For the better part of two decades, singer and songwriter Allen Clapp wrote his songs, made his records and toured with his band The Orange Peels from the vantage point of the Eichler home he shared with his wife, Jill, in Sunnyvale.

Then came 2014, when he and Jill—who plays bass in The Orange Peels—were rear-ended on Interstate 880. They could have been killed in the horrific car accident; thankfully, they both escaped serious injury.

“We had a second chance at life,” Clapp says, remembering the accident. “At that point, we had talked about moving to the Santa Cruz Mountains for a decade. So, it was like, let’s just do it.”

Today, Clapp and his wife live just 18 miles, as the crow flies, from their former home in Sunnyvale. Environmentally, however, it might as well be in another country. Home is now a hexagonal house sitting alone on a mountain adjacent to 50 acres of redwoods in the rugged terrain north of Boulder Creek, in the heart of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

This week, The Orange Peels celebrate the release of their latest album, Trespassing. It’s their seventh release as a band, dating back to 1997. But it’s their first to be conceived and recorded at their new redwood-shrouded retreat. When you make the move from urbanized Silicon Valley to what feels like Tolkien’s Middle-earth, that’s going to make a difference in your music.

“The biggest impact of living in this place is the bigness of everything,” Clapp says by phone from his mountain lair. “There are 200-foot redwoods all around us, gigantic mountains. The largeness of living in a place like this seeps into the music. I mean, this album sounds enormous to me, compared to some of the stuff we’ve done recently.”

Both Clapp, as a solo artist, and the Orange Peels have cultivated a sterling reputation as smart, melodically talented indie-pop artists that capture the slippery essence of living in the Bay Area.

Trespassing continues that lineage with a collection of shimmery pop jewels that dance seductively in the space between dream pop, chillwave and ’80s-style synth. But if you listen closely enough, you’ll also hear the wild and wooly mountain vibe bleeding through. Some of the drums, Clapp says, were even recorded outdoors among the redwoods: “You can hear what the woods sound like up here.”

Trespassing was created during the harrowing winter of 2017, when rain fell by the bucketload on Clapp’s corner of the Santa Cruz Mountains. “In our neighborhood, we got more than 110 inches of rain, which all fell within about two months. The power was constantly going out. Big trees were falling. Roads were going out. The whole mountainside was in a cloud for, like, 90 days.”

It was against this weird backdrop that Clapp wrote most of the material that ended up on Trespassing, including the album’s first track “Camera 2,” an urgent if elegant freak-out that captured the sense of doom on everything from the political situation to the insane winter. “Reality had just fractured,” Clapp recalls, “and that song came out of that surreal feeling.”

“Dawn Tree” is dedicated to a certain tree on the Clapps’ property, which represented a kind of second chance after the rainy season. “One morning, I walked out and there was this crazy refracted light and there was this oak tree. The sun’s coming up behind it, capturing all this moisture in the air. So, yeah, I wrote a song to a tree.”

On top of performing with the Peels and as a solo artist, Clapp works as a mini-mogul in Bay Area indie music with his label, Mystery Lawn Music. In that role, Clapp collaborates with about a dozen Northern California bands in an effort to articulate and capture a distinctively Bay Area sound.

“I’ve spent my whole life in this area,” he says. “And there’s a way that the air feels and how the light looks because you’re on this little spit of land between two giant bodies of water, the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific. I just think there’s something magical about this part of the world.”

The Orange Peels
‘Trespassing’
Apr 27, Minty Fresh

Twenty years into their career, it’s clear that Atmosphere will go down as one of the best underground hip-hop groups ever. The Minnesota duo’s early albums feature a quick-witted Slug using his silver tongue to couple glib remarks with intricate and braggadocious rhymes, all while producer Ant drops some seriously dope beats. But as Sean Daley and Anthony Davis grew up, so did their music. Slug turned his lens inward, admitting his faults and drawing on his experiences as a father. All the while Ant’s production has only grown more sophisticated, and the pair now tour with a full band.

Atmosphere
Fri, 8pm, $56+
The Catalyst, Santa Cruz

Considering their reputation as folksy, down home and altogether analog, some might be surprised to learn that Dr. Dog got their start composing electronic tunes.

