It was June 28, 1992, and my friends and I were at the nightclub One Step Beyond in Santa Clara, where the foul odor of booze and vomit wafted through the muggy, pressure-cooked air. We’d danced through four bands already, including a young, awkward, and poorly dressed Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. Now it was time for the headliner. We stood by the stage, sweaty and shaking, willing the heavy theatre curtains to open. 

The wait felt unbearably long. Finally, the lights went dim; everyone hushed. The buzz of the opening bass line rang out and the curtains whooshed apart to reveal San Jose ska band Skankin’ Pickle, a group of six misfits staring defiantly out into the crowd. The bass line continued to build slowly, each instrument joining in until the walls reverberated with eerie upbeats. Chills ran up my neck. The song reached peak volume and winded back down, each instrument dropping out one by one. The crowd roared.

Skankin’ Pickle went right into their next song. The tall Korean American sax player sang about missing the bus to work. He wore a karate uniform and jump kicked between each line. The song ended with the sing-along: “I love Three’s Company, but that’s no excuse for missing the bus.”

The remaining horn section pulled my focus away. They occupied the stage like two drunk frat guys. The slide trombonist lurched back and forth, pausing between blats to wave his arms like a windmill; he grabbed some devil sticks and did a short one-minute performance, while the valve trombonist leapt up and down with his arms glued to his side. He grabbed the mic and yelled, “pick it up pick it up pick it up,” and glided into an ear-splitting ’70s metal scream.

At the end of the song, the bass player approached the front of the stage. He pushed his bushy blonde hair from his face and turned to the side, posing like Jessica Rabbit. An obviously fake ass of cartoonish proportions bulged under his Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts. Scattered applause from the audience. He pranced back and forth with a shit-eating grin.

Once he had our full regard, he said in a lousy talk-show voice, “Not only am I the president of the hair club for men…but I’m also a client.” He pushed off all his hair—a wig!—and slapped his bass right into a punky ska song twice as fast as the previous tune. It inspired a raging mosh pit. A friend and I leapt in, possessed by brutal punk rock demons. Our limbs flailed like broken marionettes as we ran in circles. The few lyrics I understood cracked me up. There was one line where he took an aggressive stance against blow dryers.

At last, the song ended and I caught my breath. Sweat dripped off me in rivulets. I’d never had this kind of fun at a live show before. I looked up just as the now-bald bass player mounted a unicycle and haphazardly pedaled across the stage. He dangled a moment precariously over the crowd but stumbled off and landed on his feet like a trained circus performer. Everyone cheered. An older, hairy, shirtless guy patted me on the back. “They rule!” he shouted. I threw my hand up and slapped his hand. We were brothers for life.

The sax player took the mic back and ordered all the Asians in the audience to join him on stage. He looked out and pointed at a guy near the back and said, “Get up here.” A few other Asian people followed suit.

A bald, not-Asian guy shouted, “Albinos too?”

The sax player laughed and motioned him up. “Come on up before I change my mind.” He ran up and paced around with the others, arms raised like he’d won the lottery. The sax player looked back at the drummer, a stone-faced classic rocker with long stringy hair, and nodded. “This song is called ‘Asian Man,’” the sax player said. The drummer counted off and broke into speed metal. The on-stage crew went ballistic.

Fifteen seconds in, and suddenly the song pulled back into a mid-tempo hip-hop beat. The spiky haired guitarist hung her tongue out the side of her mouth like a dopey dog and hopped up and down on the off-beats. The sax player slipped into a mock rap pose and began: “I’m sick of people always telling me that dogs shouldn’t be eaten as a delicacy. Yo, it tastes good, as a sandwich meat. Heck, I like it and it’s low in calories!”

The newly anointed stage dancers did their best wannabe rapper impressions. We all did. After the first verse, the sax player dove headfirst into the audience, flipping around mid-air. The albino guy screamed and followed after him. They floated on the crowd’s hands, returning to the stage in time for verse two.

I danced hard. Everyone around me danced just as hard. Punks with red mohawks, guys in loose-fitting suits, girls in polka dot dresses, long-haired hippies with tie-dye peace symbols, nerds with tucked in Atari sweaters, goths with painted black lipstick, metalheads draped in oversized Danzig shirts, and plain, old, fashion-free dorks like me. We were all dissimilar. Yet here we were, all moving together as one giant, heaving beast.

When I thought I’d pass out, the mood slowed into a down-tempo reggae song. The guitarist stepped forward to sing: “We live in a racist world/Where the colors of the land/Won’t keep us hand in hand.” People embraced each other, swayed back and forth, and sang along.

As I watched Skankin’ Pickle from a sea of mismatched people, I felt a deep comfort. They were bizarre and flaunting it. And if they could, so could we.

Later that night I wrote the band a long, bizarre fan letter. I made it extra weird to get their attention. It worked. The Korean American saxophonist turned out to be Mike Park, who would found the hugely successful Monte Sereno-based indie label Asian Man Records in 1996; he sent me an orange peel and told me to call him. I became friends with the band, toured with them as a roadie, and had my band Flat Planet open for them.

I’d found my music. And it changed everything.

Ode to Taco Bravo

But believe it or not, there was a time when being in a ska band was considered embarrassing. I know, crazy, huh? You should’ve heard the wild accusations people made: Every song sounds the same! Out of tune marching band horns over pop-punk riffs! Nothing but silly songs about food!

Ok, that last one is sort of true, at least for Flat Planet. We had a song that was an ode to cheese, but sung in Spanish. (“Queso en el dia, Queso en el Noche! Queso! Queso! Dame Mas!”)

