Happy New Year!

We hope you enjoyed the holidays however you chose to celebrate them. While we appreciated the break last week, we’re excited to be back with a batch of new songs from some great Bay Area bands. A bunch of them are playing live in the near future and we encourage you to check them out. And while we’re on the subject of live concerts, we hope you saw our latest announcement…

About this week’s bands:

We start this week’s episode with a beautiful song from The Harbours‘ excellent debut album Second Story Maker, released late last year. They have an upcoming show at the Make-Out Room on Saturday, January 27th with Fits. Find out more about them and pick up their record at their web site and hear some more songs at their MySpace page.

Roommates caught our ear recently and we’ve been playing the hell out of the songs on their MySpace page. The duo promises that they will be releasing a 7″ in the near future and they will be playing Pacific Noise‘s one year anniversary show on February 8th at the Balazo Gallery. Check them out at their MySpace page.

Birds & Batteries caught our attention through their membership in the Thread Productions collective, which also includes Silian Rail and Bay Bridged almuni Tartufi and Low Red Land. We included a track from their album Selections from… “Nature vs. Nature” which displays their excellent blending of electronic and acoustic sounds. You can catch all of the Thread Productions bands at the El Rio on Saturday, January 13th. To find out more, head to Birds & Batteries’ web site and MySpace page.

Black Fiction has gained deserved praise for their release Ghost Ride. They will be playing at Cafe du Nord on Friday, January 19th with Citay, heard here on The Bay Bridged, and T.I.T.S. More information about them can be found at their MySpace page and web site. You can dowload their track “Magic Hands” here or purchase Ghost Ride on iTunes.

The Graves Brothers Deluxe, who we included in last year’s South by Southwest mix, just sent us their brand new EP, a split with Boxcar Satan entitled Black Water Rising, and their track in this mix is a cover of Boxcar Satan’s “Shoot Down the Sun.” Proceeds from sales of the record will be donated to groups providing free mental health services to people impacted by Hurricane Katrina. More information about the CD and this very worthy cause can be found at the Graves Brothers’ web site and MySpace page.

The Makes Nice brought us an awesome track from their brand new album Candy Wrapper and 12 Other Songs. They are celebrating the CD’s release at the Rickshaw Stop on Wednesday, January 17th. More information can be found at the band’s MySpace page.

We also heard a great song from Crime in Choir, off of their latest album Trumpery Metier which was released late last year on the Gold Standard Laboratories label. Catch them this Thursday, January 4th with Tussle and Ascended Master at Bottom of the Hill. To hear more from them, visit their web site and MySpace page.

Tommy Guerrero‘s latest album is the much-acclaimed From The Soil to the Soul, released in October on Quannum Projects. This record mixes elements of a whole lot of sounds, including rock, hip-hop and soul, to produce a really interesting and diverse set of songs. More information can be found at Tommy’s website and at Quannum’s web site. You can download “War No More” here or purchase From The Soil to the Soul on iTunes.

We hope you enjoy the mix and can get a chance to check out more from these bands. Be sure to come back next week for our first feature episode of 2007, dedicated to one of the best new bands in the Bay Area. They will become the one-hundredth band to have music played on The Bay Bridged and we are excited to have them on the show!

See you then!