touch with great bands all across America, and specifically with great bands in our genre and in our own neighborhood. We’ve been able to expose our media to a ton of new fans and new peers. People are hearing our tracks, reading our blogs, and seeing our photos. The Battle has driven traffic to our main website, which in turn drives traffic to our other pages like Facebook. So in that sense, We’ve already won!

….also, does it kind of make you feel like you’re on American Idol: Rock Show?

The contest is a little silly, and a little cheesy. I’ve participated in all kinds of internet-voting contests and there is a sort of underlying fantasy about them, because it’s easy to assume that whoever has the most votes really just has a server somewhere with a clever piece of javascript and there are no real fans, and is that even fair?

The great thing about the Warped Tour Battle is that the voting mechanism is pretty solid and, more importantly, human judges are involved after the initial voting round narrows it down for them.

You’re doing local a Battle of the Bands like the show at Mutiny in Antioch on May 22, just a few weeks before selections for the Warped Tour Battle of The Bands are made. That’s almost like a televised debate between politicians just before the general election. Was that intentional?

Our Antioch show was booked actually a while before we started the Vans Battle – that is really just for fun. THE ILLNESS played out in Antioch this summer and felt the intensity of the metal crowd out there, so we’ve been looking for more opportunities to play out there.

We sound different from the traditional ‘ordinary’ metal bands the real hardcore guys are usually into. We are music nerds, we play jazz chords, intense polyrhythms, and seriously fucked up song structures. We are having a lot of fun writing songs, playing songs, and generating media. I know our fans are feeling all that too, and it all comes down to big fat party. A party with electric guitars and lots of jumping up and down. I just sorta feel bad for Dillinger Escape Plan or whoever is playing the main stage while we are slaughtering the crowd over at the Battle Of The Bands stage.

If you make in the Top 100 vote-getters, comes the hard part: a panel of “industry professionals” who choose the final four bands. It seems as though you have the fan base, what makes The Illness stand up to more corporate scrutiny? In other words, what makes you pro?

So, we are fighting this battle on both fronts: Our fans are getting very very excited for us, we are emailing over 100 people a day reminding them to vote, and they are! We shot a 45-second video of the band playing while Josh (our frontman) addresses the camera with gratitude, asks our voters to keep it up and, of course, plugs our next show. We are trying to keep our Facebook page and Battle page very active, posting new blogs, live MP3s, pictures, and updates all the time. We want to keep our supporters excited (because the band is really excited) and we also want those judges to know The Illness.

That’s the thing – the top 100 bands get judged, but by what? All the judges know about us is our internet presence and so we are cranking our internet presence up to the max! Our songs are professionally recorded and mixed. Our photos are professionally shot and edited. Our live videos our professionally shot in HD and married with professionally recorded audio. We have taken great care – for the whole year this band has been playing – to impress all of the people, all of the time.

Vote for The Illness at the Battle of the Bands website, here.

To hear The Illness, visit their website or MySpace page.

The opening bands at Kimo’s are San Francisco’s prog-rock band No Captains and “western influenced post-apocalyptic rock band The Wasteland Saints (both I might add, groups with very cool band names, although NC is a bit easier to say rapidly repeatedly)

Kimo’s Bar & Penthouse Lounge is at 1351 Polk St (Cross Street is Pine) in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District.

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The great rock documentary It Might Get Loud showed up as streamable content on my Netflix account–and that’s the sort of news that really gets an impecunious bastard like me salivating.

The film manages to bring in one room three generations of electric guitar masters–Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, U2’s The Edge and The White Stripes’ Jack White–to talk about and riff on their craft. But it builds up to it. You see the three in their cars on their way to the sound stage, the helpers setting up their gears, White, ever the sparkplug, suggesting “there might be a fistfight.”

