In Live This Month, we sample some of the great local and out-of-town bands performing in the coming month in the San Francisco Bay Area.
A number of the Bay Area bands included in this month’s mix are celebrating the release of long-overdue albums, although no band embodies that quite as much as SF band Acid King. The stoner-metal group began in 1993; its new album, Middle of Nowhere, Center of Everywhere, arrives a full decade after its predecessor. Listening to “Red River,” one might assume that the ten years was spent amassing heaviness to unleash on a now-unsuspecting public.
By comparison, it’s only been three years since Tumbleweed Wanderers’ first album, an interval that found the group busy touring, playing festivals like Outside Lands, and releasing an EP. Still, the singles from Realize make the Oakland band’s new album feel like a big leap forward, seamlessly melding the group’s love of Americana, soul, and psych music into a unique spin on rock ‘n’ roll.
Two Sheds has long been a favorite of ours, and we’ve followed the group from its early origins in Sacramento, through a stint in the Bay Area to their current home of Los Angeles. The indie rock-pop band’s new album, Assembling, was spawned out of some marathon songwriting sessions, and we’ve long been impressed by the group’s ability to build rich atmosphere from layers of sonic texture.
Finally, in what we think is a Bay Bridged podcast first, we’ve included two songs in this mix that both have the exact same title. How weird is that? And more importantly: will 2015 ultimately be known as the year of “Bad Blood”?
