Fans of ‘cholo goth’ duo, Prayers, turned out in force at Back Bar SoFa to catch songs from San Diego group’s new, Travis Barker-produced EP, ‘Young Gods.’ The show—hosted by the San Jose-based alternative Latino music collective, Sonido Clash—also featured an opening set by Xuxa Santamaria, and DJ spots by Cutso and Chatos 1013. Check out our video interview with Prayers’ frontman Rafael Reyes (a.k.a. Seyer Leafar).

In the clip, Reyes discusses working with former Blink-182 drummer, Travis Barker, the support he feels from the chicano community in San Jose, and bringing his gangster swagger to goth music.

This is not the first time Prayers have played Back Bar SoFa. The duo came to San Jose in November of 2014. You can read our interview with them from last year here and check out photos from that show here. Photos from last Thursday’s show are below. Photos by Geoffrey Smith II:

Back in 2003, when Cincinnati MC Donwill and Brooklyn MC/producer Von Pea settled on naming their duo Tanya Morgan, they intended it as a goof—an inside joke about a record store clerk attempting to trick customers into buying a hip-hop album disguised as a ’50s soul record. At the time, the pair never expected to make another album together.

“We planned the album as a one-off deal,” Donwill says, speaking on his cell phone last week. “I thought I was gonna be Nelly; Von thought he was gonna be Pete Rock.”

It’s more than a decade on now and he and Von Pea are still working together. In fact, at the very moment of our conversation, you could say they are literally stuck together—in a car, with a just-fixed flat tire, somewhere in the middle of Wyoming..

These days, Donwill says, the name still retains its original meaning, but he adds that it has also become “a rallying cry.”

“So many people got behind it,” Donwill says. Today, he views the name and his group as a collective gathering space for those who never quite felt like they fit in—“an island of misfit toys.”

Upon listening to Tanya Morgan’s extensive catalog—the group has released 10 albums in 15 years, and the individual MCs have also dropped solo recordings—you can hear that tension, that feeling of otherness, of being an outsider.

Just consider Rubber Souls, Tanya Morgan’s 2013 LP. On the album’s lead track, “For Real,” Eric B and Rakim are name-checked, along with the year 1994—the year Nas released Illmatic and Biggie dropped Ready to Die. And song No. 4, “Never Too Much,” features the distinctive ping of an 808 cowbell. Both songs have some serious boom-bap and are reminiscent of the so-called “golden era” of New York City hip-hop.

Songs like these stand in sharp contrast to what’s hot right now—the triling, machine-gun hi-hats of Southern rap, and the bombastic lyricism and minimalist beats of Rae Sremmurd and Bobby Shmurda.

Von Pea says he and Donwill aren’t trying to make any kind of statement about what sounds better by hewing to this sonic palate. “It’s more or less what we know, really,” he says, explaining that the “golden era” jams of Tribe Called Quest, Common and others were the sounds they grew up listening to.

On the group’s forthcoming LP, You Get What You Pay For, due out later this year, Von Pea and Donwill say they will be sticking to their boom-bap guns, but will move away from the live instrumentation of Rubber Souls in favor of a samples-based approach—akin to what the duo did on the 2011 album You & What Army.

Tanya Morgan play the Back Bar SoFa on Apr 2. Doors at 8pm. More info.

It’s been almost two decades since he and his Living Legends crew helped usher in a new era of DIY in hip-hop, and Scarub is still doing things his own way. In fact, he’s doing everything his own way.

After releasing his first solo effort in eight years, Want for Nothing, in November, Scarub is preparing a major tour in support of the album—and he’s doing it all by himself. That means scheduling dates with promoters, booking hotel rooms and plotting his route across the country, which will drop him in San Jose this week, when he headlines the Friday the 13th Monster Jam at Back Bar SoFa.

And while the additional work might be a hassle sometimes, Scarub, a.k.a. Armon Collins, says the freedom he gets in exchange makes it all worthwhile. Being his own tour manager and booking agent ensures that he can visit the special places and people he has come to know and connect with since he began performing back in 1998.