It’s an engaging film too and that’s in no small part thanks to Director and Producer Davis Guggenheim who managed to make a PowerPoint presentation from a politician into the fascinating An Inconvenient Truth. The editing–which helped liven up the doggedly verbose Albert Gore, Jr.–is superb, whirling between the three stars with equal reverence and attention. The filmmakers make good use of archival footage in introducing the heroes while capturing gems themselves. Witness, in the opening sequence, White fashioning a make-shift slide guitar out of a bit of wood, a wire, some nails, a Coca-Cola bottle and a pickup. He plays a few notes, shrugs and says, “Who says you need to buy a guitar?“

This attitude is the polar opposite of The (Technological) Edge’s method. You see him in a little recording studio, tweaking knobs all the time. He strums and stops. Shakes his head, flips another switch or two, just straining to “make the sounds coming out of the speakers match the sound in (his) head.” For the tete-a-tete with White and Page, his guitar tech sets up a pedal board comical in its elaborateness, with 30 or so separate pedals on its palette. Certainly, it makes sense when you think of the painstakingly crafted image of his band U2.

For my money, I’ll side with White on this one, though. “Technology is a big destroyer of emotion and truth,” he says. I remember in 2001, discovering the White Stripes’ White Blood Cells album really before it blew up on the radio the way it did. After spending a lot of time listening to arrangement-heavy groups like Broken Social Scene or Belle & Sebastian and music made by control freaks like Everclear’s Art Alexakis and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, I was jolted awake by the rawness of the White Stripes. The songs, led off by “Dead Leaves and The Dirty Ground” and “Fell In Love With A Girl,” were pure blues-rock nuggets full of feedback and guitar squeals. It was invigorating and a bone rattler that matched my dissatisfaction with the shit-bag known as Senior Year High School.

“By the time I get into my teenage years in the late 80’s,” White says in It Might Get Loud, “I don’t remember that many rock and roll bands that were that popular. Things were changing so much in music and technology was taking over so much. Technology was heavily distracting everybody. I mean people would spend weeks trying to get the perfect snare drum and gated reverbs.“

This is from a guy who is forced to loop riffs and use octave pedals to be able to play live without a bass player or second guitarist, but still. The concert footage is where the three rockers in the documentary diverge. In one grizzled piece of tape, Led Zeppelin’s players feed off each other on an intimate stage. U2’s Bono and The Edge, meanwhile, showboat through the stadium crowds on catwalks, freed of wires by new technologies.

The White Stripes have long been a band apart when it comes to the live fare:

“I always worry about getting satisfied. When you get satisfied, you die,” White said. “It takes me three steps to get to the organ on the stage in the middle of a song. Put it four steps away and then I’ll have to run faster and I’ll push myself harder to get to it. Meg and I don’t even talk about what we’re going to play. We just get up there and do it. Think of something fast ’cause these guys want a show. People know when something’s fake and when something’s rehashed and rehearsed. They know when you’re telling the same joke you told at the show the night before. They can smell it.”

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Ever feel “behind the times”? Ever browse through your iPod only to find the same old titles, each classic like a French lover but not-so-fresh like, well, a French lover?

Now, thanks to MuseZu, you too can be one of those unfailingly hip jerks quick with the great new band out there. Just browse through these next few titles, embrace the new newness of these still-underground players and pull them out on your next date or hang-out. Name-dropping these bands will make you sound cool. Guaranteed. Now, go for it, Indie Newbie.

St Vincent

Why: It’s hard to dismiss an act that does such beautiful, yet simple videos: check out the weeping-on-command in “Actors Out Of Work” or the stilted, jarring camera work in “Marrow”. Well, it helps that she’s unbelievably pretty, in a porcelain doll way. Sound-wise, you remember that superb balancing act on Radiohead’s In Rainbows album, between the purity of Thom Yorke’s voice, the steady beats and distorted walls of guitar? It’s all in here, in sonic bloom.  Only her voice sounds more like Billie Holiday’s. It’s pristine yet surprising like Bjork’s music can be but more approachable.

Key Tracks: Actor Out of Work, The Strangers, Marrow & The Party from her 2009 album “Actor.”

Cool Thing To Say: “It’s actually just one person, Annie Clark, and, I’m not trying to name drop here but: she’s toured as part of Sufjan Stevens’ band and she was a guitarist and background singer in the 27-member group Polyphonic Spree which is headed by Tim DeLaughter, the guy from that awesome 90’s alternative rock band Tripping Daisy.”