We also had a song about Taco Bravo, our favorite late-night dive in San Jose. It was the go-to place for bands of every genre. And jocks. And just plain ol’ drunks. Many fights ensued alongside absurdly heaping Super Nachos and refried bean-stuffed Taco Delights. The Taco Bravo staff served everything with a superabundance of cheese and treated you like garbage, which was a major part of the appeal. Whenever Flat Planet showed up after a gig or band practice, the late-night manager would shake his head and say, “You guys again…don’t you have lives?” “No,” we’d proclaim, shoving crumpled dollar bills in the tip jar, asking for even more cheese, as the ashes from the staff’s cigarettes fell into the beans. We were so obsessed with Taco Bravo—and always talking about it—my mom decided to go there to see what all the hubbub was. She ordered a decaf coffee with her meal. When they handed it to her, she confirmed, “This is decaf, right?” The guy told her, “Yes…it’s coffee.” She couldn’t sleep that night, wired from having caffeine for the first time in a decade. 

Our songs were influenced by the general silliness that defined a lot of the ’90s ska scene, which I know people hate. Let’s defend “ska silliness” for a minute and describe what it was like to be in a ’90s ska band.

In 1993, our local San Jose music scene consisted of bands playing grunge, dreary alt-rock and, worse, rap-metal. There were maybe three ska bands in the whole city. This scene took itself seriously. Too seriously. I can’t tell you how many times some shitty rock band was on stage at the local eighteen-and-older venue Cactus Club, acting like disaffected rock stars to a crowd of 20 people who cared more about their ice-cold beer than the cool poses of random local bands.

For us, getting on stage and giving our set a considerable dose of silliness was a fuck you to the self-indulgent, pretentious rock star bullshit we saw at the Cactus Club and on MTV. When we played in front of 20 people, we weren’t trying to be cool or get signed. We wanted to make everyone in the venue smile despite themselves. Yes, it was also an outlet for all our crazy, awkward energy, but we were trying to get people to join us and have a fun night, not admire our cool threads and perfectly disheveled hairdos.

Ashamed To Be Ska

In the early ’90s, most ska bands weren’t riding the silly-train. The priority was to play danceable music with creative hooks and unique song structures that kept things interesting. People in this era liked the clothing, the dancing and usually understood basic ska history, like how 2 Tone was born from British punks and Caribbean immigrants combining forces to make an exciting new musical style with a strong anti-racist message.

The Pacers formed in 1990 and built an impressive scene in Milwaukee, their hometown, and later Minneapolis, where they would relocate, as well as several nearby Midwest cities where they regularly gigged. They weren’t Milwaukee’s first ska band. Bands that predated them were International Jet Set, Invaders, Wild Kingdom, all of whom started in the late ’80s. These were popular local bands, but the Pacers applied some business smarts by pushing shows to be all-ages. They went to the Unicorn, a local twenty-one-and-older club, and told the venue owner if they let them play an all-ages show, they would draw three-hundred kids. The club owner agreed to it reluctantly. It was a success, but due to some disagreements, the relationship didn’t last. The Pacers took the same deal over to Peter Jest at the Shank Hall, and that started a three-to-four year run of really packed, successful shows. It was a captive and consistent audience. The band was making a couple thousand dollars a show just because they recognized how eager kids were to go out and dance.

“We never wanted to be a group where everybody showed up in Fred Perrys. We also weren’t skate punks either. We wanted to be popular with kids our age,” Pacers bassist Andy Noble says. The Pacers didn’t play punky sounding ska songs or dress in wacky costumes. They were closer to a 2 Tone sound, with mid-tempo upbeats and Specials’ style grooves that were mixed with subtle rock and soul beats and some New Wave melodies influencing the group’s intricate sound.

By the mid-90s, the Pacers were witnessing a shift happen as younger bands joined the scene. It wasn’t a shift they liked.

“We were extremely ashamed to be a ska band,” Noble says. “When we started, we were really proud of it. We thought we were the only motherfuckers on to that stuff. We had this pride of ownership. By the time we were done, we perceived the music to be jazz band nerds wearing mismatched suits, recruited by one guy who realized he could have a popular group.”

They weren’t too stoked by the growing number of ska bands in the Midwest, either. Or how those bands were making the genre look like nothing but a bunch of kids spazzing out at Chuck E. Cheese on a permanent sugar high.

“The first time we saw Skankin’ Pickle, we all thought it was really funny. Two years later, it was like every ska band was a joke novelty band. We were not proud to be part of that scene anymore. We thought it was nerdy,” Noble says. By 1994, because of this and some other internal band factors, the band lost steam and broke up. 

Ska had a moment in the mainstream a few years later, which softened the “nerd” vibe temporarily. It also validated the wackiness. Suddenly, bands on TV were wearing colorful shirts, checkered shorts, and pork pie hats. The Mighty Mighty Bosstones showed off their plaid suits in Clueless; Reel Big Fish sported cabbie hats and colorful, tucked-in button-up shirts in BASEketball. Save Ferris represented the rainbow’s full spectrum with their members’ bold single-color t-shirts and laid-back skater shorts in their “Come On Eileen” video. When ska fell out of its short-lived favor, all those offbeat checkered V-neck sweaters and bowling suspenders were as mortifying as MC Hammer parachute pants.

The Lamest Guys Around

James Rickman of Santa Cruz band Slow Gherkin, tells me about his experience living through the peculiar era of ska during the late ’90s.

“We felt like we were just the lamest guys around all of a sudden,” he says.

Slow Gherkin formed in 1993 and were an underrated band that never reached a large audience outside of their hometown, where they would sell out the largest venues. On tour, they’d draw anywhere between 50-150 people. Not bad, but not enough to give them the satisfaction of quitting their day jobs. As they pushed forward, they were handicapped by ska’s rise and fall in the mainstream.

