We’re coming in from the cold. As the Bay Area emerges from some of the chilliest weather we’ve seen all year, two major Californian summer music festivals—Coachella and BottleRock—have announced their 2015 lineups. AC/DC, Jack White and Drake top the two-weekend, six-day bill at the Indio Polo Grounds this year, while Imagine Dragons, No Doubt, Robert Plant and locally bred Fritz Montana have signed on to rock the bottle up in Napa.

As always, Coachella has more bands than you can shake a stick at. In addition to the big three, the lineup also includes Tame Impala, Interpol, Flying Lotus, Cloud Nothings, The Weeknd, alt-J, Ratatat, Run the Jewels, Parquet Courts, Kaskade, St. Vincent, Circa Survive, Built to Spill and a whole shit ton more.

The BottleRock bill is a little more manageable, though not as densely packed with buzz worthy artists. Highlights from the third installment of the festival include The Avett Brothers, Foster the People, Passion Pit, Snoop Dogg, Cage the Elephant, Portugal. The Man and Public Enemy.

Who are we most excited about seeing? That’s really hard to say. But at Coachella Run the Jewels has to be at the top of the list:

So are the S.F. by way of the South Bay indie rockers Fritz Montana:

It’s a new album and a new start for Dee Dee Penny and her brainchild the Dum Dum Girls. Though it’s fair to say that each of her three albums has been its own departure, 2010’s I Will Be introduced the band as a more than competent low-fi act that understood its roots in ‘60s girl groups and garage rock.

Sophomore album Only in Dreams separated Dum Dum Girls, performing April 9 at the Blank Club, from the pack. It was not only richer, louder and more beautiful, but more ambitious and complex. Produced in the wake of the sudden death of Penny’s mother from cancer, the album stares unflinchingly at loss, longing and the experience of watching loved ones wasting away. The album’s genius, however, is that it uses the same conventions of ’60s teenage heartbreak songs to discuss adult loss.

On the surface Too True, the band’s latest release, is the darkest and moodiest to date. An extra guitar has been added to the mix, bringing new textures to the DDG’s previous, monolithic wall of sound, and giving it a more distinctly shoegaze and even gothic sound. But that’s just the surface. At heart it’s a warm and seductive pop album, true to DDG’s roots but open to a wider range of influences. “Are You Okay,” the emotional heart of Too True, suggests that Penny is. Having weathered a difficult time, she and the Dum Dum Girls are moving ahead.

Although DDG formed in Los Angeles and now lives in New York, Penny (born Kristen Gundred) is a Bay Area native who graduated from UC Santa Cruz, where she studied literary theory, music and German.

“I felt very much at home tucked up and away on the mountain campus,” she writes in an email interview.

“Tucked away” is how Penny likes to create. The first DDG album was written and produced in her bedroom. Too True was a similarly solitary effort—at least in the writing, which she did from her apartment and from a room in L.A.’s Chateau Marmont.

While the typical DDG metier is the sound of the mid-60s filtered through ‘70s New York punk, Too True’s touchstone is the early ’80s, mostly. On the Dum Dum Girls’ website, Penny name-checks Siouxsie Sioux, the Cure, Madonna and the Paisley Underground, but also Suede and Patty Smith. I ask her to expound on her list.

“That list was kinda tongue in cheek,” she says. “I’ve found if you don’t define your terms someone else does, most often incorrectly.”

I take that as a challenge to state my own terms. To my ear, Too True evokes 1983, that banner year for music when REM’s Murmur album was defining a new indie sound and the Cocteau Twins’ Head Over Heels invented dream pop. This was a time when post-punk gloom was widespread, when the term “goth” wasn’t yet in wide currency and music critics were describing bands like Echo and the Bunnymen and Sisters of Mercy as “neo-psychedelic.”

I ask Penny if she was explicitly thinking about the ties between ’80s alternative music and ’60s rock when she was putting together the new album.

“I don’t think I’d call my music ‘goth,’” she says. “I relate much more to that earlier neo-psychedelic term. Ultimately, I’m just making pop music and choosing to color it as I see fit, however it gets me off. I serve the song.”

Perhaps that’s a little disingenuous coming from the black-haired, black-clad songwriter whose “Evil Blossom” ends with a chorus of “Why be good? Be beautiful and sad. It’s all you’ve ever had.” And perhaps that’s an unfair characterization. A quality that raises the Dum Dum Girls above a mere revival band is that they are not slavishly locked in to any genre. Penny borrows what she needs, and always serves the song, just as she says.

I’m reminded of David Bowie’s observation that it’s easiest to be sincere through artifice. (And if he didn’t say that, he should have.) So I ask Penny if having a lot of musical references to play with has allowed her to write about topics that might otherwise be too emotionally difficult. Does working within a genre give her freedom to be more personally expressive?

“I am with you theoretically but I don’t really feel like I work within the constraints of anything. The persona and melodrama are just part of the sincerity. I know I’m not inventing anything, and I know that the exchange between artist and listener is often most powerful when we touch on those common, shared experiences.”

Dum Dum Girls perform at 8pm, April 9 at the Blank Club. More info.

After a long wait for Coachella fans, festival organizers finally announced the 2013 lineup today with Blur, the Stone Roses, Phoenix and the Red Hot Chili Peppers  topping the bill.

After months of speculation and big rumors about the Rolling Stones and other heavyweights, the late announcement is a bit lackluster. Sure, the Chili Peppers are great (if they stick to the old stuff), Phoenix will have new material, and you can’t go wrong with SoCal punk from Social D. and the Descendents, but where’s the fire power?

Who’s going to live up to hologram Tupac, Prince playing purple rain in the dessert, Jay Z… the Beastie Boys? First impression: underwhelming.

Share you thoughts in the comments section.

