Modest Mouse, Twenty One Pilots, Panic At The Disco, Atlas Genius and many more of today’s hottest alternative and indie rock acts played BFD—Live 105’s annual summer festival at Shoreline Amphitheatre—this past weekend. The weather was warm, the beers were cold and the energy was high at the 22nd “big fucking deal.” We sent Metro photographer Jessica Perez to cover the action. Check out some of her best shots below:

View the entire gallery here.

With a little more than a month before the June 1 festival at Shoreline Amphiteatre, Live 105 announced today the lineup for its annual BFD Festival with Foster the People and MIA topping the bill.

The festival celebrates its 20th anniversary this year with four stages of music. Other highlights include Phantogram, Fitz and the Tantrums and trap heavyweight Flosstradamus:

Main Stage
Foster the People
MIA
Fitz and the Tantrums
Phantogram
New Politics

Festival Stage
Walk The Moon
MS MR
Kongos
Cherub
Bleachers
Birds of Tokyo
Big Data
Bear Hands
Finish Ticket
Skaters
Semi Precious Weapons

Subsonic Tent
Flosstradamus
RAC
Giraffage
The Knocks
Amp Live
WhiteNoize
Aaron Axelsen
Miles The DJ
St. John
John Beaver
DJ Dials.

Soundceck Local Band Stage
Waters
The Hundred Days
French Cassettes
Everyone is Dirty
The Trims
More TBA

Tickets go on sale at 10am on April 26, with a $10.53 ticket only available at the Shoreline box office while supplies last.

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.”

LIVE 105 has been on the forefront of the EDM movement for years, promoting it even back when it was still a niche genre. In recent years at the BDF festival, the Subsonic Tent—an extension of Aaron Axelsen’s electronic music show—has become a bigger part of the festival, encompassing a bulk of the festival’s more interesting bookings.

In fact, even on the other stages this year, the strongest bands were the ones who stylistically could just as easily fit on the Subsonic Tent. Below are some of the highlights from this year:

Capital Cities
By far the strongest act to play the Festival Stage this year. Capital Cities, a new duo from LA, brought disco-infused synth-pop beats to BFD with a live guitarist, bassist and a trumpet player. Two vocalists, one tall with a mustache and the other short with a bushy beard, both equally shared vocal duties with a fun, somewhat goofy stage presence.

Midway through their set they taught the audience the “Capital Cities Shuffle,” which was simple enough for anyone to execute. They played a bizarre, slow-downed rendition of the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” and an upbeat dance-version of Sinead O’Conner’s Prince-penned “Nothing Compares 2 U.” They closed with their buzz single, “Safe and Sound,” a catchy dance-pop song.

PHOTOS: Check out the Metroactive photo gallery.

Wallpaper
It’s incredible the attention Wallpaper have been getting the past year considering that it’s basically an ironic pop act with elements of R&B, hip-hop, all done through a weird performance-art lens. But now it seems the ridiculous character known as Ricky Reed is becoming an actual pop star. What has been their biggest selling point is how strong of a performer Reed is and his ability to engage the audience and get them moving, but the entire band has become a theatrical spectacle.

At the Subsonic Tent, where they played this year, their three drummers pulled out some amazing synchronized moves, including the final breakdown of “Fucking Best Song Everrr” when the drummers stood up, shook the audience’s hands and returned to their kits at the same moment and jumped back in on the beat. They are one of the best live acts going right now.

Passion Pit
LIVE 105 couldn’t have booked a better main stage headliner this year. Passion Pit have really blown up this past year with the success of their brilliant sophomore release, Gossamer, which infuses synth-pop with elements of indie rock. At BFD, they played cuts from their debut, but the highlights were the tracks from Gossamer, including “Carried Away,” “It’s not my fault, I’m Happy,” “Cry Like a Ghost” and the breakout single “Take a Walk.” The evening was particularly special for Passion Pit as lead singer Michael Angelakos celebrated his 26th birthday.

DJ Shadow
DJ Shadow’s set at BFD featured obscure and often brand new tracks that he continued to assure the audience they’d probably never heard before. It was a strange, mind-melting juxtaposation of songs, mixed and blended by the iconic Bay Area producer. Every once and a while he’d lower the music and make a comment, like, “Just to let you know, there’s no laptop on stage with me” or “If you’re confused about what’s going on, look at your neighbor and do what they’re doing.” Some of the beats we danceable, others were just weird, slow trance beats, while others were loud, bass-filled outer space soundscapes. He cut songs together so fast, and with so much skill, it was hard to do anything but stare, amazed.