In 1998, they released their brilliant Squeeze-meets-Nick Lowe-infused, peppy, rock-ska sophomore album, Shed Some Skin. It still holds up as a unique record during a year when one thousand ska records were released. They’d gone on multiple tours that year and were rehearsing daily to make something happen.

Mike Park, of Asian Man Records, the label that released Gherkin’s first album and already agreed to release its second, was already feeling ska trepidation by early 1998 as Slow Gherkin was recording Shed Some Skin. It was clear to Park the ska boom was not going to last much longer. But the band was already set to record in the lovely twenty-four-track studio SoundTek and had a thick twenty-four-page booklet planned for the album release. Rickman tells me that Park would show up in the studio as they were recording, pace back and forth and say, “No one is going to buy this record” and then leave.

Park’s nervous foresight turned out to be correct. The album sold less than the band’s debut record. The tides were changing in pop culture, and Slow Gherkin looked on, suffering a band identity crisis. By the end of the century, post-Shed Some Skin, they were writing songs deliberately lacking upbeats, as if to signal to the world they, too, were no longer part of that horrid ska scene. Other bands did the same. Orange County ska band the Hippos released their major label debut Heads Are Gonna Roll in 1999, now as a ska-free, synth-rock band, with an album cover fabricated to look like a hip ’60s rock ’n’ roll group, a la the Kinks. In subsequent years, the Hippos singer/guitarist Ariel Rechtshaid furthered his cold-hearted ska abandonment by carving out a hipster producer career, working with artists like Vampire Weekend, HAIM, Adele, and Charli XCX

“We did what so many other ska bands did, which was suddenly get totally self-conscious. That was the real sell out moment, I think. All ska bands got mocked all of a sudden, and we were like, ‘Abandon ship!’” Rickman says. “I like Run Screaming [the band’s third album]. We wrote great songs, but it’s not a ska album. It’s a pretty chicken shit move. On one hand, we were getting to be a better band, but we were having a total identity meltdown right in the middle of that.”

Ska may have dropped in popularity, but trying to pretend you never were a ska band only brought on greater ridicule. 2002’s Run Screaming was Slow Gherkin’s lowest-selling album. Only 2,000 copies were pressed, and not all of them sold.

Ska’s never been as hated as it was in the early 2000s, but since then it’s never lost its stigma. Even now if you tell people you like ska, you must do so with a big fat asterisk, acknowledging all the bad, bad ska bands out there before admitting to the ones you like. Ska seems more than any other genre to be defined by its worst bands and least creative tendencies.

The problem with ska in the ’90s is only a few bands reached mainstream audiences, so the general music-loving population never received proper exposure to the genre. Trying to explain to the average music listener why ska is one of the most diverse musical styles out there requires a couple of pie charts, a lengthy powerpoint presentation, and a history lesson that spans several decades. To most people, all ska sounds the same.

“I hope at our best we shined through that [third wave] and sounded different,” Noble says, reflecting on his time in the ska scene with the Pacers. “Now the huge bulk of what people think of as ’90s ska is background music for Food Network shows. We did not want to sound like that. That’s for sure. But we probably did sometimes.”

It’s so entrenched in culture to make fun of ska as wacky nerd music that no one questions why nerdy music is such a bad thing. Are we also throwing They Might Be Giants, Weird Al, and Devo under the bus, because last time I checked, they were some of the best artists to come out in the past 40 years. Besides, if I had to choose between some douchebag rock star flexing his muscles on stage while playing an uninspired guitar solo to woo groupies to his hotel room later that night, or some silly kids who spent hours discussing the pentatonic scale and all the tacos they want to eat after the show, I say long live band nerds and pass me a taco.

Excerpted from Aaron Carnes’ new book ‘In Defense of Ska,’ published May 4 by Clash Books. Carnes will be signing copies of In Defense of Ska at Streetlight Records, 980 S Bascom Ave., San Jose on Saturday, May 8, from 1pm-3pm.

For Sanae Yamada—keyboardists and one half of psychedelic rockers Moon Duo— the most surreal aspect of relocating from the Bay Area to Portland a few years back was the difference in seasons. Portland’s were pronounced, but she had barely noticed the cyclical shifts in San Francisco. Over time, her memories of Northern California became more difficult to place in time, because there weren’t weather clues attached to them.

This realization, in part, inspired the group’s most ambitious project to date: a two-album exploration of the hidden energies in our universe. It’s kind of about weather, but it’s also about the unseen spiritual energies that guide our world. The album is divided into the dark (Occult Architecture Vol. 1, released this month) and light (Occult Architecture Vol. 2, slated for release later this year).

“It wasn’t like we sat down and were like, ‘Let’s make a record about the seasons,’ but removing myself from the context of the seasons gave me totally different qualities to my memories,” Yamada says. “It was more the binary aspects of things that we were talking about—the existence of opposites that contrast each other, at the same time define each other, and make up this whole.”

In a way, the concept of the record isn’t different than anything the group’s done on their previous three LPs. Examining the occult, the spirituality of the natural world, and even the weather (the album Circles was partially inspired by the sunniness of Colorado, where they recorded it) has always been a part of how the duo makes music. What is different is the size and scope of the project—the two albums were made back to back to give them the feel of a single project. Going into it, they didn’t know if it would even work.

“It’s a very daunting concept to take on.” Yamada says. “I don’t, by any means think that we covered it. We just opened a few doors, I guess. I think that the investigation of the cycles and the patterns and structures that make up our reality, matter and consciousness and all of those have been an enduring fascination for both of us.”

