This weekend marked the eighth anniversary of the SubZERO Festival. Featuring music from local and national musicians, food, drinks and plenty of local artists, it was only the second time the festival spanned two days. Check out our video by Metro interns Linh Nguyen and Raechel Price and view photos by Metro photographer Greg Ramar.

Band: Rin Tin Tiger.

View the entire gallery here.

This year’s SubZERO Festival boasts a lineup of top local and national talent.  From veteran punk rockers, Talky Tina, to acoustic warrior and hometown hero Brother Grand. The festival’s organizers even snagged the avant-punk duo and Sub Pop Records artist No Age. Here is our list of can’t-miss music at this year’s festival.

Eyes On The Shore: 7:15pm | Anno Domini Stage (Fri)
Just before their performance at Live 105’s sold-out BFD, Eyes On The Shore will be playing the Anno Domini stage on friday night. This four-piece indie rock outfit is local to San Francisco, formed from members of the band Ambiance Antrom Kury and Kayhan Golkar, who have been writing together for more than a decade. Joined by vocalist Cory Tauber and drummer Kyle Albery last year, the band put out their debut album A Golden Blue, which features dramatic drum and bass lines accompanied by melodic surf guitar rhythms to create a sound that reflects the band’s variety of influences, from ‘60s surf rock to blues to post-modern bands like Radiohead and Sigur Ros.

Rin Tin Tiger: 8:30pm | Anno Domini Stage (Fri)
Rin Tin Tiger, an alternative folk rock trio from San Francisco (with some members originally hailing from San Jose). This group carries the high-energy, lyric-heavy, acoustic guitar-lead sounds of modern folk music, while still aiming to retain a contemporary feel. Rin Tin Tiger pulls influences from a plethora of genres—anything from Bob Dylan to Morrisey to Tupac. Their new single, “Small Cuts That Bleed A Lot,” is full of introspective lyrics and a killer harmonica hook.

Picture Atlantic: 10:30pm | The People’s Park Stage (Fri)
Another pre-BFD performance by San Jose based Picture Atlantic will be headlining the People’s Park Stage Friday. Hailed by The Owl Mag as “an exquisite mix of thrilling, boppy synth highs, and dark, heavy bass lows,” the band’s 2012 album strives to push musical boundaries and create sounds that have both ingenuity and longevity. They have developed a bit of a cult following in the South Bay and have played alongside the likes of Coldplay, The English Beat, STYX, Say Anything, Eisley, and Dan Black.

Brother Grand: 9:30pm | The Secret Garden Stage
Psychedelic-folk rock duo Brother Grand will grab audiences with an engaging live performance Friday at the Secret Garden Stage. Each song, be it stripped down to a banjo and upright bass or screaming into a wall of electric sound, highlights the band’s passion and dynamic stage presence. Combining live loopings, chaotic string melodies, thunderous drums, and yes, even a rhodes piano, Brother Grand is mixing the best of folk, psychedelic, and “film-score soul,” proving they can push boundaries without completely breaking ties with their musical roots.

Scissors for Lefty: 7:15pm | Anno Domini Stage
Heading off Saturday’s set at the Anno Domini stage is SF-based Scissors for Lefty. Brothers James and Peter Krimmel started the band with Bryan Garza while attending college in San Luis Obispo. Garza’s energetic vocals lend an air of Brit-pop pretension to the band’s dance-punk vibe, standing tall among contemporaries like Arctic Monkeys and Panic! at the Disco. With their debut album Bruno turning 10 this year, Scissors for Lefty is an indie art pop band that still retains a high-energy dance pop feel and a sense of humor.

No Age: 9:45pm | Anno Domini Stage
Performing at 9:45pm Saturday at the Anno Domini stage is the LA-based punk duo No Age. No Age has the experimental qualities of more avant-garde noise pop while still remaining fundamentally punk rock. On their 2013 album An Object, produced by Sub Pop records, guitarist Randy Randall and drummer Dean Spunt turn their carefully cultivated dream-punk sound on its head with melodies that are more emotional than they are technically perfect and drums that combine traditional lumber and steel with experimental sounds of contact mics and electric bass. Cut, packaged, and labeled by Spunt and Randall themselves, An Object is protest music to the core.

