Ticket Giveaway Wednesday: Moon Duo, Tokyo Police Club and more
To enter for a chance to win tickets to any show below, email contest@thebaybridged.com with the name of the band and the date of the show you’re entering in the subject line and your full name in the body of the email. Winners will be selected at random and notified via email. Thursday, September 10th Tokyo Police Club, Max and the Moon @ Great American Music Hall 9pm, $23, all ages. Buy advance tickets here. Thursday, September 10th Moon Duo, Peaking Lights, Britt Govea DJ set @ California Academy of Sciences 6pm, $12, 21+. Buy advance tickets here. Thursday, September [...]
Noise Pop 2015: Craft Spells’ woozy dream-pop at Great American Music Hall
(Photo Credit: John Margaretten) In order to write Craft Spells’ last album, Nausea, Justin Vallesteros had to leave San Francisco. The congested city became too much for him, and he returned to where he grew up, the Central Valley. He eschewed social media and tried to make sense of the Internet's push and pull, the disconnection that comes from social over-saturation, and also taught himself how play the piano. From that came his sophomore album after 2011's critically acclaimed debut, Idle Labor. The last time I saw Craft Spells play was when they were headlining a sold-out show at The Chapel, a night that was also supported by [...]
Noise Pop Festival announces first bands for 2015, badges and tickets on sale this week
Our friends at Noise Pop announced the first batch of bands playing the 2015 edition of their iconic San Francisco indie music festival, and they're off to a great start. The lineup so far features a host of local Bay Bridged favorites (Giraffage, Cathedrals, Six Organs of Admittance, Tony Molina) as well as artists from far-and-wide (Caribou, Dan Deacon, Slow Magic, Surfer Blood). Early Bird festival badges are $125 and go on sale for TODAY at 11am PST – once those are gone, Regular Badges will go on sale for $150. Badges give you access to all general admission shows. [...]
Mixtape: Catching Up With Some Former Locals
http://media.libsyn.com/media/thebaybridged/Former_Locals_Mix.mp3 Download: Mixtape: Catching Up With Some Former Locals (Podcast #348) The news that John Dwyer of San Francisco mainstays Thee Oh Sees was moving to Los Angeles – followed shortly thereafter by a Dwyer-penned press release that called the City a “graveyard” of “tech waste” – caught many of us by surprise, but it probably shouldn’t have. Indie musicians frequently leave their home bases for new environs. Musicians move for a variety of reasons--for a change of pace, to be closer to collaborators, and to find new receptive audiences. Locally, many have been concerned about the high cost of [...]
Craft Spells and The Bilinda Butchers sell-out The Chapel
The Bilinda Butchers (Photo: Nic Pope) Justin Paul Vallesteros has a knack for creating woozy bedroom-pop that clenches deep in the pit of your stomach. Melding wistful incantations for the cerebral, Craft Spells recently released their sophomore effort Nausea, a follow-up to Idle Labor, which was about romantic false starts when young. Now they're back with Nausea, an album about the stomach-churning effects of constantly being plugged into social media, and how that affects intimacy and blurs reality. While the sound is completely different, Nauseau's progression toward pensive maturity reminds me of Mac DeMarco's Salad Days: more spacious, introspective, and carefully presented while remaining self-effacing. The Chapel, a still-new venue in the Mission that consistently [...]
Live This Month: July 2014 — an audio guide to upcoming SF concerts
http://media.libsyn.com/media/thebaybridged/LTM_July_2014.mp3 Download: Live This Month: July 2014 (Podcast #342) In Live This Month, we sample some of the great local and out-of-town bands performing in the coming month in the San Francisco Bay Area. Summer's here, which means that bands are hitting the road in droves and new albums are coming out fast and furious. That's great news for local music fans, but it also means that July is the sort of month where tough choices abound. On Saturday, July 5, for example, you could check out The Fresh & Onlys, whose House of Spirits shows the band continuing to [...]
Craft Spells talks ‘Nausea,’ social media dependence, and composing in limbo
Justin Vallesteros just needed to get away. The San Francisco native and creator of Craft Spells emerged from his escape to the San Joaquin Valley with a single a couple months ago foretelling the release of his first collection of new tracks since 2012's Gallery. The new album, Nausea, is ethereal and spacious, residing in the purgatory between a corporeal reality and the dizzy space of a wandering mind. Here, Vallesteros talks to us about the new album, dropping June 10 via Captured Tracks, self-reflection, and moving forward. The Bay Bridged: You took a little break between Gallery and Nausea when you moved to Lathrop. What [...]
Craft Spells finally returns with new single
We haven't heard much from Craft Spells, the project of Stockton/San Francisco's Justin Vallesteros, since he holed up in the San Joaquin Valley after 2010's Idle Labor. Since he disappeared, he picked up a few more musical provisions—a skill in piano and a penchant for string accompaniment, for example—but the end result is worth waiting for. "Breaking the Angle Against the Tide", the first single from next album Nausea (which will drop from Captured Tracks June 10), is compositionally thoughtful, breaking through predictable cyclical pop with the aid of a string section. He cautiously adds his vocals, apprehensive to upstage the rolling [...]
Live This Month: August 2012 — an audio guide through SF concerts this month (Podcast #284)
Live This Month: August 2012 — an audio guide through SF concerts this month (Podcast #284) In Live This Month, we sample some of the great local and out-of-town bands performing in the coming month in the San Francisco Bay Area. August means the return of the Outside Lands Festival, the latest installment of which deftly balances the expected big name headliners with a healthy serving of compelling indie artists. There are certainly plenty of good options to keep attendees satisfied all weekend long, but if you're considering a single day ticket, we'd recommend skipping work on Friday, as opening [...]
Craft Spells is back in the Bay Area after brief time in Seattle
Hot off the tails of a tour with The Drums, Craft Spells frontman Justin Vallesteros played a killer show at the Great American Music Hall last month and then never left. (Can you blame him?) In a a recent email, Vallesteros confirmed that he recently returned to the Bay Area after briefly moving to Seattle and is working on demoing an LP to take into the studio to professionally record as Craft Spells for the first time. Shortly before the end of the Drums tour, Craft Spells released another EP, Gallery featuring six tracks of smooth, synthy, awesome. If you [...]