› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Skip the cherries — life at times seems like a big fat bowl of Froot Loops — the type that figure-eight, undulate, and connect in the most unpredictable ways. For instance, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, né Will Oldham, and his ungainly, increasingly ecstatic shadow folk-country — that association's only right and natural. Oldham and Gen X cinematic hot-spring stoner sagas — it's altogether plausible. Read more »

› kimberly@sfbg.com
"It definitely contributes to this kind of cavelike, sort of womblike environment up here."
Tom Carter is surveying his kingdom, a.k.a. the Oakland apartment he shares with his partner, Natacha Robinson, and we both try to make the connection between Charalambides, his 15-year-old duo with ex Christina Carter, and the hundreds of Playmobil figurines that populate damn near every surface around him. The only Playmobil-free space seems to be Carter's cranny-cum-closet-cum-studio housing a computer equipped with Pro Tools and sundry plug-ins that simulate analog effects. Read more »

› kimberly@sfbg.com
REVIEW Tired of those battered punk-rock veterans of the hardcore years? You know, the geezers rocking in their thrift-store easy chairs, wheezing, "You had to be there — those were the days. I saw Darby when ..." before heading to the acupuncturist? Can you help it that you never saw Flag back before My War? Read more »

› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Honestly, is sincerity back? And if not sincerity, then can we expect at least Bruce Springsteen, Thin Lizzy's Phil Lynott, and that word-drunk, narrative-schwinging, Dylan–damaged breed of songwriter that you associate with a kind of East Coasty, epic rust belt, bar-band earnestness that freedom-rocked our worlds in the early ’80s? I know Bob Seger is back — please don't make me listen to the new album.
You can be forgiven for assuming a J. Read more »

› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Don't be tripping, sit your sexy back down slowly, and I'll try to break the news to you gently: Justin Timberlake and I have a history.
OK, it's not like we sat around in Pampers and OshKosh B'Gosh, playing gastroenterologist with Barbie and GI Joe and gurgling along to "White Lines." Though I am getting a dose of feverish white-line nostalgia listening to coke-daddy ode "Losing My Way" off dusty Justy's new Jive album, Speakerboxxx ... whoops, I mean FutureSex/LoveSounds. Read more »

New York City band Grizzly Bear's gently ambient Yellow House (Warp) manages to delicately conjure bittersweet associations of musty, memory-cluttered childhood homes and reference Charlotte Perkins Gilman's feminist-modernist novel The Yellow Wall-Paper — but the real household dirt on this band has to remain in one's imagination.
Vocalist-keyboardist-guitarist-autoharpist Edward Droste is up-front about his own sexuality — saying he's been in a relationship with one man for most of the band's existence — but when it comes to the love lives of his straight mates, the sometime journalist and P Read more »

› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Which John Lennon did you know? Initially, I was too young to know him as anything more than the moptop behind the chipped bobble-headed garage-sale find — and as one of the songwriters behind my parental units' token soft-rock gatefold, the Beatles' Love Songs (Capitol, 1977) (the "White Album"’s "acid rock," as Moms described it, went way beyond the pale). That's all the Lennon I could grasp until the Rolling Stone cover pic that accompanied news of his 1980 murder — that coverlineless image picturing a nude Lennon fetally curled around a clothed Yoko Ono. Read more »

Jet Li may be fearless, as the title of his new Ronny Yu martial arts epic goes. The five-time all-around national Wushu champion of China may be a formidable opponent on a movie set — and a devout Buddhist much like his Fearless protagonist, legendary Wushu fighter Huo Yuanjia. Read more »

› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Why do we want DJ Shadow, né Josh Davis, to suffer for his art? Why are we so enamored of the romantic image of Davis, pate and gaze humbly hidden by a hoodie, bowed like a monk before a crate of precious vinyl like a mendicant curled in prayer at the dusty cathedral of flat black plastic? It doesn't help that Davis seems to resemble in part that now-iconic pop image when he meets me at Universal Records' SoMa offices. Read more »

› kimberly@sfbg.com
Sneak a peak at the California Cereals factory — a gray, boxy concrete sprawl looming over an otherwise peaceful West Oakland neighborhood lined with wood frame houses and a sugary spray of Victorians — and you immediately expect that mulchy aroma of processed wheat products to assault the senses. So why do you detect ... barbecuing oysters? Read more »