These days it wouldn’t be so surprising to hear My Chemical Romance raining softly down from overhead speakers at your local Nordstroms. But before punk was fully incorporated into the Great Corporate American Songbook, a trio of scuzzy East Bay kids in their 20s paved the way with a multi-platinum album called Dookie. It’s been 25 years since Green Day released their pop-punk masterpiece. Now, another Bay Area power-pop trio, Pounders, plans to pay tribute to Billy, Tré and Mike by covering Green Day’s seminal 1994 album in its entirety.

Green Day Tribute
Fri, 8pm, $15
Art Boutiki, San Jose

Local artists, high-flying wrestlers and Silicon Valley musicians will converge with tasty food trucks, cold beer and other creative vendors in downtown San Jose this Sunday, as the biannual SoFA Street Fair returns with its yearly spring installment. This year the spring fling features four outdoor stages and 12 indoor venues—including The Ritz, Forager and Uproar Brewing Co. Pounders, David Brookings, Panhandlers Union, Steely Nash & The Cuts, Love District, Wax Moon, Israel Sanchez, Life Size Models, Super Soul Bros and Boy Uomo are all slated to perform. Plus many more. (NV)

SoFA Street Fair
Sun, 2pm, Free
SoFA District, San Jose

There are two things you can be sure of when it comes time for the annual Barb Rocks Birthday Bash, back on Saturday night at Neto’s in Santa Clara.

(1) Promoter/band manager Barbara Wahli will book a handful of some of the best local and regional bands in the area. This year she’s got The Trims, Pounders, Stormy Strong and Fallen Short.

(2) Something unexpected will happen.

For years bands have made it a tradition to surprise her on her birthday by playing covers they know she knows and then coaxing her onstage to sing them. (One year it was Dramarama’s “Anything Anything,” another it was Pat Benetar’s “Bad Reputation.”)

Now she’s on to them and even announces that you should expect a surprise performance on the Facebook event page.

Barb Rocks Birthday Bash
Neto’s, Santa Clara
Sat, 8pm; $8 adv/$10 door

Local post-punk rockers the Trims are set to release a new EP, Delete You After, this Friday with a release party at the Blank Club.

While the band has always been known for its late 70s/80s retro alt -rock sound, influenced by bands like Joy Division and early cuts from the Cure, this new EP has a more modern twist, capturing the essence of groups like the Killers, the Rapture and Franz Ferdinand, who themselves were highly influenced by 80s post-punk but with a more dance-rock edge.

The shift is due in part to the band working with producer Steve Murr, who has an impressive resume, including Smashmouth, J.Dash, Young Science and Pounders.

“We felt that we had hit a plateau with our sound as far as recording so we decided to bring in a producer to help shape the songs with an outsider’s perspective,” says lead singer/guitarist Gabe Maciel. “Working with Steve was not work at all, but rather a sharing of ideas with someone who became less of a producer and more of an extended member of the band.”

Some of the key changes that Murr brought to the table was the use of keyboards, which the Trims have never recorded with before, as well as suggesting they speed up their songs. Both of these elements give the songs a stronger dance feel and less of an overt rock sound.

http://youtu.be/TJbCXY_EsVg

Murr also helped the Trims pull off the bigger guitar sound they always wanted. Although they’ve been able to achieve a large sonic wall of guitars in their concerts, they haven’t yet been able to translate that power to their recordings.

“We tracked guitars in a way that would capture that same tone and emotion you would hear live,” says guitarist Bryan Aguirre.

For people who haven’t seen the Trims live in awhile, they’ve added a visual component to the show, putting on coordinated color lightning as they play.

“We feel that the lighting reflects visually what’s going on musically,” Maciel says. “We have always wanted to give people the most bang for their buck. If you come out to see us and pay money, we want to bring an arena style performance to a small club and give our fans a show they deserve and will never forget.”

The Trims play April 26 at the Blank Club at 9pm. Tickets are $8. More info.

More than half of the 20 Bay Area bands competing for an opening slot at Live 105’s Not So Silent Night, featuring Jack Whit, the Shins, the Killers,  M83, Tegan & Sara, Passion Pit and more on December 7 and December 8 at the Oracle Arena, are from the South Bay.

As of this this posting, Curious Quail and Light the Rocket are the two South Bay bands with the most votes. They are neck and neck for 3rd and 4th place. The first place position belongs to Livermore group Hear The Sirens. To win, some of the bands are finding creative ways to motivate their fans to vote. Dogcatcher, for instance, is offering all their albums for free online until the voting ends. Curious Quail uploaded a video explaining to their fans all the reasons why they should vote for them.