The Morning Benders

Why: Because it’s pretty much impossible to hate it because it’s the kind of summery California (they’re from Berkeley) pop that we haven’t seen since Rooney or Death Cab For Cutie (before they got depressed; remember “Pah, Pah, this is the sound of settling!“?). It’s just infectious and innocent-sounding but with the sort of intelligent instrumentation that comes with the label “Baroque Pop” some have slapped on them. They look like they’re about 17 but that’s a good thing if you’re a girl and are kind of into day-dreaming. Here some morsels on their MySpace page. Check out their concert listings because the Morning Benders are in the middle of their first U.S. tour headlining, and not opening for a change. One gripe: the term “morning benders” sounds suspiciously as lame a reference to hard-ons as “morning wood” and there’s already  band called that.

Key Tracks: Cold War, Promises & All Day Day Light from 2010’s “Big Echo.”

Cool Thing to Say: “Yeah, they look like those fucking Jonas Brothers but they’re serious, man. I mean, their last album is, like, they’re ninth release. Plus they’re the coolest thing to come out of the East Bay since (Indie Rock/Hip-Hop band) Why?”

Charlotte Gainsbourg

Why: Well, isn’t it kind of cool to say you listen to Serge Gainsbourg’s daughter who adopted the same sing/talk vocalization style as her illustrious (and pervy) dad? And even if he was kind of France’s answer to Bob Dylan, that still makes Charlotte way cooler than that fuckwit Jakob Dylan. If you have a girlfriend who’s remotely hip and romantic and has a Netflix account, you might have seen Charlotte in Michel Gondry’s movie “The Science of Sleep.” 2010’s “IRM” is that girl’s second album and, for this one, she had Beck write all the music and much of the words for her. On a few of the tracks, including the single “Heaven Can Wait,” the two duet like Serge used to with Jane Birkin. Lyrically, death and hospitals are recurring themes (in fact, the album title is French for MRI) because Charlotte suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in 2007 and nearly died from it. Check out the visually stunning video here, and don’t be surprised if the link’s dead–they’ve been taking down all “unofficial” links.

Key Tracks: Heaven Can Wait, Trick Pony, Dandelion & Le Chat Du Cafe Des Artistes (for a little sensual French cred) from her 2010 album “IRM.”

Cool Thing to Say: “The team-up with Beck is cool but if you really want to get deep check out her first album, for which the guys from the French Band AIR and Jarvis Cocker, the hot dude from Pulp, wrote the music and words.”

Black Bug

Why: Picked this one up from those insufferable music nerds at Aquarius Records in the Mission. Pompous? Yes. Totally right? Well, yes. It’s the most hardcore thing on this list by far and if it sounds scary at first, think of it like a post-punk Sonic Youth and listen for the melodies in the noise. And appreciate these Swedes’ lo-fi appeal. Listen on their MySpace page (Hey, don’t knock it, you Facebooksters, MySpace still is the simplest and most straightforward way to stream whole songs from whatever band, at the drop of a hat) or through Aquarius Record’s archives.

Key Tracks: Inside Out, Beating Your Heart Out & Fell In Love With from 2010’s self-titled release.

Cool Thing to Say: (I’m deferring to the nerds at Aquarius Records here but if you can somehow pull out this whole line out of your ass, you’re bound to get some serious cred.) “This Swedish new wave garage punk trio is a furious feral synth-driven monster. Their sound is equal parts Cold Wave Gloom, Riot Grrl Yowl, in-the-red Punk Rock, and ultra raw, blown-out Garage Pop. But even that’s a bit reductive.”

Broken Bells

Why: Because it’s the latest project from musician and producer Brian Burton (who by now you should recognize as Danger Mouse) and James Mercer, the voice of The Shins, the band that Zach Braff thinks “will change your life.” Burton famously made 2004’s Grey Album, in which he mashed The Beatles’ White Album with Jay-Z’s Black Album. He then formed a little group called Gnarls Barkley (don’t tell me you didn’t go “Crazy” over that one.) and then he produced Gorillaz’s Demon Days (2005) and Beck’s Modern Guilt (2008) before teaming with James Mercer. The singer and pulse of The Shins had a falling out with his bandmates and got together with Burton to create this slick, poppy little gem knows as Broken Bells. If you see them live, they often cover “Crimson & Clover,” which is a very good fit. I dare you, DARE YOU, to listen to “The Ghost Inside” and not immediately like it. You can do so right here in this live footage, and be sure to check out Burton’s completely unassuming face while he drums on yet another hit project. Screw Timbaland, seriously.