Talky Tina: 8:15pm | The Secret Garden Stage
Coming to the Secret Garden Stage on saturday is Talky Tina, a local band that boasts a Metro alum as one of its own. Started by former members of another San Jose band Odd Numbers in 2009, Talky Tina modernizes classic elements of punk and power pop. Talky Tina’s sophomore album Just a Little Broken has made them a staple of the reemerging San Jose punk scene.

There will also be a multitude of great art and crafts on display at SubZERO. Here are just a few that we’re excited about:

Black & Brown
SubZERO wouldn’t be complete without fashion. Come to the Black & Brown booth—one of the best vintage clothing shops in the South Bay—and check out their expertly cultivated collection of vintage wear.

SLG Publishing + APE-POP
This locally based comic books shop is about much more than super heroes. At SLG, you can find plenty of gritty, punchy and humorous 2D characters as well. Since 1986, Slave Labor Graphics Publishing has been at the cutting edge of independent comic book and graphic novel publishing. It is perhaps most notable for its dark and strange sense of humor. SLG will bring back the Alternative Press Expo, a showcase of non-mainstream artworks. Come and pick up some original comics from the Bay underground artists.

Spectrum Glass Art & Works/San Jose
The Glass Art Society’s 44th annual International Glass Conference is overlapping with this year’s SubZERO Festival. Check out SPECTRUM at Anno Domini and Enlightened Glass at Works/San Jose. Both exhibits aim to change the way you think about glass artwork. Much more than just decor, the pieces in these exhibits tell stories, express emotions and contemplate philosophy.

Current Tattooing
Current Tattooing will be displaying some of the best work they’ve done on that most precious of all canvases—the human body. Whether you’re completely inked, are considering taking the plunge, or just appreciate the artwork, stop by the Current Tattooing booth.

For more information on SubZERO, click here.

Ryan Sebastian now knows that bacon is the third rail of the food industry. Touch it at your own risk. Sebastian’s food truck event company, Moveable Feast, brought over 12,000 people to the first annual San Jose Bacon Festival of America this past weekend—overwhelming vendors with about 5,000 more attendees than expected.

“We have fairly good data from previous festivals,” he said. “We’ve been doing this for a while now, but the Bacon Festival was just way beyond that.”

Despite having no advertising beyond social media, so many people showed up that lines grew too long and trucks started running out of bacon. Eventually, festival organizers had to start turning people away.

“It was just insane,” Sebastian said. He also credited heavy local media coverage to the large turnout.

PHOTOS: Images from the San Jose Bacon Festival of America

The event’s Facebook page is rife with angry festival-goers. Writes one: “I stood in one line for 40 minutes and 25 minutes in they announced they were out of a bacon dish… It was freakin’ 6:00 pm! Bacon Festival my ass! It was the worse [sic]! I knew something was wrong when the smell of bacon did not engulf the parking lot or festival! I would like a refund!”

Sebastian is well-aware of the criticism (valid and otherwise) and is currently working on responding to the flood of emails and posts he has received since event, in addition to granting refunds. Moveable Feast will also be pushing out a survey to festival-goers about their experience in order to better understand what people expected and their concerns were.

“We pride ourselves on doing excellent events. This was a definite black eye for our company,” Sebastian said.

When asked why he thought the festival had gotten so out of control, Sebastian couldn’t really say. Other bacon festivals around the country have experienced similar problems, he pointed out. Maybe there’s just something about bacon that gets people sizzling.

So what does that mean for the San Jose Bacon Festival of America 2014? “We have to decide whether we want do it again,” Sebastian said. “It’s one thing to turn a profit, but if it’s at the expense of what people think of our company, then it’s not worth it.”

Before Ryan Sebastian, co-owner of Moveable Feast and Treatbot, decided to create San Jose Bacon Festival of America, a large-scale food truck event themed entirely around bacon, he was leaning toward doing a sriracha festival, since everyone around here, he figured, had tried sriracha at some point, thus making it an instantly recognizable, fun themed event. Only problem, he learned, is that although most people may visually recognize sriracha, few knew it by name. (For the record, sriracha is the red hot sauce with the rooster on the label found at nearly every Asian restaurant.)

So Sebastian went with something even more recognizable: bacon.