To be clear, the very first tracks that the Philadelphia indie rockers ever recorded weren’t club bangers, or even chilly IDM. Still, the founding trio of Toby Leaman, Scott McMicken and Doug O’Donnell constructed most of the songs on Psychedelic Swamp using the lo-fi synth patches and tinny drum loops of a cheap keyboard.

With the exception of the vocals and the guitars, Leaman says that just about every tone and tom-tom on the record came from a Casio sound bank. “There’s certainly no live drums on it,” the singer and songwriter says of the 2001 album, which the fledgling group stitched together with a pair of cassette four-tracks and then dubbed to even more cassettes and some CD-Rs.

They managed to sell a few copies of the album at some of their earliest gigs, Leaman recalls. However, Dr. Dog only kept one song from the sessions in regular rotation at shows. The sour mash of chintzy keys, the odd effects created by manually synching the two four-tracks during the mixing process and many other idiosyncrasies meant that most of the collection didn’t make sense in a live setting, he explains over the phone from his home—pausing occasionally to assure his young daughter that he’ll pay attention to her very soon.

“The original thing is not what I’d call the most accessible piece of music ever recorded,” he says with a laugh.

For a little over a decade Psychedelic Swamp remained a rarity—lurking in the bootleg collections of Dr. Dog super fans. A few copies remained with the band, as well.

Then, in 2015, the Philly-based Pig Iron Theatre Company teamed with Dr. Dog on a live stage and music production for a local arts festival. Pig Iron asked the band to dig up some material that few had heard, and so Leaman and McMicken dusted off Psychedelic Swamp.

The play, titled Swamp is On, provided the impetus for the band to do what it had always intended: re-record their debut—this time in a real studio, with “a billion more pieces of gear and a billion more years of experience.” The new album is out now under the same name.

The result is something both old and new. “It felt like we were just doing cover songs,” he says, describing the experience of revisiting the old material. “It’s liberating in a way, for sure, but it’s weird too.”

Leaman says he is excited to see how audiences react to the new-old material. At their upcoming show in Santa Cruz he says the band will still very much be working it out.

“It’s going to be pretty raw still,” he says. “They’re not road tested at all. It will be interesting to see what catches and what doesn’t.”

Dr. Dog plays on Jan. 31, 7pm, $25 at The Catalyst, Santa Cruz.

It’s been two years since Animal Collective’s last album, Centipede HZ, but singer and multi-instrumentalist Avey Tare has used his free time to ratchet up that record’s tense vibe. Tare, whose real name is David Portner, has just released Enter the Slasher House, the debut album from his project Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks, formed with ex-Dirty Projectors’ Angel Deradoorian and ex-Ponytail’s Jeremy Hyman.

Enter the Slasher House sounds a bit like a stripped-down version of Centipede HZ, with Tare taking inspiration from B-movies and ’60s garage rock bands and mixing it with a ’70s horror flick aesthetic. It may sound campy, but the resulting music is legitimately creepy and unsettling.

“It’s not something I feel I ever would have explored with Animal Collective, being so referential with the music I like,” Portner says. “It was cool to be more experimental in that sense. There’s also an open-endedness to it. As much as I like that aesthetic, and I’m making it obvious with the photos we take with our press stuff, there’s this other side of music that’s like ‘you should leave it open for somebody’s imagination.’”

For a band called “Slasher Flicks,” the subtlety is surprising. They never break out into Misfits monster-movie punk tunes, or gothy Bauhaus-type songs. The horror influence is more abstract; Portner has paired the recognizably eerie sounds from horror movies like Halloween and the films of Dario Argento, with the youthful exuberance of early teen garage bands like The Seeds to create a driving, uncomfortable batch of songs that deal with his feelings about getting older.

“This record caught me at a weird point in my life. The songs are cathartic, in a way of getting stuff out that I felt like I needed to get out of my system—there’s a driving tension to it,” Portner says.

His change in direction over the last couple of years is less surprising in the context of his history with Animal Collective. Sung Tongs, the record that established them in 2004, was an acoustic record that radiated a natural, organic feeling, right down to the often wordless vocal melodies. They were hailed as leaders of the “freak-folk” scene.

But with each album since, Animal Collective have made significant shifts in their sonic palette. On 2009’s Merriweather Post Pavillion the group channeled the Beach Boys—coupling psychedelic melodies with deliberately synthetic production and texturing. It’s not so much that they’ve been able to succeed in the face of constantly altering their sound; they’ve succeeded because of it.