Key Tracks: The Ghost Inside, The High Road, Vaporize & Float (in order of Most Like Gnarls Barkley to Most Like The Shins)

Cool Thing to Say: “Yeah, Danger Mouse worked with Beck on his last album and on tracks like “Modern Guilt” you can see he was unto something cool. But he really needed James Mercer’s falsetto in the same way he exploited Cee-Lo’s falsetto with Gnarls Barkley.”

p.s.:  remerciements a Geneva Kitchell for introducing me to much of this music.

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First up on PULSE OF THE DECADE: Rock Bands of The Seventies…

Aerosmith

AC/DC

Black Sabbath

KISS

Elton John

Led Zeppelin

Pink Floyd

LAST SEEN: In 2005, Waters released an opera based on the French revolution. Founding singer and guitarist Syd Barrett died in 2006. They are currently fighting for royalties from record company EMI.

Blue Oyster Cult

Rush

Rolling Stones

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For every minute in the day, three minutes worth of new music comes out to listen to.  For this reason it is no wonder that we have a new sub-genre what seems like every two weeks.  Groups of creative individuals are constantly borrowing and reshaping their favorite elements from various sources in the great music spectrum, giving birth to new sounds.  Trying to discern a group’s influences is one of my favorite parts of listening to new music, and that is why I had such a fun time experiencing the new EP from a band who’s name seems to sum up in one word the constant flux of musical textures we are experiencing today.

A Sacramento band two years in the making, Evolutia is certainly nothing utterly groundbreaking, but this is more often than not a good thing.  Nobody wants to hear somebody playing the saw to the a-rhythmic background of guinea pigs, for instance.  Evolutia’s new EP, “Fears Fall”, borrows unapologetically from several relatively unrelated genres (though of course you cannot completely separate any genre from any other.)  Drawing from such varied influences as classical music, ragtime piano, Muse, The Julianna Theory, Bloc Party, Led Zeppelin, 36 Crazyfists, Mars Volta, Radiohead, mewithoutyou, and say anything, their sound lends itself to a varied and aurally pleasing listening experience.

The Fears Fall EP kicks off it’s first track, My Element, with a slightly faster, slightly edgier Death Cab For Cutie-like melodic sensibility.  It’s pop worth is enormous, with simple chord progressions made more elaborate by classically oriented piano arrangements.  This band’s further depth of influence comes from the romantic desperation found almost ubiquitously in pop punk bands from earlier last decade.  This theme continues through the EP, and although I have to admit I wanted to vomit every time I heard this in the pop punk context, in this neo-piano prog rock setting it’s comes through as being very creative.  The singer moans “I fall apart without you”, and frankly, I believe him.

The band continues right along with its pop sensible melodies with the tune Half Awake, which brings a Muse-like element to the sonic table, keys pounding away in syncopated rhythms augmenting the palpable angst of the vocals.  The tech trimmings don’t hurt either, keeping the track fresh all the way through.  They seem to one up themselves in their track We Used to Sleep, introducing very heavy guitars into the mix and adding Incubus into the list of bands that seem to influence this group.

The title track, Fears Fall, seems to sum up what this band is all about: progressive piano rock.  As I understand it in terms of classifying music, the word progressive means taking a genre and moving it towards something else; something yet undefined.  Evolutia definitely deserves this badge, and although the EP leaves me wanting a blatant ballad, a listen to their new EP wouldn’t be a waste of time.  You can find it streaming at http://www.myspace.com/evolutiamusic .

Good luck boys, please give us a shout out when you’re going to be in the Bay Area!

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Synchronicity is best defined by way of example.  You know how whenever you learn a new word you tend to hear it several times over the course of the next few days, having never been aware of hearing it before?  That’s what synchronicity is.

I was recently tuned into a pair of new internet sites that claim to measure the activity around a band in all markets, including myspace/facebook streams, internet and FM radio play, and blog activity.  I think we can all see what a handy tool this would be to bands, but that’s not the point.

