I ran into a temporal anomaly while driving. My first warning sign was the police cruiser with one headlight flashing its sirens behind me. Wrong place at the wrong time? Well, I was getting pulled over in Sebastopol on the way to Richmond from SF, but when the cop told me I was doing 78 in a 55, it suggested one thing —speeding. Read more »

The 20th anniversary of Noise Pop is oh-so-close to upon us. In celebration and commemoration of how far the festival has come, and of the musicians who’ve made Noise Pop a much-anticipated Bay Area tradition, Bottom of the Hill will be hosting a retrospective photo gallery. The exhibit's opening reception takes place Tues/7 from 6 to 9 p.m. and is free to the public. 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 »

The Family Jams, a documentary by Kevin Barker (the man behind Currituck Co. and and on-again-off-again accompanist of Vetiver), captures the careers of the genre-fucks Devandra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, and Vetiver in their infancy on a 2004 summer tour. (The doc screens Thurs/24 as part of the Noise Pop Film Festival; check out a trailer here.)

Near the film’s beginning, Barker, in a voiceover, shares a memory of seeing large flying cockroaches that lived in his grandmother’s kitchen drawers in Hawaii. In the next scene — whodathunk? — a large cockroach appears during a show in Houston, Texas when his musical family (Banhart, Newsom, and Andy Cabic of Vetiver, among others) plays together at the show’s end. Could this link 'twixt families be made any more obvious?

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