“It’s not like I have to fight for a seat or time table with whoever else is on the tour who wants to do other things,” he says, referring to the complicated logistics of attempting to keep the entire crew of rappers in line and on time. “I get to move at my own pace.”

Doing things on his own terms has helped get Scarub to a place where he is more at peace than he ever has been—a state of mind that is reflected in the title of his new record.

“It’s a play on words, on both sections—light and dark,” he says. “Hustling until you achieve it, or caring less about it and freeing yourself of those desires or obsessions. I’ve always worked with mottos. At my age, I’m at a point where I want to want for nothing. I want to be comfortable in my skin, and no one else can do that for me.”

Being comfortable and working at his own pace also means that the emcee won’t be worrying about pushing out new music at the speed of the Internet. He plans to stick to emphasizing quality over quantity. He particularly notes the output of De La Soul as a point of inspiration. “They put quality time into it, and that’s what I’ve done,” he says.

Scarub says he wants his fans to take their time with his music—to notice album through-lines and reprised motifs that will reveal themselves upon repeated listens. That attention to detail may explain why Scarub is still able to tour while plenty of his contemporaries are long gone.

“I think you need to give people more time to listen to music instead of giving them more and more and more music,” he adds. “At the end of the day, I think if someone has five potato chips versus a whole bag of potato chips, they’re gonna savor those five potato chips.”

Released this past November, Want for Nothing is Scarub’s seventh solo release, his latest since 2011’s The California EP. The album builds on a number of sounds, from the bluesy guitar lick on “My Moment” to the head-bobbing bounce crafted from a shuffling drum beat that accents the spare, contemplative keys of “Go.”

For the latest exposure to what he’s still capable of lyrically, check out his video for “Get Out!” where dancers respond to the beat as well as Scarub’s elastic flow, which shifts from elongated syllables to rapid-fire cadence. Once the double-time hi-hats appear, injecting a new-found energy to the beat, Scarub unleashes a lyrical barrage. Thankfully, lyrics appear on-screen to help the viewer keep up. It’s a great example of the studied nature to his cadence and the effortlessness to how he switches his delivery from one line to the next.

Asked about the crew that helped launch his career—along with the careers of Murs, Grouch and Eligh—he both confirms and downplays much of what has been said about Living Legends of late.

It’s true that both Murs and Grouch no longer associate with the Los Angeles and Oakland hip-hop collective, and yes, what’s left of the group hasn’t been nearly as active as it was at its peak, but that’s just life, Scarub says.

“We’re no longer in our teens or our 20s,” he says. “We’re in our 30s, man—so people have mortgages. People have bigger responsibilities.”

And while cracks seemed to appear within the Living Legends camp after the departures of Murs and Grouch, Scarub is quick to insist that “the energy’s still good” among all of the group’s members. He doesn’t rule out more Living Legends releases in the future.

“There is no hate.”

Scarub plays Back Bar SoFa on March 13 as a part of the Friday the 13th Monster Jam, which will also feature supporting performances from Cannabidroids, Pariah and TOAST. More info.

Cultivating a sound that draws upon a wide range of musical influences, running the gamut from reggae and ska to punk to soul and beyond, the Whiskey Avengers aren’t an easy group to categorize—and that’s just fine with them.

The Avengers—who formed in San Jose in 2006 but are now mostly based in the San Diego area—are more concerned with making good music and connecting with fans than with fitting neatly within the parameters of a specific genre.

“We’re a little bit of everything—a little bit of punk, a little reggae, a little gypsy-pirate music, a little bit of banjo/country/folk,” Stefan Meissner, the group’s singer and guitarist says. “We have a direction. It’s every direction.”

This Friday, Meissner and his bandmates, Clint Westwood and Kevin Higuchi, will be returning to their city of origin for a show at the Back Bar SoFa.

Meissner and Westwood grew up together in San Jose, bonding over their mutual love of music. The pair first joined creative forces in high school, co-founding the hip-hop group Language Arts Crew in 2000.

