Although they are signed to two record labels—including Barsuk, home to Death Cab For Cutie—and they recently released a well-received single, Oakland-based quartet, Trails and Ways, won’t be leaving the comfort of the bedroom, their prefered recording space, any time soon. And why should they?

After all, they arranged and recorded their excellent debut LP—the glossy, yet intimate Pathology—mostly in the home of their drummer, Ian Quirk.

“We like to play with lots of different approaches when we’re writing a song,” says guitarist Keith Bower Brown “This lets us work in our own space, lets us be more creative, have more time and less pressure around the process. We feel like we’re getting closer to a formula that’s really good for us.”

The members met while living in the cooperative houses surrounding UC Berkeley, but they didn’t start jamming together until after a bit of post-grad wandering around the world. Alongside Quirk and Brown, Hannah von Loon tickles lead guitar and Emma Oppen keeps everyone grounded with her dubby bass lines. In the spirit of their former residences, the band collaborates on lyrics, composition, and singing for each track, creating exuberant pop filled with thick harmonies and genre-melding melodies. “This is a creative journey for all of us,” Brown says. “We want to do it in a shared way.”

Their breakout single, “Nunca,” has the tinny guitar riff, galloping drums and infectious hook of a pop song, but the lyrics testify to the melancholy resilience of street life in Sao Paulo, a city that inspired Brown during a trip through Brazil.

“We have this idea of our music as always having an environment, a context,” says Brown. “It takes you on a journey to a real space. For ‘Nunca,’ I wanted this noisy, lively, very life-saturated space, like being in Sao Paolo, and wanting that noise to be an integral part of that song.”

“Nunca” caught a buzz in the blogosphere, and the band racked up 70,000 plays in a single day. With heavy emotional and political statements enmeshed within their dreamy, organic grooves, they seek to make popular tunes with a shiny surface that invites deeper digging.

“It feel dishonest to me to make music that strips out the trouble that you’re in.” Brown says. “And I feel like I live in a world where a lot is not going well, for a lot of people, in a lot of places. How that hits me personally and how that can be the root of a great pop song is something I’ll be trying to find out as long as I’m making music.”

Trails and Ways play San Pedro Square Market on July 25 at 7pm.

In February, the San Francisco Bay Guardian named sunny-pop quartet the She’s a local band to watch with a cover story for the newspaper’s “On the Rise” issue. Of all the bands selected, the She’s were definitely the youngest (between 17-18 years old) yet they weren’t by any means a new band. They’d already been playing together for five years, since middle school—and had achieved more than a lot of bands.

Things really started to take off in 2010 when bass player Sami Perez sent a MySpace message to Christopher Owens of Girls. She told him that she really liked his music, and wanted to know the lyrics to a particular song. She also mentioned that she was in a band and that he should check them out this weekend, and he did.

“He liked us and he offered us a gig with him at the Fillmore,” Perez says. “We were sophomores at the time, so that was pretty big. We realized it was a huge gig and we were in awe, but it was pretty early in our phase as musicians. We were still designing our sound.”

After that, the She’s pretty much played most San Francisco venues, while starting to branch out to the rest of the bay area. In 2011, they released the brilliant LP Then it Starts to Feel Like Summer, which captures their ultra-catchy, early 60s surf-pop, Beach Boys pop sound. While there’s been a resurgence in sunny-pop in indie rock the past five years, or so, the She’s stand out because they do it so well. Their songs hit that “makes you feel good” sweet spot so perfectly.

The She’s might also look familiar after a major Converse advertising campaign in San Francisco had the band scattered on billboards and posters all over the City.

“They were focusing on local artists and musicians, so we got to be a part of that,” Perez says. “We did a video with them and it got over 300,000 views. That’s gotten us a lot of publicity as well,” Perez says.

The She’s only recently graduated from high school, which marks a major turning point in their already successful band. They’ve all been accepted to college in New York, but before they go, they are going to give the She’s their undivided attention for a full year. They have a new six song EP nearly finished, and they’re making plans to tour and maybe see if they can sign label. According to Perez, the new EP isn’t quite as sunny as their first album.

“It’s still poppy, but it’s getting a little darker, a little more developed,” She says. “Our last album was pretty much straight-up pop. This one has a little bit more edge.”

The She’s perform September 28 at C2SV Music Festival at San Pedro Square market. Ticket info.