“A lot of what people respect about us is that we’ve done it in this other way—in the experimental nature of it,” Portner says. “For me it’s always just a continuously spinning wheel of music, and its little compartments that spin around. It’s like, where will the wheel land?”

Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks play the Catalyst Atrium in Santa Cruz on Aug. 25 at 8:30pm. More info.

Rock critics have been obsessed with Kurt Vile’s supposed “trad-rock” sound, constantly comparing him to classic rock icons like Springsteen. I’m sure it doesn’t hurt to be spoken of in the same breath as the Boss, and certainly he’s one of the Philadelphia musician’s many musical heroes. But I think this is a tragic case of confusing an artist’s influences with his art.

Listening to Vile’s latest, Smoke Ring For My Halo, I hear the low-fi indie-rock of contemporaries like Yo La Tengo (who, don’t forget, love them some retro rock) and Beck. Vile has a personal, intimate way of delivering a song that is miles from the big, poppy sound of FM radio heroes past, and Springsteen’s worldwide-sized anthems.

Yes, Nebraska is the obvious exception, but Vile’s sound doesn’t have that reductive starkness, either. On the contrary, I’d say he’s completely of his time, the epitome of the forward-looking 21st century singer-songwriter: patching together a unique and remarkable pastiche-rock sound under slightly numbed but still emotional lyrics about the state of his world today. Let’s leave the Springsteen comparisons with Gaslight Anthem, shall we?

Kurt Vile plays the Catalyst in Santa Cruz on Wed, Jun 6, 8:30pm; $15/$17.

After the last-minute cancelation of the Bassnectar show in Santa Cruz that was scheduled for tomorrow, the EDM producer posted a message on his Facebook page calling city officials “shameful” for they way they treat artists, fans and the music community and announcing two new shows at The Catalyst, May 6 and 7.

From Bassnectar:

“Basically, there is a very vague city ordinance #9.36.010 which
makes it nearly impossible to have a concert at the Civic Center
(unless it is like a gentle jazz show, or a poetry reading). It most
definitely makes it impossible to have a Bassnectar experience, or any
kind of EDM show. Now had they told us this 6 months ago when we
booked the show, that would have been understandable (it still would
have been weird, because we already did one successful show at the
Civic Center, and are not going to play music any louder than last
time) but having this happen so last minute is basically putting us in
a very difficult situation. Now they have told us we will be shut down
if we play at our normal volume (the same volume we played at last
time, and the same volume we play at in cities all across the
country), forcing the show to be cancelled. We offered to start way
earlier than normal, and to have music end by 10pm, and they had zero
interest in finding a solution.”

Santa Cruz Weekly reports that there was an issue with monitoring noise levels at the show, quoting Civic Auditorium manager Andy Botsford: ““He was very firm that he didn’t want to compromise on his artistic integrity,” which could have included a request to turn the music down if it was too loud. It’s unkown why the issue wasn’t resolved between the Civic, the promoter Goldenvoice and Bassnectar’s management when the show was booked several months ago. Civic Auditorium manager Andy Botsford says she got word Monday that the show was cancelled and that talks continued on Tuesday, according to the Santa Cruz Weekly.

In other news, the show in San Jose is now officially sold out, but bleachers were removed to create more floor space. Read the complete message on Bassnectar’s Facebook page.

Apparently, Santa Cruz city officials are unwilling to deal with a little extra bass from San Jose-raised electronic music producer Bassnectar, a former UCSC student scheduled to play a sold-out at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium tomorrow. The show was cancelled today with a two-sentence explanation on the venue website.

“Due to the high volume and intense bass of a Bassnectar show it would be impossible for the show to comply with local sound ordinances. Thank you and please accept our sincerest apologies.” via CityofSantaCruz.com

Fortunately, the Event Center at San Jose State University is better equipped to deal with the extra decibels and the May 5th show there is still scheduled as planned. In fact, a few tickets are left via Ticketmaster for our coastal friends in Santa Cruz who want to make the trip over the hill to catch Bassnectar in his old stomping ground.

For more details on Bassnectar and his San Jose roots, read our feature interview from the latest issue of Metro.

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