Every February for for the past three years, longtime local music promoter Eric Fanali has devoted all his energy to wrangling nerds—herding a large and disparate group of indie rockers, chiptune artists and video game fanatics into the same place for a weekend-long video game and music festival known as Rockage. His job…
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This weekend marked the final curtain call for The Blank Club. After 12 years of booze-fueled, punk rock parties and indie discos, the owner of the San Jose venue, Corey O’Brien, allowed the club’s lease to expire. O’Brien plans to open a new venue in the SoFA district in March. It will…
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by
Anne-Marie Harrison on January 29, 2015
At 20 years old, Tess Dunn has already got three alt-rock albums under her belt, is taking a full class load, and continues to fight a lifelong battle with cystic fibrosis (CF), diabetes, and epilepsy. She’s so damn admirable that I found myself hoping she had some deep, dark secret to unearth.
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“It’s 2015. We gotta stay away from the negative shit,” the San Jose-based emcee and producer Cola says on a recent evening, as he plays with the bottle cap of the soda he is drinking. The emerging rapper is referring to the recent Chris Brown shooting at local South Side club Fiesta,…
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By his own admission, Will Sprott has been doing “some strange things for money” these days. After spending five years in Oakland, the San Jose-born singer, songwriter and former leader of The Mumlers is now living in Seattle. He moved there about a year ago, without any idea of where he would live…
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It’s 10am on a Saturday morning inside the recently opened RockBar Theater. While the mood is light, it’s clear that this crowd is not composed of morning people. As Barbara Wahli, better known as promoter and manager Barb Rocks, admits at the start of the meeting, she’s running on only five hours…
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Fifteen seconds into Hard Girls’ newest album, A Thousand Surfaces, the band explodes with more power and ferocity than anything you’ll find on any of the San Jose group’s previous recordings. It’s the kind of agitated, visceral energy missing from a lot of punk rock these days.
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Amy LaCour’s blend of funk and folk is a perfect fit for Red Rock Coffee’s “Western Songwriters” series. Well… except for the coffee part. “I don’t drink it,” she laughs, “I drink tea.” The choice is fitting for the soulful songstress. Her understated delivery does not grab you by the lapels, like…
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Murder mystery dinners are fun and all, but lets be real—aside from the candelabra used to bludgeon the poor victim to death, they just aren’t metal enough. That’s about to change this April, when Metallica guitarist and horror fanatic Kirk Von Hammett hosts his second annual Fear FestEvil in San Jose, which will feature…
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“Everything is kind of cyclical,” says Mike Huguenor, lead singer of San Jose-based indie-emo-punks Shinobu. He’s referring to the tendency for musical trends to fall out of favor for a decade or generation before returning, slightly transmogrified and infused with a new youthful energy. Huguenor is currently experiencing this phenomenon first hand,…
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