Back in the mid-’90s, 17-year-old punk-rocker Nathen Maxwell was on the prowl for a new band after his angry, sloppy punk-rock band PBS had broken up. At the suggestion of his musician father, he snuck into the bar Molly Malone’s to watch a Celtic rock band called the Dave King Thing, which would eventually change its name to Flogging Molly.

Maxwell was blown away by the talent and passion of the musicians. “It was the real deal,” he recalls. “It just struck a chord in my heart.”

Maxwell continued to show up every Monday night to catch Flogging Molly. Despite having virtually no experience with Irish music, Maxwell wanted to be in this band. Surprised, King actually asked Maxwell to be their bass player after their original bassist quit.

“He never heard me play or anything,” Maxwell says. “We just hit it off. I started practicing my ass off.”

Shortly thereafter, the band changed its name and re-emerged with a heavier sound, but without losing either its rock or traditional Irish influence.

By the 2000s, Flogging Molly became a well-established, drawing Celtic-punk band, performing as many as 200 shows a year. While playing music for a living fulfilled a dream for Maxwell, he still had a desire to write music—which he did, but the only people that heard his songs were his bandmates after shows, when they’d gather and hang out backstage.

That changed in 2009, when Maxwell decided to take songs that he’d written over the past decade and record a solo album under the moniker Nathen Maxwell and the Original Bunny Gang. The band stops in San Jose for a free Daydream Nation concert at San Pedro Square Market headlined by the Phenomenauts on April 27.

“I’ve been a songwriter since before I joined Flogging Molly,” he says. “There are songs and stories that I need to get off my chest that don’t necessarily fit into the Flogging Molly vision. Instead of trying to force my songs into Flogging Molly, I realized, along with David King, whose advice was for me to do my own thing, that I should record an album.”

To help him do that, he called the best drummer he knew, his dad, who has played drums in bands his whole life. He is most known for his surf band in the ’90s called the Blue Hawaiians.

One thing Maxwell knew when recording was that he didn’t want to write a punk album. He’d already done that. Instead he came up with White Rabbit, a mellow, acoustic folk-rock album with a heavy reggae influence.

“Playing in Flogging Molly, I was really able to get that punk side of music out and get that off my chest. I did that for many, many years,” Maxwell says.

This was only a temporary sensation. “I started touring that record. What I realized from touring it is that I still have a hell of a lot of energy. I still am very much a punk-rocker. It’s difficult for to me to go up onstage and play a full set of mellow songs,” Maxwell says.

What was also temporary was the project remaining a solo venture. Touring gelled the foursome into a band. Maxwell even changed the name of the project to simply “The Bunny Gang.”

“It’s not just musicians playing my songs; it’s really evolved into a band,” Maxwell explains. “It’s completely democratic.”

Last year, the Bunny Gang went into the studio and recorded what will be their debut full-length album, which they plan to release sometime in late summer on Hardline Records. The songwriting is similar to White Rabbit, but Maxwell plays the electric guitar instead of the acoustic guitar. They have already released the song “Sirens in the City,” which sounds like early-’80s-era Clash, a far cry from the nonpunk White Rabbit.

“The new record is bigger, louder. The sounds are even further out, more eclectic. And it has more energy to it,” Maxwell says.

As the Bunny Gang has grown, Flogging Molly has required less of Maxwell’s time. Nowadays, Flogging Molly are playing roughly 50 shows a year, which is significantly fewer than when Maxwell recorded White Rabbit. This gives the Bunny Gang an opportunity to really become a touring band.

“Initially, it was about letting off creative steam,” Maxwell says. “Now it’s like, let’s travel the world and play this music and see what we can really make of it.”

The Bunny Gang
Saturday, April 27; 6:30pm; free
San Pedro Square Market, San Jose

A few years ago, Worker Bee and Doctor Nurse were two of the biggest local indie-rock bands. They haven’t broken up, but they aren’t as active as they once were. Evan Jewett, Worker Bee’s lead singer, moved to New York, and a couple of members of Doctor Nurse had kids, which made gigging and maintaining a regular practice schedule tough. In the midst of all this change, Dinners, consisting of two members of Doctor Nurse (Jeff Brummett and Todd Sandigo) and two members of Worker Bee (Andy Barnes and Damien Wendel), formed in the most unassuming of ways.

“Jeff was bored and started hanging out with Andy,” Sandigo explains. The band performs during the latest installment of Daydream Nation at San Pedro Square Market on February 23.

While Brummett was the primary songwriter for Doctor Nurse, it was Jewett who took the lead with Worker Bee, yet Brummett found that Barnes was actually quite the songwriter. Both brought their songs to the table, singing lead vocals to their own compositions. Wendel and Sandigo quickly joined and made it a full-fledged quartet.