The first record, which is supposed represent darkness, doesn’t sound how one might imagine. It features fast-driving, precise playing; a heavy dose of new wave synth, offset by Ripley Johnson’s fuzzed-out guitar. Johnson’s vocals also feel different this time around. He sounds as if he’s in a trance—his delivery squashed, almost expressionless.

Yamada explains that she and Johnson weren’t looking to make a dark album—at least not in the sense of something evil or sorrowful. The word that stuck out for them when they made the album was “claustrophobic.” In dialing in her synths, Yamada says she sought out “a lot of growling sounds and gurgling sounds, little sharp stabbing textures.” She was thinking about a cave space, she says, like liquid bubbling up from the ground. The vocals were recorded normally, but were mixed in a way that gave them a compressed sound.

The forthcoming second installment of Occult Architecture has no such effect applied to the vocals. The most important thing was for it to sound expansive and summer-y. And Yamada worked on a different sound palette on Vol. 2. “I tried to make more sugary sounds, like granular floating textures,” she says. “Like dust in the air.”

Ambition aside, the most remarkable thing about this pair of records may be the way they have expanded the group’s sound beyond the confines of the psych rock genre they are most often associated with.

“We definitely get labeled psychedelic, which I actually don’t mind so much, in that the term itself, is a pretty expansive term,” Yamada says. “I think a lot of things could fit under the heading. But I think in its current iteration, there’s definitely a fairly identifiable sound that goes along with it that we don’t necessarily fit that well.”

Moon Duo
Feb 22, 8pm, $15
Don Quixotes, Felton

For six years, Kevin Martinez slaved over his Nintendo Entertainment System and Gameboy. Chopping up the buzzes, bleeps and bloops, and painstakingly pasting them together with crunchy explosions, cooing laser beam blasts and sawtooth synths until he had something entirely new.

But by 2006, Martinez was feeling that the scene he loved—“chiptune,” as it is commonly called—was drying up. So, in the same way he had compiled his collages of 8-bit sound, he pieced together a collection of like-minded musicians and bands for his very own, two-day chiptune festival. He called it “Frequency.”

“The first Frequency was a joke,” says Martinez, who performs under the moniker Wizwars. “The first night had 15 paying customers. The second had 20. I did it in a little art space—a week later it got shut down because one of the people living there was selling drugs.”

While the first Frequency—or Freq.Fest, as it has come to be known—didn’t sell many tickets, one of the attendees, Jesse Avila, saw great potential in Martinez’s concept.

Avila and Martinez hit it off immediately, and decided to work together on the second Frequency, which they held in January 2013. The second time around Freq.Fest drew 120 people each night. The pair also formed 8BitLA, a collective of artists and musicians focused on producing chiptune music, pixelart and other creative 8-bit endeavors. They regularly organize chip shows and other events under the umbrella of the broader 8-bit scene.

This Friday and Saturday Avila and Martinez bring Freq.Fest to Northern California. Co-sponsored by their sister organization, 8BitSF, the event will be held at Art Boutiki.

The chip scene in general has evolved a lot over the past decade. Most of the chip musicians started out playing electronic music which relied heavily on Gameboys as the primary instrument, Martinez’s band, The Kevin Gnartinez Band, included. Now many groups within the chiptune scene have expanded their sounds significantly—a fact made apparent by Freq.Fest’s lineup: The Kevin Gnartinez band mixes chip with pop-punk; Curious Quail plays indie-folk with subtle 8-bit flourishes; and San Francisco’s Crashfaster are essentially industrial rock with just a hint of the chip sound.

“You find a bunch of bands that are not stylistically or musically similar at all, but we all have something in common,” Martinez says. “I think there’s something for everyone, and Frequency celebrates the diversity of what chiptune can be.”

Freq.Fest.Norcal will be held this weekend, Sept. 11-12, at the SLG Art Boutiki.

Fifteen seconds into Hard Girls’ newest album, A Thousand Surfaces, the band explodes with more power and ferocity than anything you’ll find on any of the San Jose group’s previous recordings. It’s the kind of agitated, visceral energy missing from a lot of punk rock these days.

As on prior records, their sonic palette borrows more from bands like Guided by Voices, Television and Pavement than the Ramones or Black Flag. But this time around, Hard Girls attack their songs with the immediacy of a high school garage band—while approaching their upcoming tours as the seasoned veterans they are.

The three-piece have never been this focused or concise. Though they’ve been playing together for more than five years, Hard Girls has always been a part-time venture. But last year, the boys decided to take the plunge—quitting jobs or taking demotions in order to free up the necessary time to make the band their primary focus. And it shows.

“I don’t think we would have ever written these songs if we didn’t have as much desperation,” says bassist/vocalist Morgan Herrell. “Our attitude has changed—we’ve made them more to-the-point. We’re writing the best music we’ve ever written.”

The strength of A Thousand Surfaces doesn’t come solely from its intensity. In fact, the record features some of the band’s softest moments. It just feels as if every note is purposeful and deliberate. And that’s no accident. Unlike on previous albums, Hard Girls went into the studio knowing every song backwards and forwards.

“For Isn’t it Worse, we weren’t really prepared,” Herrell says, speaking of the band’s 2012 release. “We only had five actual songs (of nine) written. So everything was kind of haphazard. On this one, we worked really hard at making them sound exactly how we wanted them to.”

It’s no surprise they treated the recording process of A Thousand Surfaces more seriously. They went into the studio shortly after making the decision to prioritize the band. They released the record in June of 2014.

Once it was recorded they knew they wanted to hit the road to promote it, but they were surprised at the level of tours they were offered. For the second half of 2014, they provided support for Andrew Jackson Jihad, Pup, Antarctigo Vespucci, and Broadcaster.

