San Jose-based alternative quartet Citabria have released a new song and accompanying music video. The song premiered on Live 105’s Soundcheck program a couple weeks ago.

The band has been performing the song live for a while, and played it during their set at Cafe Stritch during the C2SV festival earlier this month. Check it out below.

The SoFA Street Fair returns to San Jose’s South First Street arts, culture and nightlife district this Sunday for a day of music, food, beer, art and much more. It marks the fourth such event since festival organizer Fil Maresca brought the party back to life in 2014 after more than a 10-year hiatus.

As has been the case with the past three fall SoFA Street Fairs—and 2016’s inaugural spring event—the focus will be on local bands. However, Maresca says, there is another focus he and his team have been devoting energy to this year: keeping SoFA Street Fair free and putting a little cash in the pockets of local artists.

“All the bands have always done SoFA Street Fair for free,” Maresca explains of the event he began back in in 1991. The festival remained free until 1995, but began charging a $5 cover from 1996 until 2001 to help cover the costs of running the show.

“We want to avoid that this time around,” Maresca says.

In order to avoid charging folks at the gate, the SoFA Street Fair team have turned to the Silicon Valley virtual payment firm Square and their product “Square Cash,” which, like Venmo and other similar apps allows friends to transfer money wirelessly to one another for free.

This year’s SoFA Street Fair will be giving each band what Maresca is calling a “virtual tip jar.” So far 87 are slated to play on 16 stages, and every one of those bands will be assigned a “cashtag”—like a Twitter hashtag, only with a dollar sign preceding the band’s name, rather than a pound symbol.

“I’m really pleased with it,” Maresca says of the system, explaining that at each stage, a band’s cashtag will be displayed. Attendees who have downloaded the Square Cash app, can then use a given band’s cashtag to tip them. Minimum tips are $2, and one dollar from every tip goes to the SoFA Street Fair. The rest goes to the band.

So, for example, Maresca explains, if someone donates $20 to a band, that group will get $20 and the festival will get $1.

This year’s festivities feature four outdoor stages—two for live music, with bands performing staggered set times so attendees don’t have to choose one act over another; one DJ stage, wedged between The Ritz and The Studio rock climbing gym; and, of course, the crowd-pleasing UGWA wrestling ring.

Some highlights of this year’s musical performers include David Brookings and the Average Lookings, who recently released an excellent self-titled LP. They play on the William Street Stage at 2pm. San Jose blues metal quartet ZED, who also recently released an excellent LP, Trouble in Eden, will also take the William Street Stage at 5:30pm, followed by ascendant alt-rock band Citabria at 6:30pm, and then rock-soul-funk sextet Sweet HayaH headlines the stage at 8pm.

Other clubs in town will be getting in on the action as well. Craft cocktail bar Haberdasher will host Mark Arroyo jazzy rock trio at 5:30pm; and at 7:30pm Cafe Stritch will host psychedelic garage rockers The Gentle Cycle—led by local psych-rock celeb Derek See of The Careless Hearts, and, more recently, The Chocolate Watchband.

Scene veteran Chris Landon will perform at the SoFA Market at 3pm and Uproar, a new music and art space taking over the former space occupied by Zero1 will be hosting Wax Moon at 3pm, Mitchell Lujan at 6:30pm and Bird and Willow at 7:30pm.

As for art, The Exhibition District—the local non-profit responsible for putting up large-scale murals all over downtown San Jose, including their most recent piece on the side of Hotel De Anza. Exhibition District leader Erin Salazar was recently profiled in Metro’s Fall Arts issue.

SoFA Street Fair
Sep 11, 2pm, Free
South First Street, San Jose

The SoFA Street Fair is returning for its second straight year since awakening from its decade-long hibernation last September. The Fair’s original reign, which lasted from 1992 until 2001, bookended one of the most exciting eras in the history of downtown San Jose—at least for fans of alternative art, music and culture.

It was a time when the South First Street Area arts district—SoFA—was thriving. The street was home to a glut of music venues, including Marsugi’s, the Cactus Club, F/X and Ajax. Nirvana, Helmet, Sublime, Green Day and No Doubt all played shows in the SoFA district.

But then the dotcom bubble burst, the Twin Towers fell and the SoFA district went into a decline—along with the rest of the country and downtown San Jose. Fil Maresca, organizer of the SoFA Street Fair, turned his attention to different ventures, but he never gave up on the district; he’s always kept an office in downtown San Jose.

Last year, seeing the effects of Silicon Valley’s second big tech boom—the new restaurants, bars and young professionals filling up the newly built apartment towers—Maresca felt that the time was right to “reupholster” his beloved SoFA Street Fair.

His instincts were spot on. With veteran ska-punks Fishbone headlining, and more than 50 local and national acts supporting, the festival was a success—drawing large crowds and garnering favorable press from a number of local outlets.

This Sunday, the festival returns with more than 70 bands performing on three outdoor stages and scattered at 13 venues around town. That’s a lot of music—literally more than any one person could hope to listen to on a given day.

Don’t let #FOMO send you into a tailspin. We’re here to help. Here is our list of six can’t-miss acts at the SoFA Street Fair. Follow this to the letter, enjoy your beer and the total absence of needing to make any kind of decision.

Belle Noire, San Jose
This local quintet is recommended if you like Dredg and Saosin. With echoing guitars, punchy bass lines and heavy breakdowns, Belle Noire expertly navigates a Bermuda triangle of saccharine sweet melody, lush and ambient atmospherics, and powerful riffs.