“It was organic,” Brummett says of the process. “It was going well, and those other guys weren’t around.”

The songs they came up with were entirely different from both Worker Bee’s lush, meditative, dynamic sound and the subtly complex psychedelic-folk songs of Doctor Nurse. Instead, they played bare-bones, heavy, guitar-driven indie-rock songs.

“It was a reaction to both of our bands,” adds guitarist Sandigo. “Worker Bee was really highly composed, with all these different parts and all these different polyrhythms going on. Doctor Nurse was complicated also, with the folk and the other styles mixed in. We just wanted to get back to basics.”

In the year-and-a-half they’ve been playing together, they have been very modest about promoting themselves. The four members just don’t seem to enjoy making a big production about themselves, even down to their name, “Dinners,” which doesn’t exactly sound like a typical band handle.
Yet they’ve worked on their debut album, Black Rabbits, which is being pressed on vinyl now. They write their songs quickly in order to capture a liveliness, yet they have been diligent at selecting only the songs that sound exactly right.

“We’re not meticulous, but we’re really picky,” Sandigo says. The pickiest of all is Brummett, who doesn’t like to spend too much time on a song that doesn’t feel right. “Jeff’s a big song dumper. That’s part of his M.O., and that’s been for all his bands,” Sandigo says.

They spent the better part of four months recording their album in Brummett’s living room with an eight-track tape deck rather than working in a studio, or even using modern computer recording software. The sound quality is reminiscent of the ’80s/’90s lo-fi indie bands, back before underground bands had access to Pro Tools.

“I like the ideas of weirdos hanging out in their houses recording jams at midnight on a Monday rather than a bunch of people in some big studio somewhere,” Brummett says. “When I listen to my favorite four-tracked records—Guided by Voices, Lou Barlow, Bill Fox, Beatnik Filmstars—there’s an intimacy and looseness that is very appealing to me.”

The production is deliberately squashed. The vocals are mixed right down into the guitars and drums, instead of high above as on most radio songs. The songs jump between fast and slow tempos with loose pop sensibilities. Yet people used to standard rock production qualities may not get it, which is OK with Dinners. They spent a lot of time making sure it was mixed just the way they liked. After several failed attempts to do it themselves, they enlisted their friend Yong Muller to give it a go, which worked out.

“I genuinely like stuff that sounds like it’s on a four-track. I generally really dislike the way big rock guitars sound digitally. There’s no grit whatsoever,” says Brummett.

Most of the 13 songs on Black Rabbits were written and demoed a few months before the album was recorded. A couple were written during the recording session itself. All of them were recorded while still fresh so that the band was very excited about them.

“We really should have the recording stuff set up constantly and during practice when a song is really peaking, just record the album version right then,” Brummett admits.

In September, Dinners started an Indiegogo campaign to pay for the vinyl pressing. Rather than offering a rewards for different levels of contribution, Dinners just treated the campaign as a way to pre-order the album, because really all they care about is being satisfied with what they’ve created.
“It’s fun to play songs with people, but absolutely it’s about the content to me. Just listening to a song and capturing what the song is supposed to be, that is incredibly fulfilling. That’s the whole thing really,” Brummett says.

Local indie roots rockers Northern Son haven’t been that active these past couple of years. But now with the new year, they’re ready to play more shows, write new songs, and hopefully record a new album. We talked with lead singer/guitarist Jeff Carmassi about what 2013 has in store for them.

In the first couple years of your band existence (2009 and 2010), you guys played a lot of shows and released a full length, an ep, and three music videos, and even got a fair amount of attention. Why have the last couple of years been so lean?

The last couple years for Northern Son have been a time of transition and personal growth. When we first started this band there was a solid group of five extremely motivated friends who wanted nothing more than to share the music being created, but, sometimes life leads people down different paths and things don’t always go according to plan. This led to many line-up changes! Some ex-members left to create other music projects, get married, start families and pursue higher education. We reached a point, during all the line-up changes, when Northern Son was almost no more. All the transitions over the years took Northern Son from a five piece band to a duo, myself and lead guitarist/Background Vocalist OJ Montevirgen.

We each took some time away from doing or thinking about anything Northern Son. But through the absence I realized one thing: writing, recording, and performing songs with Northern Son makes life better, just does something for my soul. I think OJ and I came to that realization about the same time and decided to give it another go.