It’s a new experience for the band. Before Hard Girls formed, guitarist and vocalist Mike Huguenor was a part of jangle-punk group Shinobu, and Herrell and Feshbach were in post-punk band Pteradon. During those bands’ runs in the early- to mid-2000s, they were hard-pressed to get anyone to come see them, and were usually stuck playing with screamo and metalcore bands. The two bands became close friends, played together all the time, and even shared a practice space because they felt like the odd ducks in the San Jose music scene.

“We were the only ones that wanted to hear each other,” Herrell says.

Both bands dissolved within a few months of each other. Everyone in Shinobu besides Huguenor moved out of California, and the third member of Pteradon quit to focus on work. Huguenor, Herrell and Feshbach were literally the last three standing—and they already shared a practice space. Since they had all put so much work into their prior bands, hitting their heads on the wall just to get some recognition, they approached Hard Girls more as a fun project.

“We both felt like the bands before had a sound, and when we started this we were like, we’re just going to do songs, whatever they are, not worry about a sound,” Huguenor says. It turned out to be the right strategy.

“We toured more last year than we ever have before combined,” Huguenor says, joking that it would have been nicer to have hit on this kind of tour earlier in his musical career. “I think we picked an inconvenient time to do this—it’s a lot easier when you’re 24 and don’t have a job. When you’re 30, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to do—but I think it’s the right time. We’re trying to make it work.”

The tours seemed like a cosmic reward for finally taking the leap of faith with the band. Not only were they on the road with bands that drew well, but they were in front of audiences that appreciate offbeat, creative punk-influenced bands. By the end of the year, A Thousand Surfaces showed up on several top album of the year list on music blogs. This year they are planning to tour a whole lot more behind the album. They play their first show of 2015 at the Billy DeFrank LGBT Community Center this weekend (sharing the bill with local emo-punks Bread Club, who are playing their last show).

Hard Girls are playing the Billy DeFrank LGBT Community Center in San Jose on Jan. 17 at 6:30pm.

Despite some dazzling math rock chops, and a growing fanbase, local singer, songwriter and guitarist Yvette Young is still green when it comes to playing in a band. Her new math-prog rock group, Covet, makes their South Bay debut this Saturday at Homestead Bowl, playing their second show ever.

This doesn’t mean Young is new to music. She’s simply been going it alone for the majority of the past five years. She started posting videos of herself playing music to YouTube in 2009, when she first moved to L.A. Young quickly found an audience, but still only occasionally played shows, and never in L.A.—only in San Jose when she was visiting home on vacation.

“I got a lot more fans through Facebook and YouTube than shows,” Young says. “It just comes with the territory of the Internet generation, where everything’s online. It’s funny because I don’t have a lot of local fans. I have fans across the sea, in other countries—that’s just how I got most of my fans.”

Her solo material is a natural fit for YouTube. Unlike Covet’s hard-edged, driving prog-rock elements, Young’s solo material is intimate acoustic music—a blend of gorgeous singer-songwriter folk tunes and technical math-rock licks. The songs are catchy and emotional, but part of the appeal lies in watching her fingers work their magic, as they fly between the bridge of the guitar and its fretboard, picking and tapping what sounds like multiple guitar parts at once.

Earlier this year, Young released her solo Acoustics EP, but Covet is where she’s placing her focus these days. Upon moving back to San Jose, the songwriter immediately set to assembling her band. It took a while, but she found Ben Wallace-Ailsworth (drums) and David Adamiak (bass) to play with, and together they started developing several songs she had written on her electric guitar specifically for an ensemble. As a trio, they are able to wow audiences with their combined technical prowess, but showing off isn’t what Young is going for. With Covet, as with her solo material, her goal is simple: to make music that sounds good.

“When I write, I want it to sound pretty,” she says. “That’s all I really care about. I listen to a lot of post-rock, and a lot of it is very beautiful. There are moments of planned dissonance, but it’s to create tension to resolve it again with something beautiful.”

Young has developed a unique finger-tapping technique, which she attributes to having learned to play piano before ever picking up the guitar. “I started piano when I was four,” she says. “It helps with separating your right and left hand, so you can do different things. As a soloist, I’ve had to find ways to play so that when people close their eyes, they hear something really full.”

Her success on YouTube led to a solo tour in Japan earlier this year, where she played in front of as many as 100 people at one show. Before going there, a friend showed her some fan-made cover videos of her songs, but it was still a shock when she went there and met people who’d waited years to see her live.

“I was super surprised I even had fans there. It’s so crazy,” Young says. “A ton of people came up to me after the show for pictures and autographs. I’ve never signed autographs before, so it was very awkward, but also flattering. It felt like a dream.”

She hasn’t made many solo videos for YouTube lately. When she uploads something it’s generally to show off new gear or give people a sneak peek of something Covet is working on.

“The band is my priority right now because I’ve been sitting on these songs for so long and I want to get them fleshed out and recorded,” she says. “I love playing as a band way more than solo because the attention is dispersed and not only on me. I’m bad with crowds. I definitely still value my solo work. I am working on a few more acoustic songs. I always feel like there is so much to do, so many ideas, but so little time.”

Covet play Homestead Bowl in Cupertino on Saturday, Dec. 20 at 8pm. More info.

As a teenager, Rafael Reyes had to hide his love of dark, brooding bands like Christian Death and Joy Division, but not because he had overbearing parents worried that such music would warp their child. His story is a little different. He had to listen on the downlow because he was a gang member in a rough Chicano neighborhood in San Diego, where identifying as a goth would have carried potentially more serious consequences than getting grounded.