Six years later—almost by accident—Meissner and Westwood stumbled into creating what would become the Whiskey Avengers. The duo attached a ska song they’d written to the end of a Language Arts Crew album as a secret track and the response was overwhelmingly positive. They recruited Higuchi to play drums and the Avengers were born.

After making a name for themselves in clubs up and down the West Coast, and releasing three full-length albums and one EP, the core trio found themselves making the move to Southern California a couple of years ago.

“We did it for multiple reasons, we were kind of just getting stagnant, you know? Doing the same thing,” says Meissner.

Their time in San Diego has been fruitful. The band has recorded a new EP, “Ballads in the Key of Dub, Vol 2: Ro-Bit,” which they will release at their upcoming San Jose show.

“It’s a fun little project—a little rap/ska mixup,” Meissner says. “We used some old ska tunes, they’ve just kind of been re-vamped and flipped out, and we wrote some extra lyrics to them.”

In keeping with the feel and sound of their first dub EP, the group plays with preexisting instrumental recordings, chopping up the tracks, creating new parts and often adding different effects, such as heavy echo or reverb—“dubbing” over new components to the songs.

Meissner says that the dub series isn’t indicative of a change in direction, adding that fans can expect a new full-length album of original material out some time in the spring or summer of next year.

“We’re almost done,” he says. “We’ve recorded all the music and vocals, and we just have to wrap up some last minute tracks—that’s going to be the real one.”

Since the band moved, they’ve also gained some new off-and-on members—guitarists and keyboardists living in various parts of California and even Arizona that join the core trio at different shows, giving each gig its own flavor.

“It’s fun for us, because it’s always something different,” Meissner says. “We’re always mixing it up, doing different sets. It makes for a unique show every time.”

While the San Diego scene has been providing a supportive environment to gig and write, the members of the Whiskey Avengers are looking forward to coming back home and playing around the holidays—particularly at a space that holds some good memories for the band.

“It’s the back of the old Cactus Club, which is kind of funny,” Meisser says. “That was our old stomping ground, before this band—we were in other bands that played there—that was the best place in San Jose back in the day. Plus I haven’t been up there since February—and all of our friends are in the Bay Area.”

The Whiskey Avengers play Back Bar SoFA on Nov 28, 9pm. 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.

Much like the Aesop of antiquity, it isn’t particularly easy to get a bead on Aesop, the emcee of the Bay Area and Los Angeles hip-hop crew, Living Legends. A Wikipedia search of the Aesop of Aesop’s Fables will inform you that scholars are undecided as to whether Aesop ever really existed or if folk tales were simply attributed to him. Similarly, Google searches for Aesop of the Living Legends crew turn up websites that haven’t been updated for years and YouTube clips from the late aughts.

This is due to many factors. First and foremost, any online query featuring the words “Aesop” and “hip-hop” will return an avalanche of hits pertaining to Aesop Rock, a similarly named rapper with a larger online footprint and a free-associative, tongue-twisting style quite different from that of the Aesop in question.

Second, for the past few years the man known to his close friends and family as Derrick McElroy has been on a bit of a hiatus from making music. Reached by phone from his current home in his native Fresno, he says he made the conscious decision to retreat from hip-hop a few years back to focus on his family and take up some lower-profile work as a promoter and sound engineer.

Beyond that, McElroy says that he isn’t a very easy person to get a hold of. “If you hadn’t caught me today, you might not have gotten this interview,” he says with a chuckle. It’s easy enough to believe. Over the course of the interview, the multi-instrumentalist, producer and lyricist frequently walks away from the phone—his voice growing faint as he walks across the room to tend to some other more-pressing business than talking to a local paper. (He later confesses that he is making a sandwich.)

“I’ve always been about doing things underground,” McElroy says, explaining that he’s never had a publicist, that he doesn’t often give interviews except informal ones to fans after shows, and that he has always booked his own tours—including his forthcoming tour of the West Coast, which includes a stop at the Back Bar SoFA this Wednesday, Oct. 22.