Refreshed from time away and the addition of our new drummer Kyle Freeze, Northern Son feels new again. We are really excited about the future.

What are your plans in 2013? Are you planning on releasing any new material? Could you tell us about all that the future has in store for Northern Son?

It’s going to be a great year for Northern Son. We are doing a bunch of writing, and new material is on the way in 2013. A few new songs have already made it into our live set. There are plans to release an ep, possibly a full length album this year as well as playing a bunch of shows all over California. Maybe a music video or two! Hahaha.

One of the elements that fans were so attached to with your early releases is how you built such a large sound, while still pulling from the rawness of roots rock, classic rock n roll and alt country. With the member lineup changes, how has the sound of the new material been compared to what you created back then?

The new material is more mature but still has that classic roots rock backbone. I feel very blessed to be in a band where all the members play so well off each other. I will bring in the bare bones of a song and OJ and Kyle will shape it and it always comes out sounding like Northern Son. This is the strongest Northern Son lineup to date and I think people who liked the older material will like our new material because there is still the same heart and soul behind the music.

Could you tell me a little about the attention you got back in 2009 and 2010? I know you were played on Live 105. How did this come about? Were you ever approached by any record labels or management companies?

We had a few songs played on Live 105 and Aaron Axelsen even did a write up on us for live105.com as a south bay band to watch out for. That lead to playing some live 105 sponsored shows around the bay area and even landed us a spot on the local stage at BFD 2010 at shoreline. We’ve done some touring up and down the west coast and played with bands like Vertical Horizon, Third Eye Blind, and Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers. Our song “Spin” was featured in the season finale of an E! television show called “The Spin Crowd”.

We never officially received a record deal but we did talk to a few labels and management companies back in 2010. That was really eye opening for us. I think it’s the first time we realized there is a big business side to music. Almost no one starts a band because they love looking at contracts and talking to managers and lawyers. We just love playing music. Nowadays we are better prepared for all the business that comes with being in a band.

Your music—as well as that of your main influences, Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen—lean heavily on roots rock. What do you think it is about roots rock that lends itself so naturally to emotional, honest and straight forward songwriting? Why have you chosen it as a foundation for your songs?

I like to think that we didn’t choose roots rock as the foundation for our songs but rather it chose us. There was never a conscious effort made to be a certain type of band or write a certain style of song. I think we focus on doing something really honest and simple. No bells, no whistles, just straight to what really matters – Lyrics, melody, emotion.

Roots rock always seemed like working class music to me. The emotions and themes found here are things everyone feels and deals with. It’s universal. These guys we look up to like Tom and Bruce seem like our best friends when they sing about life and relationships. We, as Northern Son, strive for that more than anything, creating a connection between us and the listener because we are those listeners too.

Northern Son play San Pedro Square Market on Saturday January 26th. The show starts at 7pm. Admission in free.

For a city that struggles year in and year out to foster a vibrant local music scene, the SVSX festival—which featured over 20 bands in 9 venues—was a success. Mike Huguenor, who opened the Pagoda Lounge lineup, took a moment during his set to comment on what an incredible event SVSX was turning out to be.

“I’ve lived most of my life in San Jose, and until very recently it seemed absolutely impossible for art to get any kind of foothold in this sprawling, vastly economically imbalanced city,” he said. “A festival like this seemed unthinkable until very recently, and I’m extremely happy to be a part of it.”

His band, which included Bob Vielma (Shinobu) on bass and Hank Richardson (Yulia) on drums, gave his solo material a driving rock edge. Yet, unlike Huguenor’s work with Shinobu and Hard Girls, these songs were notably mellower, while still holding true to his trademark blend of thoughtful lyrics and offbeat chord arrangements.

PHOTOS: 10 Photo Highlights of SVSX

The largely college-aged crowd slowly trickled in as Huguenor played. By the time Fierce Creatures went on, the Pagoda boasted a nice amount of attendees, all ready as Fierce Creatures soared through several of their lush, indie-rock, soul-inspired tunes.

The hip hop lineup at the Blank Club showed a diverse cross-section of rap styles. Antwon and Memphis rapper Cities Aviv were major highlights. Cities Aviv is gaining some buzz music blogs all over the web right now with his fresh, unusual interpretation of rap. As innovative as his album Digital Low is, live, he was on a whole other level of strange. He mixed atonal music, bizarre electronics and outer-space beats with rapping that was heavily processed and mixed at a volume barely above the music, which made for a surreal experience that fell somewhere between neurotic, spastic hip hop and avant-garde performance art.

