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Mike Huguenor on June 8, 2016
“You’ll never be a winner unless you lose for quite a while,” David Brookings sings on “The Optimist,” the third track on his band’s new self-titled album. The song opens on a stompy, minor-key verse, and in just over 30 seconds bursts into its sunny, horn drenched chorus, like a flower blossoming…
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Mike Huguenor on June 1, 2016
In his mind-bending essay on Marx and Shakespeare, visionary French philosopher Jacques Derrida imagined a future, which comes from the past. “The same question had already sounded,” he writes in Specters of Marx. “The same, to be sure, but in an altogether different way. And the difference in the sound, that is…
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BottleRock, the Napa Valley music, food and art festival, has come a long way since it’s inaugural year in 2013, when the founding promoters lost their collective shirts on the event.
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Nick Veronin on May 25, 2016
As the opening bookend to the Bay Area’s summer music festival season, the avid weekend warrior would do well to think of BottleRock as a warm-up. The three-day celebration is packed with some of the biggest names in pop, as well as plenty of amazing, lesser-known acts—not to mention the culinary celebrities,…
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Nick Veronin on May 25, 2016
Though he doesn’t have the energy he had in his 20s, Bobby Liebling, the creator and longtime frontman for pioneering metal band Pentagram, says he still feels like a 25-year-old at heart. “I didn’t grow up,” the singer and songwriter says, speaking over the phone from Mesa, Arizona, where his band is…
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John Flynn on May 18, 2016
In January of 2014, San Jose emcee Rey Resurreccion told Metro that his then-brand new Heart of the City was the first record he’d made after carefully studying what his fans liked. Considering that, his new EP—Sweet Tooth Tony, released earlier this month—makes total sense. At less than 30 minutes, his latest…
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John Flynn on May 11, 2016
After laying down beats, hooks and verses for six songs, Traxamillion got tired of his own voice. So he tapped three friends to feature over his hard-knocking trap tracks. After that, he threw the snack-sized project up on Soundcloud, tweeted it to his 25,000-plus followers and kicked back as the internet distributed…
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Mike Huguenor on May 11, 2016
Roddy “Radiation” Byers draws a lot of parallels between today’s political climate and the state of global affairs back when he was playing in The Specials. “It’s almost a mirror image now to what it was like in the late ’70s early ’80s,” says the erstwhile guitarist of the English ska and…
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Alongside Nicki Minaj, Taylor Swift and Beyonce, Rihanna sits atop the modern Mount Rushmore of American pop songstresses. But unlike the obsessively manicured images of her competition, there’s always been an ineffable realness to Rihanna—a steamy brashness that hasn’t waned in her inevitable, steady rise to stardom.
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Nick Veronin on May 4, 2016
Plenty of people dread their 40th birthday, but according to Ian Bavitz—better known by his stage name, Aesop Rock—the idea of being “over the hill” was particularly distressing. “Being an older dude in a younger dude’s game, it just loomed,” the indie emcee and producer says. “I think it caused a lot…
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