Monkey may very well be San Jose’s longest running, consistently-active band. The band emerged in 1995, but unlike a lot of Monkey’s contemporaries, it never mixed punk rock and ska. Monkey always stuck strictly to the traditional more R&B-based sounds of ska’s first wave.
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AARON CARNES on July 2, 2012
San Francesca has undergone a lot of changes lately. First there was that whole name switch—remember when they were called Le Verita? Now they’ve added a drummer to their lineup, which has evolved their sound.
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San Jose pop-punkers A Four Star Affair will be shooting a scene for their next video at their X Bar show Saturday. Considering that their first video—which came out earlier this year, for “The Group W Bench”—was a hoot, it’s probably worth getting in on. Don’t know if they’ll have mimes, Robin…
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AARON CARNES on May 1, 2012
Mixing anarchist crust-punk with rural, jug-band folk music wasn’t anything particularly planned out for the members of Santa Cruz’s Blackbird Raum. In fact, they never gave much thought to being a band, at least not in the early 2000s when they were all living like bohemians and squatting in abandoned buildings. Playing…
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Aaron Carnes on February 22, 2012
At one show on their Cambodian tour last year, South Bay all-girl rock band the Like Me’s played for over 5,000 people. This was less than two years after their first show ever—at Iguanas Taqueria in San Jose. Their bass player, Helena Hong, had only just started playing the bass four days…
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Aaron Carnes on January 25, 2012
Third-wave ska legends Dan Potthast of MU330 and Slow Gherkin thought they had put skanking behind them years ago. But it all came back to them in 2009, when Potthast joined up with four ex-Gherkin members (A.J. Marquez, Matt Porter, Brendan Thompson and Phil Boutelle) and his fellow MU330 bandmate Matt Knobbe…
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Two of the South Bay’s most prominent punk bands, the Albert Square and the Pillowfights, are calling it quits. It’s not entirely a coincidence that they are playing their final show together—they’ve shared many bills over the years, including some of their very earliest and even a recent West Coast tour. “It…
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