Antwon took the stage afterword. His music and performance, while not as out-there as Cities Aviv’s, is totally distinct from anything happening in hip hop right now. He’s falls somewhere between nerd rap, stoner rap and hipster rap, yet not fitting into any of these already conceived models. The audience couldn’t decide if they were with him or not. Despite being local, he rarely gigs in San Jose, yet he’s developed an impressive following in the East Bay, San Francisco and all over the Internet (he has +120,000 views for his “Helicopter” video on YouTube).

Dirtbag Dan at The Blank Club // Photo by Alex Stover

Local favorite Dirtbag Dan, who was accompanied by Skylar G and DJ Ichy the Killer, put on one of his best, hard-hitting shows to date to an enthusiastic audience. It wasn’t long ago that Dan toiled in obscurity locally—even while being one of the biggest names in battle rap all over the world. Headlining the SVSX festival to a packed house was a monumental moment for Dan.

Before his actual set, Dan had DJ Ichy the Killer perform a solo DJ routine—the same routine that got him into the DMC online DJ competition finals. He flawlessly mixed different genres, popular songs and obscure beats, using crazy spinning tricks and strange rhythms into six mind-blowing minutes.

With nine venues total it was hard to see everything that was happening, yet there was more than enough people to go around. Johnny V’s was packed, so was San Pedro Square Market and Mezcal restaurant. The other venues did well, too, and the pub crawl element of the SVSX festival was a nice touch. Walking from venue to venue and seeing so many people enjoying good local music—rap, punk, reggae, indie rock, folk—was a nice feeling.

San Pedro Square Market and hosts an all-ages show for SVSX with Careless Hearts, Doctor Nurse, and Dirty Pillows.

Careless Hearts
9pm San Pedro Square Market
Careless Hearts began as pure San Jose alt-country. After building up a following in the South Bay and elsewhere since 2005, their career took an unexpected left turn in 2009 when they found themselves backing Iggy & the Stooges guitarist James Williamson at the Blank Club, Williamson’s first performance in 35 years and a warm-up for his return to touring with Iggy Pop. (The Blank Club performance was released as the 2010 album James Williamson and the Careless Hearts.) The event was a turning point in the Careless Hearts’ career; afterward, they released a three-song EP that found their finely crafted roots thunderstruck with Iggy’s (and Williamson’s) fiery “rawk” influence. It remains to be seen what direction the Careless Hearts take next, but with the band’s proven talent and new adventurousness, their next record is sure to be a welcome surprise no matter what.

Doctor Nurse
8pm San Pedro Square Market
Doctor Nurse’s approach to songwriting is similar to that of indie-rock legends Guided by Voices. Both groups pluck the best elements of psychedelic rock, prog-rock, lo-fi indie and power-pop and blend them into an amalgam of gorgeous, offbeat, well written rock & roll.

The similarities stop there; while Guided by Voices churns out partially complete lo-fi gems as quickly as the ideas pop in their heads, Doctor Nurse works slowly and methodically. The band, for instance, spent years working on Calm Seas, Phantom Lights. The album is not only full of intelligent, grandiose psychedelic indie-folk, clearly written by educated music lovers, its production is masterfully nuanced with glistening layers of keyboards, guitars, percussion and vocal harmonies. It is the kind of album worth listening to on headphones to pick out every subtle detail with each listen—or live in concert, where the waves of sound and vibrations overtake you.

Dirty Pillows
7pm, San Pedro Square Market
Formed in 2008 by guitarist/vocalist Alejandro Villanueva (who goes by his nickname “Millhows”) and drummer Jeff Evans, Dirty Pillows plays music that celebrates the pair’s shared influences—Modern Lovers, the Damned, Talking Heads—but also captures the raw, rushing sound of the earliest days of punk.

The South Bay duo’s visibility has been patchy at times, but they’re making a big push right now. Their recent song “Love Happening” sounds like something the Brian Jonestown Massacre might have released. As Evans describes it, “That song is the one that everybody has their own interpretation for.”

Evans and Millhows manage to create psychedelic, pop and garage tones with only two band members. Jeff is not afraid to hit his drum kit, and somehow Millhows makes sense of the army of loop machines and effects in front of him. “I sort of seem to channel this very post-punk, choppy, very angular guitar spirit,” Millhows says of his guitar playing.

Daydream Nation, a series of free shows at San Pedro Square Market was back for its third installment Saturday. The show featured local bands Cartoon Bar Fight, Curious Quail, Shuteye Unison and ColorScout.