Other South bay bands in the running include Drop Dead Sixty, Fossil Tree, INFM, Pounders, Touch My Rash, The Mess, The Oarsmen and UP&GO.

More than half of the 20 Bay Area bands competing for an opening slot at Live 105’s Not So Silent Night, featuring Jack Whit, the Shins, the Killers,  M83, Tegan & Sara, Passion Pit and more on December 7 and December 8 at the Oracle Arena, are from the South Bay.

Voting is still open, HERE.

It’s been a decade since Los Gatos quartet, Trapt, hit it big with their nu-metal single “Headstrong.” Now 10 years later, they’re getting ready to release their sixth studio album, Reborn, which comes out in January 2013.

“Headstrong” was the band’s first and biggest single. It came off of their second album (and their first major label release). It is just one of those songs that takes you right back to that specific time and place in the early 2000s when nu-metal was really exploding—heavy melodic guitar work, that mixture of hushed, pained singing and angry screaming, and hip hop-influenced metal grooves. It was all there.

While a lot of the bands from that scene have either broken up or moved on to different musical genres, Trapt has, for better or worse, stayed true to the original sound that made them famous in 2002. They’ve already released two tracks off of Reborn, both of which could comfortably sit next to “Headstrong” on an album. If anything, the new material is an angrier version of the old material.

Also on the bill are locals Pounders, who will be releasing their newest album Hard Dirty And Fast at this show. They’ve been getting attention for their blend of pop-punk, 90s alt-rock and 80s New Wave—and lead singer, Chris Pounder’s flamboyant pink Mohawk.

Trapt performs with Pounders at Musik Ink on November 23. Admission is $15 and the show starts at 7pm.

Chris Pounders has had the weirdest run of luck lately. He got cast in a David Lynch video despite not only never having seen a Lynch film, but not even knowing who Lynch was. Clearly, anyone with a pink Mohawk should know that particular filmography (Pounders, to his credit, has since corrected this).

His band, Pounders, is doing well, too. They played their most gigs ever this month, and will wind up with their show tonight at the Blank Club, as well as a Warped Tour set tomorrow and a spot on the SF Pride main stage on Sunday.

But this week Pounders had yet another weird run-in with celebrity. They’re all weird, it seems like. Maybe it’s just something about Chris—he’s young, sincere, enthusiastic and oddly innocent for someone with his punk-meets-art look. He’s charming, and kind of up for anything, whether it not it fits into the image that other people project onto him.

Which is undoubtedly what led him to the auditions for The X Factor held in San Francisco on Monday. Suddenly, he found himself in front of TV arch-villain Simon Cowell, and the other judges Britney Spears, L.A. Reid and Demi Lovato. I’m not sure what exactly he did, but he definitely made an impression:

The “#TWINSES” reference—and yes, I am absolutely ashamed I know this—has to do with the fact that the 19-year-old Lovato debuted her own pink hair—just the tips, in this case—at the auditions on Monday, causing a stir among fans and celeb-watchers.

How far Pounders gets on X Factor remains to be seen. The second season of the show debuts Sept 12-13 at 8pm. The winner of this season receives a $5 million recording contract with Epic Records.

San Jose pop-punkers A Four Star Affair will be shooting a scene for their next video at their X Bar show Saturday. Considering that their first video—which came out earlier this year, for “The Group W Bench”—was a hoot, it’s probably worth getting in on. Don’t know if they’ll have mimes, Robin Hood and zombies this time, but I have a feeling it will be just as ADD and funny as the other one.

They humbly request that attendees for this all-ages show come dressed up “like this is a Hollywood premiere,” which gives you an idea of the red-carpet concept they’re going for.

These four guys can barely keep a straight face sometimes, but damn they’ve been working hard lately. They successfully raised enough money through Kickstarter to fund their second EP, A Tragedy Like Me, which is their best batch yet of soaring, sweet-as-candy pop-punk. More fun than Taking Back Sunday, but in the same vein, they haven’t changed their basic mission since 2010’s debut EP If I Can’t Have You No One Can, but they’ve matured—even though that it seems wrong to use that word in the same sentence as “A Four Star Affair”—quite a bit. Pounders, Fabulous Under Fire and Highway Music open.

A Four Star Affair performs at X Bar in Cupertino on Saturday at 8:30pm; $9.

Back at the beginning of the year, Chris Pounders landed an unusual gig. The frontman for the South Bay alt-rock band Pounders also does a bit of acting on the side, and his unusual look got him an appearance in the video for the title track to David Lynch’s album Crazy Clown Time. In fact, Lynch, who directed the video himself, handpicked Pounders for the role. After filming in February, the “Crazy Clown Time” video has finally been released.