San Jose
This was the year for San Jose at BFD. There were more bands from the South Bay to play BFD than probably any year before with four bands on the Soundcheck Stage and the Limousines on the Subsonic Stage. Over on the Soundcheck stage, the Trims, Anya and the Getdown and Picture Atlantic all played excellent sets, but it was a particular pleasure watching Curious Quail’s set. Their music probably least resembles LIVE 105’s format of all the local bands, but they fought hard to get there with an online vote.

Their excitement of being on stage at Shoreline was palatable, understandably so. Over at Subsonic, the Limousines put on an intense, mostly serious set that, with the exception of two songs, were all tracks off their new album, Hush.

Since 1994, LIVE 105’s BFD festival has been a staple for exposing new artists to the Bay Area. The Killers, Imagine Dragons, MGMT and Foster the People all played the festival before they were well known. Even AFI performed—on the local-band stage—well before they hit the national spotlight.

In fact, the purpose of BFD, with the exception of presenting a couple of big-name headliners, has always been to treat music consumers to emerging artists at a reasonable price. Aaron Axelsen, the assistant program director/music director at LIVE 105 is heavily involved with booking BFD. He likens the station’s booking strategy to that of the Oakland A’s in Moneyball.

“We’re trying to find acts at a reasonable cost that we’re anticipating are going to pop, like a Robert DeLong, or a C2C or a Diplo, or even Capital Cities, Neighbourhood, Atlas Genius. These are bands that are going to blow up. It’s using our instincts to find them, and not charging $200 a ticket,” Axelsen explains.

As the festival has matured, the Subsonic Tent, which focuses on electronic and hip-hop, and the Soundcheck Stage, with Bay Area bands, have become an increasingly important part of the festival. For Subsonic, a lot of it has to do with the growing popularity of electronic dance music.

“It was more of an underground niche back in the day, but EDM culture has really caught on,” Axelsen says. “It’s not pigeonholed. The 23-year-old music consumer—you look at their iPod, they have everything in there; they have Of Monsters and Men, but they also have Diplo.”

This year’s Subsonic Tent includes an eclectic blend of bands: Wallpaper (hip-hop, electro-pop), C2C (French turntable artists), K Theory (hip-hop), as well as electronic-music legends Chemical Brothers and Bay Area-based turntable game changer DJ Shadow.

As the Soundcheck Stage has grown, local bands are seeing a boost long before BFD arrives. “It seems like the stage has intensified because of all those other components that go into it,” Axelsen says. “These bands are getting support on Soundcheck every week and on the website. They’re getting a lot of exposure. The bands can use it when talking to booking agents or labels—oh, look, we played BFD.”

This year, San Jose is the most represented city at BFD, with four out of the 10 acts, including Curious Quail, the winner of the local band contest, Anya and the Get Down, Picture Atlantic and the Trims.

BFD
Sunday, May 19; 11am; $39.50-$59.50
Shoreline Amphitheater, Mountain View

It’s official. South Bay locals Curious Quail have won the last remaining spot on Live 105’s Soundcheck local band stage at BFD 2013. They will share the stage with nine other bay area bands, three of which are also from the South Bay—Picture Atlantic, Anya and the Getdown, and the Trims. Not only did Curious Quail win, but they did so by a sizable margin, earning a whopping 39% of the vote, with twenty bands total in the running.

“We’ve been working really hard as a band to get our name out there; the community support we got was tremendous. Being in a local band working your way up, you have this series of milestones of people taking you seriously. For a while it was the iTunes factor, then it was Spotify, or Pandora. Well, you namedrop Shoreline Amphitheatre as someplace you played and then that person you’ve known for ten years that knows you’re in a band might actually go and listen to your music and enjoy what you’re doing,” says Mike Shirley-Donnelly, lead singer and guitarist for Curious Quail.

Even though every member of Curious Quail worked hard to encourage people to vote for them, their friends and fans it seemed, were excited to help out. Even Dogcatcher, who were also in the running, told their fans to vote for Curious Quail.

“We threw up a few posts on twitter, Facebook and instagram and like everyone shared them. Everyone! It just kept going. One of the pictures had over 60 shares on Facebook and the Facebook “insights” said “11,000 people saw this post”. That’s insanity,” Says Shirley-Donnelly.