The show was also served as the CD Release Party for Curious Quail’s debut album, .:Instant Gratification:.

Photos by Jessica Shirley-Donnelly, JRSD Photography for MetroActive.

Dirk Milotz of Cartoon Bar Fight

Joel Zelaya's expanding pedalboard of Cartoon Bar Fight

Joel Zelaya of Cartoon Bar Fight

Michael Shumway, drummer for Cartoon Bar Fight

When Blush Raw Bar owners Russ Fukushima and Taylor Kim decided to start a nightclub in San Jose, they toured the country from San Diego to Las Vegas to Miami and back. They discovered all kinds of niche trends that hadn’t yet made it to the South Bay yet, but the one that really clicked with them was frozen, blended cocktails. If they could come up with their own version in San Jose, they reasoned, they could engineer their own kind of cool.

“We wanted to do a spin on that, and have a sexy, elegant cocktail,” says Fukushima.

So they’ve spent the last two years experimenting with recipes, taking their slushie pursuit to obsessive levels.

“We actually had one of the machines in one of our homes,” he says. “It was a good time.”

All that cold-case work resulted in the Blush, the signature cocktail that has been part of their menu of slush drinks since the Blush Raw Bar Lounge opened in San Pedro Square Market in April.

“It’s going off like wildfire,” says Fukushima.

But it’s not just chemistry behind the Blush approach. There’s a philosophical aspect as well, believe it or not. A frozen drink can’t be downed like a shot—though Blush does have a full bar in addition to its specialty menu, the slow-acting slushes take the emphasis away from the wham-bam-thank-you-barman approach to imbibing and suggest a longer, more relaxed vibe.

“The cocktail creates a different experience,” says Fukushima. “We don’t want to be a nightclub. We consider ourselves a lounge. We want to present a comfortable, come-as-you-are atmosphere.”

Similarly, they brought a different approach to their menu. “We wanted to bring a raw concept here. Not just sushi, not just oysters. Everything is based on raw protein,” he says.

The industrial, ultramodern look of Blush ties the owners’ conceptual threads together. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that Kim and Fukushima were able to make their ideas work together—they’ve been best friends since growing up together in Hawaii. They’d talked about doing a place together for years, but the idea started to seem a lot more realistic when Kim moved down to Northern California from Seattle.

“It got the point where we were just having beers and said ‘Why are we talking? Let’s just do it,'” remembers Fukushima, who went into the project with a decade’s experience in the restaurant business.

Expansion and franchising could be in their future, but for now, they’re just happy to see the response Blush has had so far.

“We’ve got a buzz going on,” he says. “San Jose needed something like this. It’s classy. It’s refreshing.”

Sort of like an ice-cold drink.

Blush Raw Bar Lounge
Inside San Pedro Market Square, 100 N. Almaden Ave., San Jose

Read more about Silicon Valley Bars & Clubs in the June 13 special issue.

There were so many different slices of San Jose’s nightlife present at San Pedro Square Market this past Saturday night. It wasn’t just because it was Save Alternative’s Daydream Nation’s kickoff show. Really, it was just the perfect venue for Saturday’s show.

There were different rooms for different people—a bar for people looking to hook up, a patio outside for friends wanting to hang out and chat, a place to eat for families and couples and of course a cozy spot to watch the bands. Everyone could hang out together under one roof and get exactly what they wanted. Since everybody seems to be hanging out at San Pedro Square anyway, hopefully they will be doing a whole lot more shows like this there in the future.

Ben Henderson was the main support for the concert. He put on yet another amazing show, performing most songs just him and his guitar, though he had the occasional accompaniment of a backing vocalist, a banjo player and a drummer on two songs. Henderson’s voice has gotten so fierce in the past year and a half that he can command a crowd all alone just as well, if not better, than a four piece rock band. This was Henderson’s farewell show before hitting the road for a month where he will be playing all over the country without a backing band, which explains the decision for him to not bring a full band to the San Pedro Square Market. He wanted to try his act out on a hometown crowd first.

The headliners, Dogcatcher, played a laidback blend of soul, jazz and melodic indie rock. When I interviewed them a few weeks ago they told me that they were a “rhythm section oriented band,” something not apparent on their folksy debut album, KILR, but live, it was crystal clear, this is a band that likes to groove. Even the songs on KILR were reworked to give it a dancey edge. The bass and drums locked into a solid groove while the guitar and organ layered sounds and harmonies over the top. Andrew Heine’s breathy vocals and introspective lyrics were the final touch, creating something artful and original.