As a musician I usually trend towards talk radio, preferring the blah blah blah of mostly uninteresting verbal fodder to a tune that might interrupt whatever musical thought I was in the middle of.  More recently than event described in the last paragraph to the tune of two days I was listening to NPR and happened to catch a story about those two sites, one is called bandmetrics.com, and the other bigchampagne.com.

The show was essentially a debate between the company that keeps track of the mainstream top-whatevers in every catgegory of popular music, and the creators of the above two sites.  The thing is that the charts keep track of one thing and one thing only: paid purchases of songs.  The latter two sites measure musical success by every aspect, including “illegal” downloads.  The thing I found to be most interesting was the revelation of a new statistic: songs per fan (SPF).  That is to say how many songs by a particular band the average fan is interested in.

Here’s the kicker: the average chart topping best selling grammy award winning double platinum champion of the airways has an SPF of…

(Drum roll please)

1.1

image courtesy of Matthiashaas – Dreamstime.com

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If you walk past San Francisco’s Civic Center today at 1:30 p.m., March 4th 2010, you may notice a crowd gathered there, demonstrating and visibly upset. Too often things like these happen but passerbys never know what they’re about. The shout-outs through loudspeakers just recycle labor chants from the 70’s, when these things had more weight. So I’m here to inform you on a few of the issues this crowd is upset about, because it’s nice to find these things out in polite, printed paragraphs.

The March 4th Strike & Day of Action was called in defense of public services and public education. “We’re being asked to share the pain, but Wall Street and the Banksters are making record profits,” read a pamphlet entitled “NO CUTS: Join The Movement.” These broad strokes of outrage point to a disturbing trend: as cities, counties and states struggle with budget deficits in a poor economy, public schools, public transportation and parks are the first to get cut.

The sad part is that it’s the most common people (the majority of us) that rely on these public services the most. We can’t afford private schools with room and board. We can’t afford BMWs and parking garages and we need parks because apartment buildings don’t have any.

So let us peruse through just a few of the issues at hand. This way, if you see the crowd in Civic Center today, you’ll know what they’re shouting about.

PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION

For a city as parking-challenged as San Francisco, it should behoove officials to keep a well-run and affordable public transit system. Instead, we have Muni. Back in the late ’70’s it cost a quarter to board the bus and $11 for a monthly pass. Predicatbly, rates climbed every year. In 2003, local papers interviewed a Shelley Quinn, a visitor Boston area, about the $1.25 fare she had to pony up. ”Look,” said Quinn, a bookkeeper, “this isn’t exactly a bargain town anyway. I just spent $3 for a pretzel. Another buck for a cable car won’t break the bank. For us, it’s a one-time thing.”

Well, that may fine for a tourist but the monthly pass has gone from $45 in 2003 to $70 this year. Where the hell am I supposed to find the extra $300 a year? In the end, I put that money into some new wheels and try to ride my bike everywhere.

The Municipal Transportation Agency (which runs Muni) has been brainstorming at length to find other ways to reduce its budget deficit. Most recently, the MTA floated the idea of charging Muni riders an extra charge to get a transfer, which allows them to change to another bus line limitlessly during an hour-and-a-half window. Over in the East Bay, AC Transit has started doing that and it feels like a terrible slap in the face when you board a bus. Luckily, at Tuesday’s public hearing, MTA was quickly discouraged, by those gathered, to follow that idea in The City.

Besides providing affordable transportation, buses should be relatively timely, wouldn’t you say? In 1999, San Francisco voters thoughts so and set a goal to get buses on time at least 85% of the time. How are we doing with that? Last year, Muni officials rejoiced when on-time rates reached an all-time high of 72.7%. Enough said.

PARKS

Last year, the Board of Supervisor allowed MTA to study the idea of putting parking meters in Golden Gate Park as means to raise more money. The assault on free and public spaces is a dangerous side effect of a poor economy. City Supervisor Sean Elsbernd understood that when he told SF.Street.Blog.com that he is worried that charging for parking could drive park users away. “We want to encourage people to go to parks, we don’t want to discourage,” Elsbernd said. “I wonder if meters are going to do that.”

