C2SV Music Festival is bringing big names, such as Iggy and the Stooges, the Lemonheads, Thee Oh Sees, Bosnian Rainbows and Deafheaven, to downtown San Jose, paired with some of the best bands in Silicon Valley.

The roster of South Bay bands at C2SV runs the gamut in terms of style, including electronic, Latin, indie rock, folk, metal and punk. The festival offers a chance to really get a handle on just how diverse San Jose’s music scene has become over the past 5-10 years.

Here’s a guide to this year’s local lineup:

Thu 26: Dinners
Café Stritch, 9pm
For a group of lo-fi rock & roll slackers, Dinners have created a nuanced and interesting indie rock album, Black Rabbits, that pays homage to the ’90s lo-fi indie heyday. It is best enjoyed on vinyl, where all the subtle details can be heard at peak audio quality—at least, that’s what the vinyl-worshiping members of the band would say.

Fri 27: The Limousines
Agenda Lounge, 9pm
The Limousines are San Jose’s biggest active band for a reason. Their take on ’80s-inspired synth-pop so perfectly straddles the line between clever, heartfelt and generation-defining, plus the songs are just so damn catchy. Together Giovanni Giusti and Eric Victorino make amazing dance-pop loved all over the world.

Fri 27: Talky Tina
Café Stritch, 8pm
Talky Tina’s brand of pop punk shows influences of rockabilly, punk rock and everything in between.

Fri 27: Containher
Hedley Club, 8pm
As a singer-songwriter, Containher brings a theatrical and haunting vision to her music, both in the chords she chooses and in the imagery in her lyrics. Stylistically, she is versatile (folk, electronic, indie-rock) and she frequently collaborates with other artists.

Fri 27: Amonie
San Jose Rock Shop, 8:30pm
Amonie already has so much going on with the four members they do have (two guitars, bass and drums), a singer would just get in the way. Every song is like an incredible musical journey, with a heavy emphasis on dynamics and texture. Plus, they play really, really loud.

Fri 27: The Flames
Blank Club, 10pm
Fun fact: The Flames’ drummer is none other than No Name, a local on-air DJ who at one time hosted LIVE 105’s morning show, but now is on Alice. Hopefully his boss at Alice is OK with just how punk rock No Name is, or at least his band, Flames. They play the kind of raw, drunken punk that touring bands in the ’90s used to play in backyards all across the country.

Fri 27: The JurassiC
Mezcal, 10pm
If jazz and soul were on a single continuum, JurassiC would land exactly in the middle. Their grooves tend to pull from classic soul and funk, while the chords and melodies lean more into the jazz realm. But even there, the influences for everything they do are all over the map. It’s a big jumbled mess of beautiful music.

Fri 27: Soulful Obsession
Mezcal, 11pm
More than just a live rap band, the quartet at times plays jazz, uptempo R&B, soul and straight-forward hip-hop. The group’s songs weave in and out of these different styles.

Fri 27: BVMO Crew
Fahrenheit Lounge, 11pm
Taking their name from a popular beverage store chain, these DJs spin funk, soul and hip-hop. It’s great dance music with lots of obscure song selections and deep cuts.

Sat 28: Curious Quail
Café Stritch, 2pm
If there’s any band in San Jose right that so totally has the support of their fans it’s indie-folk group Curious Quail. Their fans voted for them to play BFD this year and helped the band reach its $6,000 Kickstarter goal to fund an upcoming album in a matter of days. Big things are on the horizon for Curious Quail.

Sat 28: B.Lewis
Pagoda, 11pm (San Jose)
B.Lewis has gotten a lot of international attention for his original electronic arrangements, which often lean into instrumental hip-hop territory. Pitchfork recently gave him major props for his production on the new Bad Rabbits album. At C2SV he’ll be performing a DJ set.

Sat 28: The Bang
St. James Park, 4:15pm (San Jose)
The Bang revives lesser-known ’60s soul gems, particularly from girl-fronted bands, and contributes to the genre with exceptional originals that sound like they could have just as easily been lost soul classics themselves.

Sat 28: Haptic Synapses
Works/San Jose, 8:30pm (San Jose)
Haptic Synapses are a full-fledged electronic improvised trio. Each member makes beats and programs on the spot without coordinating in advance, playing off each other in real time to create an exciting and spontaneous musical experience.

Sat 28: Brother Grand
Agenda Lounge, 9pm
Ben Henderson has played passionate folk songs for years, sometimes solo, other times with a full backing band. Brother Grand is an offshoot of this, but with upright bass player Endika. Performed as a duo, the songs sound surprisingly thick. It’s just what Henderson’s brilliant songs have always needed.