In 1993, underground Southern Californian punk band The Offspring, which play the San Jose Civic on Tuesday Oct. 2, went mainstream when their third album, Smash, came out. Since then, they’ve had a string of singles and platinum records.

Their 9th, Days Go By, was released earlier this year. It, along with the prior album, Rise And Fall, Rage And Grace (2008) were produced by Bob Rock (Famous for producing Dr. Feelgood by Mötley Crüe and the Black Album by Metallica). We recently interviewed singer Dexter Holland about the new album and the recent direction the band has taken.

What strikes me the most about Days Go By is how much more carefully crafted the songs and recordings are—which I think is also true about Rise And Fall. How do you create that sense of immediacy when crafting songs slower? Or is that not a concern for you anymore?

We definitely spent more time on these records than ones in the past and I’m glad that it shows. It’s just a matter of us having done a number of records. This is our ninth record, and we wanted to make sure that it sounds different, not just a repeat of the other records, something more than we’ve done before.

It’s important to have different kinds of songs on the records. Some of my favorite bands growing up were punk bands like the Ramones, where a lot of times the music stayed pretty much the same from record to record. Even though I loved all of it, for us it’s always been important to try and mix it up. So it just takes a little bit longer.

How has the promotion model changed for you now, compared to the 90s, when it mostly depended on MTV and the radio?

It seems like the way the music world is, you need different things all together. It’s not just—get your video on MTV and get your record into Best Buy. That’s done. Now we’re using social media. The Internet’s really big and who you package your tour with, or if you get on Jimmy Kimmel. We have done a little bit of all of that. We did Jimmy Kimmel and the Tonight Show, which we’ve never done before.

The Internet is something I’ve always been comfortable with because I’ve always thought of the Internet as a way to directly connect to fans. It’s what we were trying to do in little clubs as a punk band. The bands that I loved are the bands that invited the audience on stage. We did a lot of that too. I always thought of punk shows as being really inclusive of their audience, like you’re part of an event. So when the Internet came along, you had your own webpage, your own chat room and your own Facebook—Twitter now is even more direct. It fits in very natural to what our band was already about.

Two of the biggest nineties relics went 3D this weekend: the melodramatic blockbuster Titanic, and rapper Tupac Shakur, whose hologram appeared onstage with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg to close out the festivities at Coachella—leaving everyone who witnessed the resurrection of Makaveli scratching their heads.

Well, not everyone. Pop wonder woman Katy Perry may or may not have cried. LeBron James felt “chills run through [his] body.” Afeni Shakur, the late rapper’s mother and overseer of his intellectual property, granted Dr. Dre the rights to use Pac’s image, and was more than pleased by the results. Which came at a hefty price. AV Concepts, the hologram’s architects, claim the projection cost somewhere between $100,000 – $400,000.

But for that price, Pac’s projection seemed closer to a real life performance, even if a real life performance might not have included a visit to Coachella. Nevertheless the weeded out masses watched in some confusion as the glowing specter of thug life did two songs, swapping ad-libs with Snoop Dogg and pulling at his crotch before returning to the cosmic radioactive berth responsible for his reincarnation – the Internet.

Whether you were there in person or streaming it online, let us know what you think: is Tupac back, or should he be laid to rest?

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Bay Area gets a boost from Coachella this week as many artists make their way to Northern California venues in the days surrounding the festival in Indio, Calif.

The South Bay only gets one high-profile visit with the Radiohead show at HP Pavilion on April 11, but several other acts are making stops in San Francisco, Santa Cruz and Oakland.

Our friends at SF Station compiled a complete list of Coachella artists performing in Northern California, including performances by Mazzy Star and The Shins in Santa Cruz, Justice in Oakland, and buzz band Gotye in San Francisco. See the full list HERE.

After fading into nowhere in particular, the celestial blues of Mazzy Star will be heard once again. As promised, the California band is releasing a new album this year and traveling the length of their native state, playing at some predictably unusual venues.

The very abbreviated four city tour will see the original lineup of Hope Sandoval, David Roback, Suki Ewers, and Keith Mitchell paying visits to Petaluma, Sacramento, San Francisco, and Santa Cruz before playing two shows at Lilith Fair Coachella.

There’s a touch of Twin Peaks to their Santa Cruz stopover. Psychedelia promoters folkYEAH! are hosting the group at the Cocoanut Grove Historic Ballroom, built in 1892 and still located across from the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk in 2012. What better place to hear Sandoval’s narcotized lullabies than within eyeshot of an antiquated theme park—and at twilight, to boot. David Lynch would be proud, if he knew what the internet was.

Tickets available at folkYEAH

Coachella is making its two-weekend debut in 2012 with another fantastic lineup topped by Radiohead, The Black Keys and Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg.

Festival organizers made the announcement with a low-key Facebook post featuring the flyer Below:

A complete lineup with specified times is still pending, but we at least know who will be playing on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday.

Friday Highlights (April 13 & 20)
The Black Keys
Swedish House Mafia
Mazzy Star
Afrojack
Explosions in the Sky
M83
Amon Tobin
Cat Power
Madness Jimmy Cliff & Tim Armstrong
GIRLS
Wolfgang

Saturday Highlights (April 14 and 21
)
Radiohead
Bon Iver
The Shins
David Guetta
Miike Snow
Feist, Firehose
Godspeed You! Black Emperor
St. Vincent
Sbtrkt
Flying Lotus
A$AP Rock
Tuneyards
Zed’s Dead

Sunday Highlights (April 15 and 22)
Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg
Florence and the Machine
La Roux
The Weeknd
Girl Talk
DJ Shadow
Porter Robinson
Santigold
Fitz and the Tantrums
Araabmuzik
Real Estate
Greg Ginn

Who are you excited to see?