At the same time, the lean times have pushed city officials to think outside the box. Mayor Gavin Newsom and his Greening Director Astrid Haryati have been in process of creating at least 10 plazas and “parklets” by converting former parking spots and inlets of public land. The first of these hugely popular spaces, at the crossroads of Market and Castro, cost only $7,000 to set up. Sprinkled across the city, the parklets revitalize drab pavement in a simple and cost-effective way. It’s more ideas like these that need to flourish to make the Bay Area a healthy place to live.

COMMUNITY COLLEGES

My friend Jason Ferretti is someone who outwardly leads a successful life (motorcycle, suede sectional sofa, big screen TV and an apartment on Van Ness Avenue). Even with a job at Farallon, one of The City’s best and priciest eatery, he’s not content. Steadfastedly, he’s been taking courses at City College of San Francisco. But his march toward a Business degree (his ticket out of the service industry) is in jeopardy because Summer courses at the community college were scraped in a cost-cutting move made to save the school $4 million but leaving about 2,000 students behind.

Ferretti was one course away from transferring–a course he was unable to take because too few sections had been offered this semester. Now, two semesters behind his academic plan, I wonder if he won’t eventually give up and end up one fewer bright bulb without the proper credentials to make a real difference.

PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES

There are two public university systems in California and together they serve around 600,000 students in 33 campuses. So when tuition is raised as drastically as they have in the last decade, it affects a lot of people. At the University of California’s campuses, tuition in 2000 was $3,429 a year (which does not count books, food or housing). UC regents area already looking to jack fees up to $10,302 for the 2011 school year, The Chronicle reported.

In other words, school used to cost the price of one 1997 Honda Civic a year. But a decade later, you could buy a 2004 Audi A4 for the amount of money it takes to go to school for a year at UC Berkeley.

It’s the same story at California State University campuses. Read this very good piece in the LA Times about Berenice Vite and Rafael Curiel, whose son Alonso is a sophomore at Cal State Long Beach. After his school raised tuitions by 32 percent this year, the Curiels missed three house payments to make the difference. It’s safe to say this is having a very serious impact on this family’s life.

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Do you have a taste for delectable qualities of beer? Does your SF Bay Area heart covertly beat faster at the thought of New York City? And if we threw a freak show in there, wouldn’t it be the coolest?

Heather Holiday, the Sword Swallower, and her very own Coney Island Brewing Co. steel hop lager

Then come see–direct from Brooklyn’s legendary Coney Island Sideshow–a real human blockhead and a sword swallower in San Francisco at select bars, pubs and cafes on Tuesday March 2. They are here for the 2nd ANNUAL CONEY ISLAND PUB CRAWL, brought out by Shmaltz Brewing Company to celebrate their new line of Coney Island Lagers. Whew that’s a lot of capitalized names thrown at you. Sorry.

Simply put, the two freaks will be performing their classic bag of tricks for free while you enjoy beers with their likeness on them. And this is pure American classic sort of entertainment that’s been all but abandoned for those obnoxious IMAX films you love so much. There will be Human Blockhead Donny Vomit (a YouTube sensation who redefines the idea of a “used” condom by sticking one in his nose and pulling it out from his mouth; tres awesome, we think) and the lovely Sword Swallower Heather Holiday to behold.

And if you try their beers you can rest assured it will be for a good cause. We’re told the Coney Island Sideshow is a registered non-profit organization and a portion of the dough you plunk down for a Coney Island Lager goes right to making sure those freaks go on stick God-knows-what into their heads.

This is where Donny Vomit and Heather Holiday will be appearing on Tuesday March 2:

7 pm – 7:30 pm
Cafe Royale @ 800 Post Street 415-441-4099
-Beer Special: Half off bottles of Messiah Bold.

7:45 pm – 8:30 pm
Church Key @ 1402 Grant Avenue 415-986-3511
-Beer Special: $1 off Human Blockhead® on draft.

8:45 – 9:15 pm
Monk’s Kettle @ 3141 16th Street 415-865-9523
-Beer Special: $1 off Human Blockhead® on draft.

9:30 pm – 12 am
Bender’s @ 806 S. Van Ness Avenue 415-824-1800
-Beer Special: $5 for 22 oz. bottle of Coney Island Sword Swallower®.

To find out more about Shmaltz Brewing Company, go here.

To find out more about the Coney Island Circus Sideshow, go here.

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