Sat 28: Dirty Pillows
Blank Club, 10pm
Is a bass guitar really all that necessary for an indie-punk band? The Dirty Pillows don’t think so. With Millhows on guitar/vocals and Jeff Jagged (owner of On The Corner Music) backing him on drums, the duo mixes elements of jangle-pop, garage, ’90s indie-rock and punk rock into a fun, tight, energetic package.

Sat 28: Bibles and Hand Grenades
Blank Club, 11pm
Bibles and hand grenades may not be two items that go together so well, but the band Bibles and Hand Grenades do bring seemingly dissimilar genres together quite naturally (country, metal, old school rock & roll).

Sat 28: Shinobu
Café Stritch, 11pm
It wasn’t too long ago that Shinobu broke up, with each member moving away from the Bay Area. Slowly the members have returned and they’re seemingly playing more shows now than ever before. Their brainy, self-deprecating throwback jangle-pop with a punk-rock edge is as good as ever, only tighter.

Sat 28: Picture Atlantic
Hedley Club, 11pm
Picture Atlantic opened for Coldplay at the HP Pavilion and they’ve toured up and down the West Coast on their own many times, drawing packed houses wherever they go. As far as guitar-driven indie-rock goes, San Jose has no bigger band than quartet Picture Atlantic. Fans love their mixture of passionate heart-on-the-sleeve songwriting and driving indie-rock beats, textured with keyboards and nuanced guitar work.

Sat 28: Sonido Clash
Mezcal, 11pm
Sonido Clash is a collective of like-minded, cutting-edge DJs and musicians pushing the boundaries of modern Latin dance music. They mix traditional Latin genres like cumbia and merengue with electronica and hip-hop. The collective includes Philthy Drones, Turbo Sonidero Futuristico, Raul y Mexia and Chatos 1013.

Sun 29: The Albert Square
Café Stritch, 4pm
When singer-songwriter Sim Castro reformed post-punk band Albert Square this past year, it was almost like a new band emerged. The songs were looser, more intense and had an almost unhinged quality about them. Castro’s songwriting still has those same subtly complex ’90s indie rock leanings, but with more urgency.

Sun 29: Cartoon Bar Fight
Café Stritch, 6pm
Falling somewhere between dream pop and indie folk, Cartoon Bar Fight could be 2013’s answer to the Cranberries. They create a lot of lush arrangements and earnest melodies, and have a knack for writing interesting concept albums. Their next release will be about space, according to the band.

Sun 29: The Trims
Café Stritch, 7pm
Proving that the ’80s offered more than just cheeseball radio pop songs, the Trims hone in on the darker, more interesting, underground post-punk bands from that decade for influence, while blending it with a modern alternative dance-rock sound. They have a gift for creating immense, consuming layers of guitar sounds while still keeping the tunes pop-friendly.

Earlier this month, the Limousines walked onto the Subsonic Tent stage at Live 105’s BFD at Shoreline for the fifth consecutive year. This time, however, they were a far cry from the duo that first went viral and gained national attention in 2009 with poppy hooks tailor-made for the meme generation.

Their electronic-pop sound and instrumentation remain intact, but the lyrics and tone of the new material has evolved into more emotional territory. Of the 10 songs the Limousines played, eight came from their upcoming sophomore album, Hush, set for digital release on June 6 and to be celebrated with a party at Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco.

“We were there to show them who we’ve become,” says vocalist Eric Victorino. “We wanted to make that one statement that we’ve changed a lot.”

Over the past five years, the Limousines have, in fact, changed a lot while also remaining San Jose’s biggest, most nationally recognized band still releasing music.

The Limousines first hit the scene with the brilliant pop gem “Very Busy People,” a song Victorino likes to say is about “jerking off to Tumblr” but is really a smart commentary on the information overload that everyone is experiencing in the age of the Internet and smartphones. The song made it on the radio, bringing them more national exposure than they ever expected to garner.

The clever existentialism continued on their debut LP, Get Sharp, first released independently in 2010 but then reissued on Dangerbird Records later in the year. It featured the fun, self-reflective single “Internet Killed the Video Star.” The track hit a million views on YouTube and brought the band an international fan base.

Hush
Hush, funded by a successful Kickstarter campaign that more than doubled the band’s goal when it reached $75,000, opens with a mood we have not yet experienced with the Limousines. “Love Is a Dog From Hell” describes the thrill of a first kiss but cautions that love is unpredictable and complex once the door is opened.