“The guys from my neighborhood, they didn’t like the way I dressed—so I conformed, Reyes explains of his adolescence. “I shaved my head and my eyebrows—just looking crazy—but inside I was a different person. I was miserable for a long time because I wasn’t living the life I wanted to live. I was doing what everyone else felt I was supposed to be doing.”

Reyes grew up living two lives. He was sent to school in a predominately white part of town. It was there that he was introduced to and fell in love with the death rock, post-punk and shoegaze bands that were never played in his neighborhood. Back at home he made the decision at a young age that joining a gang and putting up a badass facade was the only logical course of action. He made this Faustian bargain in order to protect his family and himself.

And so, when he was hanging with the neighborhood boys, he endured their music. But behind closed doors it was the underground, alternative music of the time that really spoke to him. He remembers seeing Duran Duran on MTV and dreaming that one day that could be him.

Though his band Prayers—a dissonant and aggressive industrial-goth duo, which he describes as “cholo goth”—hasn’t been played on MTV, they have been garnering a fair amount of buzz since their formation a year ago. Reyes and his bandmate, David Parely, are being offered shows all over the country—and report that they’ve been arriving to eager, highly receptive crowds. It’s a victory that Reyes has fought hard for—literally.

“I became a gangster to the point where I didn’t give a fuck,” he says of his decision to openly embrace goth style. “I, for a lack of better words, came out of the closet. I got in fights with a lot of guys, and they finally gave up. They said, ‘do whatever the fuck you want. You earned it.’”

It was a little after embracing his true self—and under extreme circumstances—that Reyes started playing music. His father died on the same day the two of them had a big fight, which sent him into an emotionally chaotic state. He turned to drugs and violence, and landed in jail for six months on assault charges. One day while incarcerated, he had a vivid dream. He was visited by his dad who forgave him, and gave him permission to live his life.

“That dream washed away my self-hate—I finally stopped feeling sorry for myself,” he says. “That’s the day I decided to be sober and to fucking live life. When I got out of jail, I fucking started playing music.”

The first couple of bands Reyes put together, Nite Ritual and Vampire, were heavily goth influenced. Reyes had spent so much time before then holding all his dark fantasies back, and they all poured out in those groups. Prayers is something altogether different, he says.

“This is real shit,” Reyes explains. “In Vampire, I was singing about being a Vampire, or whatever the fuck I was singing about. Prayers is not fantasy. I’m talking about things that I’ve been going through: the betrayals, the heartbreaks, trying to break stereotypes, because of growing up in gangs, and how they were always trying to put me in a box.”

Prayers’ raw, straight-to-the-point aesthetic—with Reyes shouting, rapping and singing over abrasive electronics and driving beats—has drawn comparisons to other out-there alternative rap groups, like Death Grips and Clipping. It has also connected with both suburban kids and the same hard-knock crew that used to rag on Reyes for his goth style.

“It resonates more with people because it’s all reality,” Reyes says. “Before Prayers, I felt like people in the music scene in San Diego weren’t taking me seriously. I gave up. I was like, ‘Fuck everyone.’ I was just angry. It turns out that was what people were actually waiting for.”

That anger is made crystal clear on the fourth track of Prayers’ 2013 full-length, SD Killwave. “I am feared and respected,” Reyes wails on the first verse of “Dog to God,” a meditation on the violent gang culture he grew up with. “Loyal to my family/Death always chasing me/From dog to god, I’m alone in this world.”

And yet, despite the bleakness of the scenes Reyes paints, he says that these days he is in a great place, thanks to Prayers.

“When I played my first show, it was better than therapy. I felt like I got this off my chest. It’s out of my system,” Reyes says. “I get these beautiful emails from people like how they connect with it, like I’m speaking about their life. It makes me so happy.”

Prayers play the Back Bar SoFA in San Jose on Friday, Nov. 21. More info.

Many bands plug away for years, playing house parties, clubs and smaller halls before they ever reach a stage inside an arena, assuming they even reach such a stage at all. But the South Bay-bred indie-blues-rock group Fritz Montana were fortunate enough to play at Oracle Arena in Oakland—on their fourth show.

This isn’t to say the members of Fritz Montana haven’t earned their success. The group went up against a slew of great local bands in Live 105’s local band contest before pulling in the most votes and nabbing the coveted opening slot for the radio station’s annual Not So Silent Night concert last December.

“It was beyond a dream,” says Fritz Montana bassist Kevin Logan, who recalls how the gravity of the accomplishment didn’t totally sink in until the group showed up at Oracle the day of the show. “The second we stepped into that arena, we started seeing all the techs, the roadies, the sound guy—it was really overwhelming.”

Since last year’s NSSN, Aaron Axelsen, Live 105’s music director, has continued to play Fritz Montana’s tunes on his weekly local and new music show, Soundcheck. When the group recorded some new tracks earlier this year, he put those into regular rotation on his program as well.

The group’s infectious mix of heavy, blues-tinged alt-rock and high-energy pop—a la The Arctic Monkeys and The Black Keys—has been earning the band a following, at home and around the country. According to Logan, the NSSN gig served as a springboard to bigger local shows and a seven-show run at this year’s South By Southwest.

For a band that is hardly 2 years old, Fritz Montana are certainly making big waves. That doesn’t come as a surprise to San Jose promoter Barbara Wahli, who caught the group’s very first show at San Jose State University.

“I loved the songs and knew they would resonate well with a large audience,” says Wahli, now Fritz Montana’s manager. “They have so much potential and everyone I contact responds positively to their music. My gut tells me big things will happen for the band.”

So far, Wahli’s predictions appear to be on point. Fritz Montana saw a large turnout at the July 26 release party for their new EP, Scaredy Cat, held at the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco. And in addition to regular spins from Axelsen, they’ve garnered some positive press. The music blog, Infectious Magazine put Fritz Montana on its “best unsigned bands to watch in 2013,” while another music blog, Lucy Out Loud, featured the band on one of its new music compilations.