The fact that nearly half of the bands playing BFD’s local band stage this year are from the South Bay reflects well on the scene here, especially considering the degree that the rest of the bay area has long since written off any band that hails from San Jose.

“The South Bay has always felt like the bastard child of the bay area when it comes to the music scene, and rightfully so: our 2000’s era metal/hardcore scene that thrived was not something to be proud of. I should know, I was a part of it. Having so many south bay bands not only on the bill already for the local stage, but also in the contest was encouraging. It’s showing that we as a community down here are actually doing something of note,” says Shirley Donnelly

Another South Bay band could be joining locals, Picture Atlantic, Anya and the Getdown and the Trims on the Soundcheck Local Band Stage at BFD this May.

Live 105 has opened up one additional slot, and the San Francisco radio station is letting its listeners vote on who it should fill it. There are 19 bands in the running and six are from the South Bay: 1989 (from Gilroy), Dogcatcher (from Mountain View) and San Jose bands All City Elite, Conversions, Curious Quail and Sweet HayaH.

Voting continues until 3pm on May 3. The winning band will be announced on air at 7pm on May 5th. Visit the voting page for more info.

More info on BFD 2013.

PHOTOS: Images from BFD 2012

Live 105’s BFD Music Festival returns this summer with Thirty Seconds to Mars, Passion Pit, Silversun Pickups and Awolnation headlining.

The lineup for the concert on May 19 at Shoreline Amphitheater was revealed on air this morning on Live 105. In addition to the main stage, the concert features performers on three other stages: the Bud Light Festival Stage, the Subsonic Tent and the Local Soundcheck Stage.

Several South Bay bands are performing on the Soundcheck stage this year, including Picture Atlantic, Anya and the Get Down and The Trims, joined by San Francisco favorites Doe Eye, Rin Tin Tiger and Mister Loveless. An opening spot still remains for the band that wins Live 105’s local band contest.

The Subsonic Tent hosts some of electronic music’s biggest names with Diplo, Crystal Method and DJ Shadow. Oakland’s Wallpaper will also be DJing in the tent.

The Complete Lineup

MAIN STAGE
Thirty Seconds to Mars
Passion Pit
Silversun Pickups
Of Monsters and Men
AWOLNATION

BUDLIGHT FESTIVAL STAGE
Jimmy Eat World
The Airborne Toxic Event
Fitz and the Tantrums
Capital Cities
Atlas Genius
Youngblood Hawke
Twenty One Pilots
The Neighbourhood
Wavves
The Mowgli’s
New Politics
Gold Fields

SUBSONIC TENT
Diplo
The Crystal Method
DJ Shadow
Wallpaper.
Justin Martin/Dirtybird
Robert DeLong
K Theorty
Aaron Axelsen
Miles the DJ
St. John
Nick G

SOUNDCHECK LOCAL BAND STAGE
Tumbleweed Wanderers
Picture Atlantic
Finish Ticket
Anya & The Get Down
Mister Loveless
Doe Eye
The Trims
Rin Tin Tiger
Bonnie and the Bang Bang

BFD is May 19 at the Shoreline Amphitheater. Ticket presales start on Thursday, March 28. General sale opens on Saturday, March 30.

This year’s BFD had the best vibe the venerable summer festival has had in years. Was it the absence of white-t-shirted bro-bot Sublime fans? Maybe the recent proliferation of fun pop bands on alt-radio? Who knows, but this one was a blast from start to finish.

One of my favorites, and I’ve been going since the very first one. Here are five quick takes on my favorite moments from Shoreline Saturday:

5. Grouplove vs. Kanye West: If there was any band at BFD less likely than Grouplove to take the stage to Kanye’s “Monster,” I didn’t see them. The fact that they did it anyway was hilarious, and in line with their clearly demonstrated mission not to take themselves too seriously. Keyboardist and co-lead Hannah Hooper is a superball on stage, and in general this band looks to create chaos on stage whenever they can. That they write the bounciest pop songs ever is neither here nor there. Back to “Monster,” they really ought to go full bore and just cover it. Another funny nod came near the end of the set when they turned their big hit “Tongue Tied” into Whitney’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.”

4. Jane’s Addiction vs. Mythological Themes: Still, Grouplove had only the second best entrance of the night. Top honors have to go to Perry Ferrell and company for their bizarre, Divine Comedy-sized opening, which featured girls in white dresses raised to the rafters and chased by flying demons. All this while a snazzily dressed Ferrell smiled that Joker-esque smile and sang “Underground”: “I came back to pay respect/To another fallen angel.”