“We wanted to write songs that we could perform as adults for the rest of our lives,” Victorino says. “I can see being 45 years old and singing ‘Love Is a Dog From Hell.’ The old stuff had a short shelf life. I can’t see myself being 40 and singing a song about Tumblr.”

The album talks about love from a multitude of angles, which range from painfully honest to almost clichéd in their deliberate lack of witticisms. Unlike a lot of music other bands have written about love, Hush taps into the reality of what love actually feels like and not a fantasy image of love.
“Ninety percent of the record is about all the best parts and the worst parts and the middle parts of what loving somebody is all about,” Victorino explains.

In “Little Space,” for instance, Victorino talks about his own challenges with intimacy. “It’s hard to be loved and to hate yourself at the same time,” Victorino tells me. “It’s hard to feel like you don’t deserve love. That’s where a lot of the songs I wrote from my perspective are coming from.”
On “Bed Bugs,” he wrote about bandmate Giovanni Giusti. Victorino had watched him experience the heartbreak of falling in love with someone who didn’t reciprocate the feeling.

Complementing the lyrical shift on Hush is a new depth in production that brings a more multilayered sound to the new songs. The beats laid down by Giusti, who also mixed the record himself, have a more distinctly ’80s sound than Get Sharp, and it won’t be hard to get crowds to dance to them. Retro, however, it is not.

“I remember stuff on Get Sharp, I was making beats in my mom’s sewing room,” Giusti says. “That was so long ago, my production has changed 100 percent.”

‘Things Change’
The fact that it took three years to release a follow-up to Get Sharp seemed a mystery to fans, but behind the scenes Victorino and Giusti were reeling from personal tragedies and problems with their label. Since getting out of their record deal, they’ve been very candid about the degree to which Dangerbird didn’t deliver on anything it had promised. In that time, several close friends of Victorino and Giusti passed away.

In 2011, the band’s success continued to climb while Victorino bottomed out emotionally. Struggling with bipolar disorder, he attempted to end his life and was eventually hospitalized. He wrote about the entire incident in his book, Trading Sunshine for Shadows.

“To have eight of your friends die in less than two years, in separate instances, it’s pretty fucking strange. You can’t go write ‘Very Busy People’ again after that. You can’t go be happy. Things change,” Victorino says.

The only song to make it on to Hush from the early demos was “Haunted,” about not being able to stop thinking about someone. Of all the band’s songs, “Haunted” marks the biggest change in direction for the Limousines.

When Victorino sat down to write the lyrics for Get Sharp, he methodically assembled clever stanzas, played with rhyme schemes and remained fully aware of the meaning behind each line. “Haunted” was different.

“I was walking, and all the words just came into my head,” Victorino recalls. “I called Gio, and I told him, ‘I have to come over, and we have to work on it.’ I just blurted the song out. I get chills thinking about it now. We were both really moved by the outpouring of it.”

At the time, the meaning of the words were a mystery to Victorino—something he hadn’t allowed himself to do with the Limousines, though he did do so years earlier with his previous band, Strata.
“I used to never think about the words, because I grew up worshiping Kurt Cobain and watching all his interviews and knowing that most of the time he didn’t know what he was talking about, but he knew it was coming from somewhere. And it was just as valid. It doesn’t matter where it’s coming from,” Victorino says.

This experience shaped Hush, allowing it to be an album that came from their hearts and not their heads. Rather than being clever or sarcastic, Hush is honest and vulnerable.

Over three years, Victorino and Giusti also got to know each other a lot better. They previously recorded all their songs by emailing tracks back and forth to each other and never working in the same room together. With Hush, working in the studio together has allowed them to discuss ideas and be much more collaborative.

“I think now that we’ve gotten to know each other, we’ve come close enough and worked together as artists, it’s OK for him to see my process, and it’s OK for me to see his,” Victorino says. “It used to be a mystery. I never even saw him make music before. I had no idea how he did it.”

Love Movement
It took several months after they’d received the money via Kickstarter before their songwriting really clicked. While Hush is indeed darker than Get Sharp, they let go of the idea of making a “dark” album and instead went with their instincts and wrote an album mostly about love. Then the album poured out.

“We thought we were working before. It wasn’t until that last period where we were like, ‘Oh we’re really working on this thing.’ It’s kind of funny because in a way we were working on it for two or three years, and in another way we weren’t working on it until a couple months ago,” Victorino says.
So far, the Limousines have gotten positive responses from “Love Is a Dog From Hell,” released a week ago, and they’re optimistic about the rest of album.

“The fact that it was funded by Kickstarter or whatever is going to be a footnote,” Victorino says. “The big feat wasn’t raising that money. The feat was that we morphed from one type of band to another successfully and made a great record.”