Localized Appreesh is our weekly thank-you column to the musicians that make the Bay. To be considered, contact emilysavage@sfbg.com.

Love Songs, a long-running SF band with high-five worthy metal riffs, is party punk at its funnest. Here, the wailing guitars meet lead singer Craig Ums' (also of What Happens Next?) classic pop punk holler a la Descendents' Milo with a mildly Jello Biafra-ish flair for live theatrics. Read more »

Localized Appreesh is our weekly thank-you column to the musicians that make the Bay. To be considered, contact emilysavage@sfbg.com.

The duo behind Bang Data has long been moving and shaking in the Bay Area music scene: MC Deuce Eclipse has worked with Oakland hip-hop act Zion I, while musician-producer Juan Manuel Caipo is engulfed in the local Latin alternative music scene. Read more »

Localized Appreesh is our weekly thank-you column to the musicians that make the Bay. To be considered, contact emilysavage@sfbg.com.

Doe Eye, aka Maryam Qudus, is perhaps the most local of Localized Appreeshers. (That is, despite her current traveler status while studying at Berklee College of Music in Boston.) The lady with the big brown eyes and soulful voice is a true blue, born-and-raised San Franciscan. And she often uses the city as her muse. Read more »

Localized Appreesh is our weekly thank-you column to the musicians that make the Bay. To be considered, contact emilysavage@sfbg.com.

Older sister band to previously profiled rabble-rousers Symbolick Jews, offensive psych-rock locals the Myonics just released their new, aptly-titled LP, Pagans. Richard Hell, Syd Barrett, and pioneering Japanese electronic act Yellow Magic Orchestra all equally inspired the record. Can’t really go wrong with that mix, right? Read more »

Localized Appreesh is our weekly thank-you column to the musicians that make the Bay. To be considered, contact emilysavage@sfbg.com.

It's hard to imagine a better fit to experimental film than psychedelic drone. The brief images on screen take you away to darkened unknown landscapes, the multitracked tape manipulation of sound mimics the calm yet uneasy mood in a segmented rhythm. Read more »

Localized Appreesh is our weekly thank-you column to the musicians that make the Bay. To be considered, contact emilysavage@sfbg.com.

The Shants have done something curiously rare these days: created an authentically Southern and categorically enjoyable stompy blues and folk record in the heart of garage punk and hip-hop obsessed Oakland. That authenticity come from real roots, as these sorts of things often do – the new record, Beautiful was the Night, is said to be a “haunted love letter” to singer Skip Allum's youth in the South Louisiana delta pines. Read more »

Localized Appreesh is our weekly thank-you column to the musicians that make the Bay. To be considered, contact emilysavage@sfbg.com.
 
There's a whole lot of religious imagery going on within new local guitar-and-drums superduo Churches. Most vivid, beyond the obvious, is the guilty, desperate strain in mesmerizing first single, “Save Me,” and its jittery remixes. The track and remixes (available on Bandcamp) are both pleading and sensual, evoking the classic good/evil ecstasy of sacred customs. Read more »

Localized Appreesh is our weekly thank-you column to the musicians that make the Bay. To be considered, contact emilysavage@sfbg.com.

Bhi Bhiman manages a joke when he coolly plucks bluesy guitar while singing about kimchi on “Kimchee Line” off his new album Bhiman (“it's cabbage time”). It's just not the food you'd expect to hear name-checked in a folky 1920s blues-style standard. (Though on another track, “Ballerina,” he does mention beans.) Despite this wry wink, his songs have an inherent sadness to them, which only makes more intriguing that irreverent style of telling socially conscious stories with lyrics you just wouldn't quite imagine there in another time period. It's the contemporary take on the classic style. Read more »

Localized Appreesh is our weekly thank-you column to the musicians that make the Bay. To be considered, contact emilysavage@sfbg.com.

Dogs, ghosts, kids, hand-clapping, whistling on a sunny park day – it's all in the video for the Yellow Dress's “This Could Be Anything.” The song itself is already a treat, kicking off with the aforementioned clapping and whistling and a solitary guitar, in pipes mariachi trumpet and swallow-you-whole powerful vocal pipes à la orchestral pop master Beirut. (It also has garnered comparisons to Magnetic Fields and a drug-less Velvet Underground.) Read more »

Localized Appreesh is our weekly thank-you column to the musicians that make the Bay. To be considered, contact emilysavage@sfbg.com.

Call it youthful summer abandon or fresh-baked pop, but there's something about Ash Reiter's song and Perez Bros-directed video “Heatwave” that melts the ice of a chilled and cubed SF day. Whether it's the the lilting melody, surfy plucking, stoop sing-along, or the perfectly-cast ice cream man offering up too many dripping frozen treats, it's hard to wipe that sticky grin off your face. That is, until you see the ice cream man's crestfallen face, realizing it's just too much sugar. Read more »