After doing the shoot, Pounders promised me the video would be “as messed up as the music is,” and if you’ve heard Lynch’s album, you know that’s pretty messed up. But he didn’t exaggerate.

“It’s so weird,” says Pounders now, after seeing the finished product.

Pounders plays the character of Dee Dee, in what amounts to a creepy, literal depiction of the song’s lyrics. Of all the characters having a “crazy clown time” in the video’s dimly lit backyard, Pounders’ has the craziest. You can see the video on the next page; watch for the moment around 3:15 where he douses his Mohawk in lighter fluid and lights it on fire. It’s just an effect, of course, but it’s a pretty convincing one. Pounders said after filming he was impressed with the fake Chris Pounders head Lynch had made for the moment of combustion.

The funny thing is that Pounders had never even seen one of Lynch’s films before going in front of the camera with him. Even the casting guy who called him to offer him the gig couldn’t believe it, and kept asking him questions like “You’ve never seen Mulholland Drive?”

When Chris Pounders cut his hair into a Mohawk, he never thought David Lynch would want to set it on fire.

The vocalist and guitarist of San Jose pop-punk band Pounders—which won a round of the Battle of the Bands at 9 Lives in Gilroy last week, and will compete in the semi-finals in March—has had his hawk for a few years now. It’s been blond, red, pink and black, and to say the least, it’s given him a distinctive look both onstage and in the acting work he occasionally does. Distinctive enough that Lynch handpicked him to be in the video for his song “Crazy Clown Time,” the title track from Lynch’s bizarre recent album.

Pounders doesn’t know when the video will be coming out, but he filmed his part three weeks ago. In it, he appears to light his hair on fire, though the effect was actually achieved by cutting a shot of him putting a match close to his hair with a shot of a matching Mohawk on a fake Chris Pounders head going up in flames.

“The video is just as messed up as the music is,” he promises.

The ironic thing is that his trademark look isn’t even a huge political statement on Pounders’ part; it was originally done as an emergency measure after his hair was massacred on a shoot. He planned to keep it just one day but ended up loving it.

“I have a Mohawk, I have tattoos, but I don’t consider myself a punk rocker,” says the 26-year-old Pounders, though it is clearly a bit of a tribute to the hard-core punks he encountered in his formative years: “When I was growing up, those guys were crazy.”

Similarly, people often tell the band—which also includes drummer Justin Imamura and bassist Alonso Hernandez—that they sound like old-school punks. This puzzles them to no end, since they’re the first to admit they don’t. Besides their look, this perception has more to do with the energy of their shows; they’re a lot rawer in concert. Pounders accurately describes their sound on record as “old Green Day meets the Cure.”

If that sounds like a pretty ingenious combination for the current music climate, you’re not the only one who thinks so. Live 105’s Aaron Axelsen has played three of their songs so far: “Scream and Let It Go,” “Chasing the Sun” (the title track from their debut album) and the new “Dead Man.”

But Pounders isn’t too impressed with the retro-’80s movement, feeling like the current groups have drawn way too heavily from the synth side of the electro-dance/guitar-band split that existed in the music of that decade. The band’s unofficial motto is “Put away your dancing shows, turn off that drum machine.”

“I’m trying to go more toward the dark, emotional, energetic ’80s stuff,” he says.

To hear their stuff getting airplay is a validation of the huge push the band has made in the last couple of years. Though he recognizes that radio has less importance than it once did, Pounders compares the importance of it in his mind to the 1994 flop-turned-cult-movie Airheads, where Adam Sandler, Brendan Fraser and Steve Buscemi break into a radio station to get their record aired.

“They raided the radio station just to get that one play,” he says. “To me, it still feels like that. It’s still exciting.”

In actuality, though, Pounders has been around since the mid-2000s. Pounders met Imamura when they were both in high school, drumming at Great America. The pair began playing together, then met Hernandez when they went back to star in Great America’s “School of Rock” show.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Nor, by the way, were any of these the weirdest gig the band members have had. Imamura has hosted Nickelodeon’s Slime Time Live, and Pounders took a couple of years off from the band to perform full-time with Stomp in Las Vegas, including their show at the NBA All-Star Game. They actually incorporate their drumming experience into some of their shows by performing trash-can drumming during their set.

In fact, considering that his last name, from which the band derived their moniker, is the one he had at birth, and not a stage name, he sometimes can’t help but feel he’s in the wrong line of work doing vocals and guitar.

“Honestly, deep inside I sometimes wish I was a drummer still,” he says. “It’s just too perfect.”

The Battle of the Bands at 9 Lives in Gilroy continues with the semi-final round next month. Pounders competes March 23.