PHOTOS: View the MetroActive photo gallery.

3. Dirty Ghosts vs. Trends: This San Francisco band was my favorite act on the Local Band Stage (regrettably, I got there too late to see Young Science). Noisy and loud in a way that makes a statement, they remind me of early Sonic Youth, with how they manage to be catchy and dissonant at the same time. Sleater-Kinney fans still looking for a fix (and no matter how great Portlandia is, doesn’t it kind of suck that Carrie Brownstein is going to be busy for the foreseeable future?) need to check this band out. They’re raising a big middle finger to rock that’s gotten too slick and mechanical.

2. K. Flay vs. Milpitas: The best quote of the day came from this unstoppable SF rapper: “BFD, are you ready to take a trip with me? Let’s spiritually go to Milpitas, and go to the mall!” I’m still not totally sure what she meant, but I have to admit, I kind of gave it a shot. No astral projection was forthcoming, but K. Flay’s set was probably the best I’ve heard her do. With the Subsonic Tent’s emphasis on electronica, her backbeats were way pumped up in the mix. A couple of times this messed with the vocals, but overall it blew me away.

1. Wallpaper vs. Sanity: If you’re not yet on the Wallpaper bandwagon, where have you been? Ricky Reed’s live show is, as he described one song, “so stupid it went to the liquor store to get bananas.” He’s just doing mind-bending stuff right now, especially on stage. A lot of credit goes to his partner in crime, singer Novena Carmel. At this show, she rocked pink hair, a polka dot blouse and a keytar. At the end of “Stupidfacedd,” she jumped on Ricky’s back, rode him like a horse, and beat her chest. It was nuts, and yet the only way to cap a set like this one.

K.Flay, also known as former Stanford student Kristine Flaherty, returned to her Bay Area roots Saturday at Live105’s BFD 2012, pirate-themed extravaganza headlined by Jane’s Addiction, Silversun Pickups and Garbage the Shoreline Amphitheatre.

Flaherty found her hip-hop muse as an undergraduate student at Stanford University. Since then, she’s created a reputation as unique as her musical tastes. Flaherty’s show translates well with fans of both hip-hop and rock since her music, while rooted in hip-hop, often moves into other genres.

At the Subsonic Stage, one of three side stages at Shoreline, she switched between rapping, live mixing and sampling and pounding on a drum alongside her drummer.

In conversation, she carries a professional, scholarly demeanor as she riffs on everything from her new-found interest for Pantera and Metric to her studies on The Farm in Palo Alto.

“I try to give everything a chance to understand why it has been successful,” Flaherty says.

Growing up, Flaherty was surrounded by a variety of music. First from listening to her father’s classical records to repeating Liz Phair albums alongside other strong female leads in music during her teenage age. Though her strength is hip-hop, that until recently was almost exclusively male-dominated, many of Flaherty’s musical roots originate from strong female leads. Most recently, Metric’s “Youth Without Youth” caught her ear.

“The thing that I like about Metric is that they are pushing boundaries,” Flaherty says. “I like that they are trying to do some things electronically—there’s a new wave feel to the track. It’s a little bit of a throwback.”

Flaherty first arrived to the Bay Area from the suburbs of Chicago as a dual major in Sociology and Psychology at Stanford University.

“I’ve always been interested in domains that have both a very technical side and a little bit more of a philosophical side,” Flaherty says of the two studies, which include both technical statistics and human interaction theory. “I think I always liked that dichotomy, which is probably why I like music, too. I like the technical parts and also being a weirdo on stage.”

Flaherty dabbles in a variety of genres and can hold down a conversation but found that her true strength lay in hip-hop because it lent her the best structure and freedom to write songs that expressed her personality.

“The ability to really manipulate words and to write something as if it was a puzzle was really cool to me about rapping,” she says. “There’s a lot of opportunity for wordplay, rhythm and experimentation.”

While Flaherty continues to expand her career into new areas with a U.S. tour and festival stops, including Boonaroo in Tennesse thise weekend, she advises to all who are just starting out in music to just learn as much as possible.

“The more you know, the more you empower yourself to make things happen when other people don’t necessarily believe in it,” she says.

More information about k.flay, along with a free download of her most recent E.P., Eyes Shut, can be found below at her official website. http://www.kflay.com/

More photos from BFD.