“Every show I feel like, we build up a little more momentum,” Logan says. “When we started we did not have a game plan. The experience of playing in front of several thousand people, that got us hungry for bigger shows.”

Fritz Montana play The Blank Club on Oct. 24 at 8pm. More info.

It can be hard to believe now, but two decades ago ska had a pretty big moment. It was a time before Gwen Stefani’s solo debut and Bradley Nowell’s overdose, when alternative radio stations were spinning bands like the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Reel Big Fish, Goldfinger and Less Than Jake with regularity. And then there were the Voodoo Glow Skulls.

The Riverside, Calif.-based six-piece ska-core band wrote hyper-fast street-punk tunes with distorted guitar upstrokes, and punctuated with bright horns, dark lyrics and hardcore-style shouting vocals—in English and occasionally in Spanish. They even released an all-Spanish version of their Epitaph debut (1995’s Firme) well before groups like Ozomatli carved out a substantial American market for rock en Español.

The Glow Skulls never got heavy rotation, but they toured hard and packed clubs. When the ska boom busted, a lot of the bands from that era broke up, changed their sound or altered their marketing strategy, but not the Voodoo Glow Skulls. They just continued doing what they did best: playing the distinct and kinetic fusion of ska and punk they’d been playing since the late ’80s. And they haven’t stopped.

“I don’t feel like we’re part of any scene. We’ve always been floating in our own little bubble,” says Glow Skulls guitarist Eddie Casillas, whose band comes to The Blank Club this coming Monday.

Even during the ska boom, it came as a surprise to the band when they MTV would play their videos. They never saw themselves as having any commercial appeal, according to Casillas, who says getting signed to Epitaph was equally as surreal.

“We’ve never tried to be commercial, or tried to be poppy,” Casillas says. “I like pop-punk. I grew up on the stuff. There will always be some Voodoo songs that have a little bit of Descendents in them or Green Day. Ours is just a little different sound. It’s not positive. It’s not poppy, or uplifting.”

Casillas and his two brothers, Frank and Jorge, founded the band in 1988. They released four albums on Epitaph, then three more on Victory Records. Their ninth was on the smaller Smelvis Records, and they are undecided for their 10th, which they are currently in the middle of recording. They are considering self-releasing a series of EPs and seven inches like they used to do in the early days, before they released their debut, Who Is, This Is.

“It feels like we’ve come full circle. Casillas says. “We went through this whole thing where we were on a couple successful labels, had full support. Now we’re back to square one. It’s like 1993 all over again. But the thing is, the band is known now, there’s a name behind it.”

The band’s writing and recording process has changed a great deal since those early days. The last three Voodoo albums were recorded by Casillas in his ever-expanding home studio. The band now record bits and pieces at their leisure, instead of on some executive’s clock.

The group have always been DIY advocates. Even in the early years, they opened their own record store and live music venue in Riverside. That not only gave them better footing in the scene, but also provided them an extra source of income—always welcomed by professional touring musicians. Ever business savvy, the band recently started a label of their own, called California Street Music, and have released a few albums of friends’ bands so far.

The Voodoo Glow Skulls’ touring schedule isn’t as jam-packed as it was back in the ’90s, but they stay busy, doing mostly short tours. Casillas continues to find motivation and inspiration in working on making better recordings. And the band keep an eye out for better gigs and festival shows that will expand their audience, but at this point that isn’t really what keeps them playing.

“Our goals have never been financial,” Casillas says. “We want to have fun and play music. I still just want to make that one next level record. I know people think we probably already made it. But there’s always more. I still think I can top it.”

The Voodoo Glow Skulls play The Blank Club, Monday, Oct. 6. More info.

There are two important facts to understand about Blue Dream, the latest solo album from Orenda Fink, half of Alabama dream-pop duo Azure Ray. First, the songs were inspired by the devastating experience of her dog passing away. Secondly, although it might seem contradictory, it’s probably the most joyful, hopeful album she’s ever written.

“I had this existential crisis,” Fink says. “It hit me harder than I had expected. I was lost in a state of despair of not knowing what death is, what it means for me, for my dog, my husband, my family—everybody. It made me realize that I had no framework for death. I’ve heard all this stuff from different religions, but I’ve never believed one set of things.”

Fink suffered from serious grief when her dog died. So much, in fact, that she saw a therapist to help her through the ordeal. During that period, the singer and songwriter experienced vivid, emotional dreams, and explored her feelings of loss through the psychoanalytic process of dream therapy. It wasn’t until a year and a half later, after she had worked through much of the pain, that she was able to start writing music about the experience. When she finally returned to music, the songs she wrote ultimately became Blue Dream.

Fink is no stranger to spiritualism, and she’s spent plenty of time contemplating death. She says that her mother is a “Southern witch,” and she has explored spiritual themes in previous work, such as her debut solo effort, Invisible Ones, which was inspired by traditional Haitian music and mysticism. But Blue Dream isn’t simply a cerebral exploration of the mystical; it is a grueling and trying emotional journey of self-discovery.

“The whole thing was so intense,” Fink says. “I feel like I found myself during the process. I realized that I’ve kind of been on autopilot for the last 10 years—or maybe I was running away from something psychically and this process really forced me to face my demons.”

