Ahead of his 24-date U.S.-Canada tour, Kung Fu Vampire is thinking about his hometown.

“There’s all this talent here,” the local horrorcore rapper says. “There are so many great emcees, but no one’s stepping up and saying ‘I’m gonna be that guy.’”

That guy is whoever will stay in San Jose after breaking big, in order to draw national attention to the largest city in Silicon Valley. It’s a concern many local creatives are voicing: who can rise to the top and succeed—in music, or the arts—in this increasingly tech-centric city.

If you haven’t heard of Kung Fu Vampire, you’re probably new to the South Bay. Welcome. The San Jose rapper and producer has been releasing solo records since 2001. Along the way, he’s landed prominent features on tracks by Bay Area legend E-40, horrorcore pioneer Brotha Lynch Hung and underground sensation Tech N9ne. He is currently touring behind his latest effort, Look Alive, and is scheduled to play The Catalyst in Santa Cruz this Saturday.

Over the past decade and a half, Kung Fu Vampire has often seemed to be on the verge of breaking through to the mainstream—inasmuch as horrorcore rappers can be “mainstream,” that is. With 90,000 likes on Facebook, and nearly 23,000 Twitter followers, he stands head and shoulders above most other musicians in San Jose in terms of fanbase and visibility. And, as an independent artist, he’s done it all by himself, on his own terms.

Stylistically, Kung Fu Vampire is San Jose’s one real contribution to “chopper” rap, a fast spitting style that has its origins in the Midwest. And due to his lyrical content and gloomy aesthetic, his music falls loosely into the category of horrorcore—a subgenre hip-hop that favors the cinematic imagery of horror movies and the macabre.

His latest single, “Fire,” features Ubiquitous from Ces Cru, as well as Locksmith—a pair of buzzed-about, up-and-coming rappers—who trade nimble verses with Kung Fu over an ominous beat of strings, swirling synth pads, choirs, and a female vocal hook that lands somewhere between club and trip-hop.

Although he champions a style that originated in the Midwest—and despite his ties to one of the Midwest’s most notorious exports, horrorcore kingpins, the Insane Clown Posse—those familiar with Kung Fu Vampire’s work know that he is fiercely loyal to his hometown. With his new record, Look Alive, the emcee says he aims to shout his allegiance to the South Bay from the rooftops.

“A lot of what I’ve done in the past is mysterious and withdrawn,” says Kung Fu. “I’m kinda coming clean on this album.”

True to his word, the emcee seems eager to lay most of his cards on the table. He still declines to reveal the name on his birth certificate, but he is more than willing to discuss just about everything else. He talks about his family and shares details about his numerous bodily ailments. While he used to maintain an image that might best be described as “club-goth chic”—ghoulish white face paint, red and white contacts, a shaved head and flowing cloak—Kung Fu Vampire has recently adopted a different look. In recent press photos and music videos, he sports a ball cap or beanie, wayfarer sunglasses, a T-shirt, shorts and sneakers. He is dressed similarly when we meet at a Korean barbeque joint in Japantown to chat.

“There’s always a side of me that’s been super goth, and then super cholo—super San Jose,” he says. “I was in a lowrider car club for over a decade.”

In a way, the title of Kung Fu Vampire’s latest album—Look Alive—openly draws attention to this dichotomy.

“What’s a vampire trying to do?” the emcee asks, semi-rhetorically. “He’s trying to look alive. Look Alive is a testament to where I’m at. I do have a crazy life, a crazy upbringing and how I got to this. And I’m showing people a whole other side of the music industry and how it can be done independently. I’m gonna do it for my city.”\

Kung Fu Vampire
Jul 9, 9pm, $12-$15
The Catalyst, Santa Cruz

San Francisco’s campy glam-poppers, Scissors For Lefty, may have been under the radar for the past six years but to say the group took a “break” isn’t entirely accurate. Since the band’s last EP, 2008’s Consumption Junction, they’ve been collecting lessons learned in the biz, making room for some life off the road and getting deeper and perhaps darker than they have ever before.

“We’re going into some territory that is not standard for Scissors For Lefty,” the group’s lead singer Bryan Garza says of his band’s recently released full-length, Bangs & Lashes. “We used to sing more about San Francisco and love gone wrong. This is more focused on the complexity of why love goes wrong and/or what’s going right and how to hold onto it and celebrate it.”

“Bangs & Lashes,” the playfully artsy video for the new album’s title track, certainly carries a less-than-savory peeping-tom vibe. Garza says the song itself is a reinvention of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”—this time from the obsessive vantage point of the stolen man.

“Dolly Parton was singing, ‘Please don’t take my man,’” Garza explains, “and this is his perspective of, ‘No please, please take me.’”

If Bangs & Lashes reminds you of the back rooms of your favorite nightclubs where the soundtrack is primarily ’80s-era British- and goth-pop, Garza says that probably has something to do with his band’s regular Thursday night dance dates out in San Francisco, where the group gravitated toward the back-room DJs spinning gloomier beats.

But perhaps what really sets Bangs & Lashes apart from previous Scissors efforts is the balance it strikes between polished studio wizardry and raw, energetic musicianship.  Garza says that is simply a product of experience. The band self-produced and recorded their debut LP, Bruno on their own time; after they were signed to Rough Trade they recorded 2007’s Underhanded Romance in what Garza described as a “whirlwind” two-month sprint; this time around, they once again took their time, but were able to incorporate the sophisticated production techniques they’d picked up on the previous album.

SCISSORS FOR LEFTY – BANGS & LASHES – Director’s Cut from GLASSCOFFIN on Vimeo.

The finished product is an album that is clean, but not sterile—emotive but not sloppy. Garza describes it comparing it to “a slick, one-mic recording.”

“To me, that’s the ultimate way of doing it,” he says—to make it feel real and not cut-and-paste.”

After many years spent touring with the likes of Smashing Pumpkins, Blonde Redhead and Panic! At The Disco, Garza says a break was necessary—and not just to find time to record Bangs & Lashes, but to avoid “singing about the rigors of the road and these trivial things that everyday people aren’t going to connect with. We wanted to make sure it was more about our life experiences instead of just some kind of touring life.”

Some of these life experiences include the deaths of loved ones, including Garza’s aunt who committed suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.

“Things like that were not easy to work into a pop album before and this album gave us a chance to really go there,” Garza said. “That meant a lot.”

In addition to delving into deeper more difficult lyrical material and self-producing Bangs, the band also made some other significant changes in the makeup and operations of the band.

Due to the economic downturn and the continued contraction of an already shunken music industry, Garza says Scissors For Lefty had to reassess some of its longstanding strategies of touring and distributing the band’s recordings. Scissors For Lefty stopped searching for a label or record deal, and now use social media and online streaming services to promote and distribute their music.

“We realized you have to do everything yourself,” Garza says. “If you make something awesome, it will find a way to shine.”

While the local scene was in flux, so too was the Scissors lineup. Ever since 2006, Scissors For Lefty was the “marriage” of the Garza and Krimmel families. On the Garza side, there was Bryan, his brother Steve, and their uncle Robby. On the Krimmel side, there were the brothers Peter and James. In the midst of recording Bangs & Lashes, Steve left the band, but was quickly replaced by Garza’s younger cousin, Eric. And Garza says he wouldn’t have it any other way—especially when it comes to performing.

“Shows are just a really great time for us to love each other,” he said. “We had a lot of eye contact at the last show and were just like, ‘Hey man! You’re my cousin! Look at us do this! And there’s your mom and my other 15 cousins out there in the audience watching us.’ It’s very fun.”

Scissors For Lefty play the Blank Club on Nov. 15. More info.