AUGUST 30: UPDATE: Here’s the “bacon team” lineup for the San Jose Bacon Festival of America:
333 Truck
BBQ Kalbi
Bigg Shrimp’n
Blast Off
Chutney Mary’s
Cluck It Up
Eat on Monday
Fairycakes
Fish Taco Wabo
Frozen Kuhsterd
Grilled Cheese Bandits
House of Siam
Louisiana Territory
Madd Mex
Me So Hungry
SF
MoBowl
MoGo BBQ
O Mi Ninja
Pacific Coast Highway
Road Dogs
Rocko’s Chocolate Tacos
Soulnese
Super Tacos
El Conrro
Takoz Mod Mex
Taqueria Angelica
Tastee Bytes
Treatbot

After the success of Sebastian’s other food truck event, San Jose Taco Festival, which celebrated its second year last May, he was looking for a secondary event that would be even easier to promote. Bacon seemed the obvious choice.

“We wanted to do something that was a no-brainer. We’ve done very little marketing for bacon festival. We’ve been extremely lax about promoting the event because the response is through the roof. Someone says they’re going to go and five people comment on their Facebook post, like ‘I want to go too!’” Sebastian says.

In other words, bacon is popular.

For a lot of attendees, all they need to know about the San Jose Bacon Festival of America, is that there will be bacon—and lots of it, but there is so much more to Sebastian’s bacon festival than just bacon. Like Taco Festival, which plays on Mexican themes, bringing in Mexican wrestling rings and air accordion contests, the bacon festival is also a tongue-and-cheek cultural heritage festival, but this time it’s old timey America.

“We’ve been wanting to do this very Americana, state fair theme that I personally like. I love parades and stuff like that. Bacon goes perfect with that. The joke is that we’re trying to make a festival that is nostalgic for a time that never really existed,” Sebastian explains. “I’m glad I live in this time. The past wasn’t necessarily best for everyone. So I think it would be great to celebrate it, while having a huge diverse group of people come in to the festival.”

There will even be square-dancing. Most people attending bacon festival presumably have never square danced before. The goofy, over-the-top nature of the festival almost gives people who would never otherwise seek it out a free pass to give it a try.

“Square dancing is a legitimate form of cultural expression. I think we should at least try and expose it and get people to try and participate,” Sebastian says. “We’ll have marching bands and a petting zoo and some other fun kinds of things that in some parts of the country would be really normal. In San Jose they almost became kind of exotic. Pin the tail on the donkey isn’t played very much. We’re looking at this as a fun, retrograde event with marching bands and kazoos and bacon.”

Sebastian’s vision goes even beyond creating a fun Americana-bacon themed event; he wants to breathe new life into the very notion of what a food festival experience can be. The key is to make the guests more active participants in the activities and to create unexpected experiences.

“It’s a lot different than the typical festival, where there’s posters of dolphins and a classic rock band. If you go to the Gilroy Garlic Festival, it costs $17 to get in. People sit and kind of listen to the music, but maybe not. We’re trying to break that whole model,” Sebastian says.

At Bacon Festival, the marching bands, for instance, will be playing in the crowd. And if they happen to play a song you like, there will be thousands of kazoos lying around for anyone to pick up and join the band if they so desire.

“We’re trying to innovate and really try to make these a unique experience. It’s not going to feel like your typical festival,” Sebastian says.

Of course the Bacon festival is at its core a food truck festival. All the vendors will be either food trucks or mobile carts. They are not required to have bacon in every dish, though no doubt there will be plenty of bacon items to choose from. The only rule the vendors have to adhere to is that no dish can be over five dollars—that way people can afford to try several items without spending a fortune. There will be over twenty food trucks, and a lot of them will offering food they don’t normally sell, both with and without bacon.

“It’s going to be a mix of different things. For some people, they may not want to eat five pounds of bacon in one sitting, or at least one day. There’s going to be a lot of different options,” Sebastian says.

Marching bands won’t be the only form of live music at Bacon Festival as several local bands are also scheduled to play. So far the lineup includes Sweet HayaH, Usurper Vong, Dreams of June and Relapse.

This year’s Mayhem Festival was different. It felt different. Gone was the dread of attending a faceless, corporate-sponsored event. As soon as I entered, I felt at ease. Why? Because I didn’t feel like a chump. Let’s face it, most of the time, festivals like this leave you drowned in a sea of bands you couldn’t care less about. With a lineup that included true metal legends like Slayer, Motorhead and Anthrax, that wasn’t the case Sunday.

Overall, the biggest stroke of genius was the traveling keg. Amongst the crowd of concert goers were wheeled carts with a kegs in them, filled with ice. A tall flag with the type of beer they were serving stuck up out of the back of the carts, so all you had to do was look for the flag. It was like a beer beacon.