Blue Dream is perhaps the most straightforward record Fink has ever released. In the mid-2000s, as part of Azure Ray, she released a handful of records that melded gothic Southern folk music and dreamy indie-rock. As a solo artist, she’s explored more textures, instruments and forms of expression. On Invisible Ones, she’s backed by a Haitian choir on several songs, but on Blue Dream, she plays simple, mid-tempo folk-rock songs—dreamy and lush in texture, but stripped to their bare essence and sung with a hushed and optimistic confidence. It’s only with repeat listens that the depth of spirituality and the complexity of theme become apparent.

It wasn’t a coincidence that she kept the word “dream” in the album’s title. Not only were dreams a key to helping her overcome her grief, they also became a tool of spiritual communication, which she feels helped her develop her own kind of belief system about death. Her recently departed dog dominated those dreams. And while he never spoke, Fink believes he was a guide, helping to heal her and lead her toward healing.

“Dreams are so powerful for tapping into,” Fink says—“not only in my personal experiences, but in the experiences of the entire world from the beginning of time—and I feel like there’s a deep well of wisdom there. That to me is almost like immortality. It’s a version of God. It’s just the tip of the iceberg—just having the tip of the iceberg was enough to blow my mind.”

Death remains an enigma to Fink (there’s even a song on the record called “You Are a Mystery”). But she says she feels comfortable in her beliefs now and in accepting that mystery—including the idea that there is a collective unconsciousness that exists that we are all a part of, and that connects us all.

The record reflects the joy Fink has found in reaching an understanding and peaceful acceptance of her dog’s passing, and having a more optimistic outlook on death. By contrast, there is actually one song on the record written before she’d worked through her grief. It’s called “Poor Little Bear.” It’s the song that is the most directly about her dog—and it’s a sad, tear-jerker. It has a totally different feeling than the rest of the album.

“I was happy—I was almost euphoric,” Fink says. “I felt like I had a line into a different understanding. When he died, it really shook me that I didn’t have anything. I walked into the situation with a complete blank slate. There is hope in the music because once I started writing, I still felt the pain, but I had a more hopeful outlook.”

Orenda Fink plays at Café Stritch on Friday, Sept. 26, at 8pm. Free. More info.

Even the guy who organized the forthcoming Electronic Sriracha Festival, slated to take place Labor Day Weekend in San Jose’s St. James Park, isn’t exactly sure why he decided to pair the the popular hot sauce with electronic dance music, or, in the parlance of our times, EDM.

Sriracha hot sauce and electronic music don’t ostensibly have much in common. One comes in a plastic squeeze bottle and makes all kinds of foods spicy and delicious; the other comes in many different forms and makes people dance.

“It’s one of those things that doesn’t make any sense,” says Ryan Sebastian, founder of the San Jose-based food-truck-event planning company, Moveable Feast, which is organizing the festival and has previously put on the Taco Festival of Innovation and the Bacon Festival of America. In a way, though, it does make sense—“on so many levels.”

There are many parallels between the ascendence of the Sriracha and EDM. Both products first established footholds overseas, both initially enjoyed only a small niche audience in the U.S., and both have exploded into the mainstream over the past five years or so.

The origins of Sriracha can be traced back to Thailand, where a variety of recipes for the condiment abound. In 1980, a Vietnamese immigrant named David Tran started producing and selling his own version of the sauce. Tran has said he never imagined his Sriracha would sell to more than a small group of Asian immigrants, as up until that point, spicy food had never been big in America.

And while some of the earliest house DJs began making minimalist, dance-oriented music in Detroit in the late ’70s, electronic dance music didn’t take off in the U.S. until recently. Club and rave culture was much bigger in Europe until about 2010—the year Bon Appétit magazine named Sriracha “Ingredient of the Year”—when noisy, maximal producers, like Skrillex, first started catching American ears. Both Sriracha and EDM are now pop culture sensations.

So, it is perhaps little wonder that the response to the announcement of the Electronic Sriracha Festival has been so overwhelming. Still Sebastian was caught off guard.

“We thought people would talk about it because it’s such a weird connection,” Sebastian says. But he didn’t expect to see his event picked up by the national press. The festival has been covered by Fox News, Huffington Post, LA Weekly and Vice. Not all of the coverage has been positive, and the Vice piece was particularly snarky, but Sebastian isn’t concerned.

“If no one ever criticizes you for anything, you probably haven’t taken enough risks,” Sebastian says, adding that he isn’t just trying to capitalize on a trend. “People have been using Sriracha in San Jose for a long time—a lot longer than some hipster from Hollywood has.”

Sebastian will be giving away custom Electronic Sriracha Festival bottles—manufactured specifically for the event at the Huy Fong plant in Southern California—to the first 7,500 people through the gate. Once inside, patrons will have plenty to do. Food trucks and vendors will be serving over 120 Sriracha-infused dishes, including cupcakes, ice cream, cotton candy and more.

There will be three stages—all focused on mellower electronic sounds, like deep house, and steering clear of bigger, brash high-energy electronic artists that spin big house, dubstep and trap. “It’ll have more of a chill out, feel-good, happy, summertime vibe,” says local DJ John Beaver who is booking the festival’s Olmstead and Kennedy stages. Mathew Gonzales from Sonido Clash is booking the Hart stage.

Some highlights from Beaver’s stages include Sam F, a Bay Area producer that’s worked on a lot of recent Lonely Island tracks, Aaron Axelsen, program director for LIVE 105, Thee-O, a cutting edge DJ from Los Angeles, and Beaver himself, who’s played Coachella, and opened for all the big names in electronic music like Tiesto.

Gonzales will have more offbeat electronic music, including groups like Los Disco Duro, play electronic cumbia music by mixing live percussion with keys and sequencers. Headlining his stage is SF DJ That Girl, who brings a global soul, future funk mix to her sets.

The Electronic Sriracha Festival will be held on Saturday, Aug. 30, at St. James Park in San Jose. More info.