McElroy, who sometimes goes as Black Aesop or Aesop’s Fables, says he is preparing to come out of hibernation—both to push his recently released a mixtape, Seeds of Hip Hop, which McElroy made with DJ Hecktik and features remixed versions of some of the duo’s favorite hip-hop classics from the ’80s and ’90s, overdubbed with new verses and slightly modified choruses.

The spooky boom-bap beat of “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing ta Fuck Wit,” becomes “LL Crew Ain’t Nuthin to Fux Wit!!!,” with Black Aesop spitting verses from his catalog in place of the verses from RZA, Inspectah Deck and Method Man. The sparse creeping electric piano of Nas’ “One Love” becomes “Love One.”

“It was a really weird thing I did,” McElroy says of the Seeds of Hip Hop project. “It was using beats from the past, in the future, but with lyrics from the past.”

Weird or not, it would seem that making the mixtape helped to inspire the emcee—reminding him of why he got into rapping in the first place. McElroy had played in bands and written poetry all before he finally decided to pursue hip-hop full time. Asked why he chose that path, he says it’s hard to say, though he recalls being moved by the likes of KRS-One.

“Listening to a lot of KRS one made me want to be good at rapping,” he recalls, adding that he was inspired by many rap groups from that era. “Old school hip-hop—real rappers from the ’80s and the ’90s, inspired me to be the real intelligent rapper that I am.”

Now, McElroy says he is in the midst of putting together what he hopes will be the best album he’s ever made. “For the last couple years that’s what I’ve been doing—making this magnum opus,” he says. “This album won’t be released until it’s perfect.”

Until then McElroy says he is looking forward to getting back on the road and touring—noting that he is especially excited to be playing at Back Bar SoFA, the former space that housed the Cactus Club, which as he recalls was the first place Living Legends ever performed.

“San Jose is where I started my career—was the first time I played with real sound, a real stage, real lights, real artists,” he says. “It’s a big deal anytime I walk into that place. The memories are crazy.”

Aesop is performing at Back Bar SoFA on Oct. 22 at 9pm. More info.

For his 10th studio album, Wu-Tang Clan affiliate Killah Priest went big. Really big. The Psychic World of Walter Reed, is a sprawling two-disc conceptual record that covers everything from rugged street-hardened tales of dope dealing and gun running, as well as cosmic journeys to the ends of the universe. The album features guest verses from Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, and Inspectah Deck, and production credits from RZA and GZA.

But Priest wasn’t done just yet. On Aug. 9, the Brooklyn-born rapper secured Kickstarter funding for his book, The Psychic World of Walter Reed—an accompaniment to the record of the same name. He is bringing his book to San Jose this week.

On Wednesday, Sept. 24, Priest will be at Back Bar SoFA, talking about and signing copies of his new book, which he compares to the type of illuminated manuscripts commissioned by various world religions and rulers over the ages to record histories in large books that paired hand-written text and highly ornate illustrations—usually with gold and silver leafing.

Speaking with Metro, Priest says the book will contain lyrics from the album, as well as verses and poetry that have never appeared on any Killah Priest recording.

Reading the book, fans will get an inside look at how Priest works, he explains. “They’re going to get the process of how I create,” he says. “They’re gonna get the writing process.”

Priest says that it made sense to make the book to accompany Walter Reed, an album that examines the entirety of his life and career. “This album is more of a mystic journey,” he says, explaining that the book and the album are meant to be taken and considered together, as one—like two artifacts recovered from an ancient tomb. “I didn’t have the crystal ball, but I had the missing book.”

“I’m excited,” he says, noting that he has always been interested in the metaphysical, and the concept of time. He recalls that he was blown away the first time he learned about different time zones. “Ever since I was small, I always had a fascination with how things are created. In science class I was kinda good. In math class I was kinda good.”

Killah Priest will also perform some songs during his appearance at Back Bar SoFA on Sept. 24 at 9pm. More info.