Focus is such an overrated virtue. Who needs it when you can be in five or six bands, have fun with all your pals, and spin around 10 times fast while saying tongue twisters till your uvula aches and the world is completely blurred out, smudgy, and swirled. Like a chocolate-peanut butter-jelly-guava-macadamia nut double-whip cone. That's a little of the operative aesthetic going on behind these discs by John Dwyer, the man of a thousand bands who obviously isn't lacking the once-assumed-feminoid multitasking gene. Thanks to the intrepid folks at Narnack (and others), every twirl by or emission outta the archetypal San Francisco music scenester's head seems to have gone down on shiny plastic discs, such as the OCS spring release, 2, and Coachwhips' forthcoming live CD, Peanut Butter and Jelly Live at the Ginger Minge. And it's quite a varied little smorgasbord.

Look at the second OCS release as the skeletal metal, wood, and fiber framework for the mounds of junked-up trash rock that make up Coachwhips. Consider these the bare, bottomed-out creaks behind the pseudo-leather daddy dance-party cranks of Zeigenbock Kopf. Opening with a tocking metronome, three guitar plucks, and spare boy-girl harmonies ("So I Guess We Can't Hang Out") and petering out with a listen back at a hardly legal Dwyer ("JPD, a Young Man Tells Goldylox"), 2 consists of mostly acoustic, lo-fi fragments that'll probably wear the patience of all but the most avid fan – at first listen or two, it sounds not-so-dangerously half-assed. But in the end, there's something disarmingly, intentionally intimate about this entire project and its consciously nostalgic glance at the folk tradition. Someone up there cares about old-time sounds enough to somewhat cynically screw with your automatic notions of authenticity, running a post-post version of roots through with warbly distortion on the second nameless track and then hammering a point home by offering a tinny, speeded-up, pitch-shifting, tic-ridden quasi-acoustic ditty. There's even pretty thrumming moments like "Mike D." and "Our Lovesong* Icky Boyfriends," but pretty isn't the point here, one guesses. Spastic, purposeful restlessness is.

Oddly that's not the case with Dwyer's most focused project, Coachwhips, and Peanut Butter. Though tracks like "Did You Cum?" are pure soiled fun with Val Tronic's creep-show keys and Matt Hartman's skillfully unskilled sense of timing – all tension and release as Dwyer throws fuzz, muck, and smegma over his vocals and guitar like so much random body fluid – the combo are at times almost hamstrung by their chosen garage-rock metier. The beauty and terror of Coachwhips hinges on their unhinged, barely containable energy – an oh-so-excitable sex beat straining against the pressure of boiled-away, defleshed rock 'n' roll. Will the monster they cum up with live or perish, eat or be eaten, have fangs or fins? Peanut Butter shows there's life in the live beast, and one hopes we'll continue to wonder were it'll lurch to next. OCS play Jan. 9, Make-Out Room, S.F. (415) 647-2888. Also Jan. 22, Hemlock Tavern, S.F. (415) 923-0923. Peanut Butter and Jelly Live at the Ginger Minge will be released Jan. 25. (Kimberly Chun)

J.T. Donaldson and Lance DeSardi
San Francisco Sessions, Volume 5 (Om)

Om Records ups the ante with its fifth volume of San Francisco Sessions, enlisting not one but two DJs – J.T. Donaldson and Lance DeSardi – to encapsulate the state of underground house in our fair city on two full-length discs. Donaldson jacks gritty swing funk, selecting tracks by Frantz Kromer, Ralph Lawsons, Brett Johnson, and others. His disc moves from soft and deep to sharp and synthy, playing like an edgier incarnation of the style made famous by Mark Farina. DeSardi explores the weirder, more microhouse-influenced corners of the party scene. Esoteric tracks by the likes of Josh Wink, Morgan Geist, and Jacob London commingle with cuts from Grey Love and Vernon Douglas. DeSardi starts out abstract and minimal, then shifts toward a more danceable center. One could listen to both discs back to back and not get bored. The secret is movement. Neither Donaldson nor DeSardi dwells too long on any one style or subgenre. Instead, they take the listener on the latest tour of the ever fluctuating sound of San Francisco house. J.T. Donaldson and Lance DeSardi play the Sunset and Stompy New Year's Day Jam, Jan. 1, Cafe Cocomo, S.F. (415) 824-6910. (Paul Smith)

Nagg
Nagg (Dollar Record)

Ah, the joy of dart games with bandanna-clad dudes in roadhouses littered with sawdust and peanut shells. The trammeled happiness of hot summer nights spent making out and drinking up in your local cemetery. The bliss of smelly gym lockers, feathered hair, and airbrushed vans you don't wanna bother knocking on if they just happen to be rockin'. What am I talking about? Who knows – those are just the images that come through, loud and smokin', on Nagg's self-titled debut.

Who cares if some of these riffs are straight off the jukebox in that long-ago biker bar outside Des Moines, Iowa? Kiss, Montrose, Foghat, Thin Lizzy, Bad Company, anything Richie Blackmore was a party to – it's the pre-hip-hop, pre-Blogosphere, pre-iPod era of hard rock some of us just can't stop getting kinda warm and mushy about. It's sick, I admit, though the fact that Nagg are fronted by AC/DShe's Amy Ward, who comes with a snarl and uses it liberally, is a big fat plus in my book, cutting the usually testosterone-heavy proceedings – here including ex-Close-Up Scott Baldwin, Flakes fellahs J.T. Turner and Greg Fenwick, and former Dragon Rojo member Brian Krepshaw – with some high-energy, high-pitched estrogen. It's also inevitable that Nagg update the Pat Benatar version of "You're Gonna Run" with their own "So Many Times," but solid, powered-up songs like "She's in Love with You" – embellished with organ by Russell Quan of the Bobbyteens, the Phantom Surfers, the Mummies, etc. – make this a disc that's bound to become someone's hard rock cult find, post-Net, post-planet Earth, in the far future. (Chun)

Mail stuff for review to Sarah Han, Bay Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., S.F. CA 94107.