Cemetery Sun, Sacramento
Hailing from our state’s capital, Cemetery Sun are aptly named, as they find the sweet spot between dark lyricism and sunny vibes—kinda like a bad trip on a beautiful beach. Their current single, “(Hard Drugs) Fake Love,” is reminiscent of The Neighbourhood’s “Sweater Weather” in the verse before breaking into a Receiving End of Sirens-esque wall-of-sound chorus.

Citabria, San Jose
After taking a few years off to let intra-band tensions cool down, Citabria have returned with a blazing-hot mashup of psych-soul and alt-rock. They recently brought down the house at The Ritz, where they performed most of their excellent new album, Exit Reality. Key track, “The Animal,” absolutely rips with its stuttering, Moog bass line, soaring vocal harmonies and jet-plane guitars.

David Brookings, San Jose
He’s been playing music for 25 years, recorded three full-length records at the world-famous Sun Studios in Memphis, and he has more than 130,000 views on YouTube. How have you not heard of this dude? Hey! Don’t stress. That’s what this guide is all about, remember? Brookings—and his band, the cleverly titled “Average Lookings”—play feel good, catchy rock songs. His 2010 album, The Maze, is a collection of 11 compact and jangly pop gems about everyday life.

Jonny Manak and the Depressives, San Jose
You might say that the Manaks are a musical family. Jonny’s brother, Chris, is also known as Peanut Butter Wolf, the founder of Stones Throw Records. But where PBW is an expert on the ones and twos, Jonny is a punk rock pro—penning lightning-bolt blasts about drinking beer, eating pizza and skateboarding. You’ve likely heard his work on MTV, even if you don’t realize it, as he writes many of the gritty punk-rock tunes used in various Dickhouse productions. Yep, those are the Jackass guys.

Talkie, San Francisco
Their Facebook page says they are from San Francisco, but we know they’re really a bunch of South Bay—or Southeast Bay—boys. Founded in Fremont, Talkie play a jangling and bouncy brand of indie pop.

The SoFA Street Fair is this Sunday, Sept. 13, from 2pm to 10pm. More info.

“For some reason things are always hard for us,” says Keviano Azevedo, drummer for the San Jose-based progressive alternative quartet, Citabria. He’s got a point. Considering the band’s fraught seven-year history, it is a wonder they’ve made it as far as they have.

After their initial formation as a trio in 2008, the band spent over a year searching for a singer. In all, Azevedo estimates, they turned away around 50 applicants before settling on Leopoldo Larsen—former frontman of San Jose nu-metal/rap-rockers Zero Mind.

From there, they recorded The Stereo Guillotine EP—an energetic and highly technical set of eight songs. After releasing the EP on July 1, 2010, Citabria quickly earned a local following and started gigging like crazy. But still something wasn’t quite right.

“We wrote that album way too fast and out of excitement,” Azevedo explains. “It wasn’t getting recognized the way we wanted it to. We weren’t getting any radio play. It wasn’t socially friendly enough.”

And so they set out to write simpler songs. Or, as Azevedo puts it: “Something that we thought grandmas could rock out to—something girls would want to dance to.”

They began working with Bill Cutler—older brother to John Cutler, the Grateful Dead’s longtime sound engineer. Cutler became like a fifth member of the band, helping the group shape their songs.

Azevedo wasn’t into it. “I felt that we were losing our individuality and our identity,” the drummer says. “I started to feel like I was just going to practice as a job—but not getting paid.”

Azevedo had a falling out with Larsen and quit. He started playing for other bands—Anya Kvitka, Los Hotboxers and Eyes on the Shore, as well as accompanying DJ sets with live drumming.

Things eventually cooled off between Azevedo and Larsen. The two ran into each other after a show and got to talking and texting. Soon they were sending each other song sketches via email, and other band members got involved. After scrapping most what they had come up with while working with Cutler, they had 18 demos.

The next big hurdle came when they all got together in the same room for the first time to play the songs they had written using electronic music production software. “That was a challenge,” Azevedo says, but they eventually figured it out.

Citabria then took to Kickstarter to ask their fans for money, ran a successful campaign and headed into the Green Day-owned JingleTown Recording studios in Oakland to record what would become Exit Reality.

They tracked the album’s 14 songs in just eight days. But Exit Reality was far from being realized. After laying down all the music, the band found itself trapped in mixing purgatory. They went back and forth with JingleTown for an entire year, but the mix never came out right.

Finally, they requested the raw tracks from JingleTown and took the album home to mix it themselves—a process that would take yet another year of layering on effects and other general tinkering. They finally released the album on Feb. 24.

“It was exhausting,” Azevedo recalls. However, as long as it took, and as difficult as the road has been to get to this point, Exit Reality goes down as smooth as buttermilk.

Take “The Animal,” for example. Aaron Axelsen, program director for Live 105, recently played Exit Reality’s second track on his Sunday-evening new music program, “Soundcheck.” With a stuttering, Moog bass line, soaring vocal harmonies, jet-plane guitars, the song sounds like a cross between Muse, Depeche Mode and Dredg.

“The Animal” is directly followed by “In Your Eyes,” which takes cues from sultry PBR&B crooners like The Weeknd and Frank Ocean. Where The Stereo Guillotine was built upon dry guitar spasms and technical drumming, Exit Reality, is soaked in codeine-laced syrup and propelled by dance-ready rhythms.

Azevedo says the band is totally stoked on the new album and ready to hit the road. He says they are especially excited to share all their new tunes with their hometown fans for the first time live. “I know there is going to be really good turnout for this show,” he says. “I feel it.”

Citabria play The Ritz on June 26 at 8pm. More info.