Musically, there were some parallels to last year’s Mayhem Fest. Instead of questioning why Testament wasn’t on the main stage, the question was why wasn’t Anthrax on the main stage? No matter, though. Anthrax came out with more energy than guys half their age.  Running amuck and sounding incredible, Anthrax’s showmanship was unmatched that evening.

As the sun set, Motorhead took the main stage. Subtle yet effective, Lemmy is the epitome of cool. He doesn’t even have to try. He just is. Dirty, gritty and louder than a 747, Lemmy made it clear that night: “We are Motorhead, and we play rock and roll!” Who are any of us to disagree?

The power of Satan took over as soon as Slayer took the stage. As Scott Ian put it: “Slayer is the music you’re going to hear when you go to Hell.” They had their Marshall stacks set up to look like two upside down crosses –-with fire shooting out of them. They set a standard that night, making me feel sorry for whoever had to follow them.

Which brings us to Slipknot.

I’ve always respected Mick Thomson’s guitar work. The guy shreds, plain and simple. There’s also no denying Slipknot’s influence and ability to get the crowd moving. But headlining? Over bands that have paved the way for them? I don’t get it. There’s no accounting for taste, so take their music with a grain of salt. But they never fail to put on a good show, whether you like their music or not.

At concerts like this, it’s always a t-shirt contest. Who has the most obscure shirt from a band you’ve never heard of? Well, I guarantee I had a shirt no one was wearing: Mr. Bungle. Last year I wore an Eyesores shirt. So, I’m still the undisputed Mayhem t-shirt champion, two years running. 

The artsy chaos on South First Street at Subzero makes for great spectacle. At the 2012 edition on Friday, there was once again plenty to see, starting with the return of Art Alive Gallery. This body-painting collective debuted at the 2011 festival, but they really upped their game this year. Semi-nude women decked out head to toe in body paint as everything from mythological creatures to art masterpieces inspired by Botticelli and Dali would be enough to stop traffic in any city, but on this night in SoFA they were just one of many unbelievable things to see and hear.

So yes, Subzero continues to be the South Bay’s coolest street festival, and the sensory overload is its most obvious appeal. But to me, Subzero is really about discovery. The reason people look forward to it so much is that it’s become the place for artists from across a wide range of subcultures to show off what they’re working on the rest of the year. There is eye-opening stuff happening around us every day in the South Bay, but it’s hidden inside San Jose’s industrial warehouses or behind the shiny gleam of tech offices.

A perfect example this year was Dru, the masked headliner on the William Street Stage. Here’s a guy who was making music and games in his South Bay bedroom, releasing albums mostly in Internet obscurity, and suddenly he’s headlining the biggest street festival of the year? He even had three of the Art Alive painted ladies dancing on stage through his set—which was, by the way, the craziest electro barrage I’ve heard in quite some time. His unique take on the Star Wars cantina band theme was particularly inspired.

That’s the genius of festival organizers (and Anno Domini owners) Cherri Lakey and Brian Eder. They pay attention to all of the subcultures around us, and have an irrepressible drive to connect them to each other, and to themselves, and to us. I didn’t get to see nearly as many of the bands as I’d planned to, just because there was so much art to look at, plus excellent randomness like the Oversocial Mofo Revue. But I did get to hear a few of the weirder stage offerings, like the Minibosses ripping through some of my favorite Nintendo themes. Unlike almost all the chip bands that have made arcade retro cool in the last couple of years, these guys play with a straight rock band set up, and their sound is a lot heavier and more powerful in person. I loved how people were yelling out video game names the way “Freebird” would get yelled at other concerts: “Contra! Connnnnnntttttaaa! Mega Man 2!” The band delivered both, by the way.

My favorite discovery of the night wasn’t even from the South Bay, but L.A. (granted, this is probably because I had seen most of the local acts before): the indie-folk outfit Monsters Calling Home. They floated ornate arrangements with intriguing lyrics across the eastern end of the festival, while cryptic messages like “Once I was a dolphin and you, you were a manatee” flashed several stories up on one of the buildings behind them. Apparently it was quite an experience for the band, too, as lead singer Alex Hwang explained that in their hometown, most crowds tend to watch them for a minute before looking down to their iPhones. “We really like you,” he told the crowd. “You guys are a lot more clappy than Los Angeles is.”