MUSIC It's a typical music-loving day at Aquarius Records when I call up the store's Irwin Swirnoff to talk about its 40th birthday and accompanying celebration. "There's always been some confusion about when the store started," says Swirnoff, after ringing up a few purchases, as the translucent sounds of Washed Out swirl from the AQ stereo. "There original owners were awesome, but stoned a lot, so they weren't sure if it was 1969 or 1970. Read more »

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MUSIC If "California Gurls" is the dirge of pop music, the arrival of Bethany Cosentino ought to make you consider calling off the funeral. That's not to say her music is pop, exactly. It has pop potential but it's not a "radio-ready" sound ... yet. Her debut album, made with Bobb Bruno under the moniker Best Coast, is rife with short, sweet hooks and infectious choruses untouched by excessive production and studio intervention.Read more »

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MUSIC Can two voices get any closer — or be laid any more bare — than those of the xx's Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim? The band's spare, pared-down pop is so minimally cloaked, with either instrumentation or pretense, that you could swear the pair were scarily close-knit sibs: the Chang and Eng of U.K. rock — the doubled letters of the xx seem less like a set of female chromosomes than a symbolic representation of Croft and Sim's doubling.Read more »

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MUSIC Chillwave is atmospheric and can fill the background, washing over you and allowing you to float through the world, or it can work as foreground with drastic beats that make you dance. Chillwave relaxes and excites. You feel it all around yourself. It's multifunctional: the perfect backdrop for walks through SF on blue-sky days, for dipping your toes in the sun-speckled sand, for stealing kisses with your lover, for dance parties. It's faded and fuzzy synth-pop of blissed-out beauty.Read more »

The just-reissued Vampires of Dartmore album Dracula's Music Cabinet (Finders Keepers) includes a track titled "Hallo, Mr. Hitchcock," in which beloved Hitch silently answers a series of phone calls from a manic, murderous prankster. The track isn't used in Johan Grimonprez's latest unconventional film essay Double Take, but it would be ideal material for the movie. Read more »

MUSIC It's typical to want to leave everything behind at times, because everything just seems the same after a while, no matter where you're from. When Bethany Cosentino ventured to New York City for college and hated being walled in by the snow and skyscrapers, she inundated herself with the warm melodies of the Beach Boys, surf music and 1960s girl groups — the soundtrack of her native California. Read more »

MUSIC Most bands change over time. Change makes most people uncomfortable. I — for all intents and purposes — am most people. Therefore, when a band I care about changes, most of the time I feel uncomfortable.Read more »

MUSIC The Bay Area has a strange relation with its musical past — accounts of Phil Lesh's recent somnambulation among the living attest to this, but the same can be said about much of the past 10 years. For better or worse, as the early '00s crawled back into the woods to die, many of us were left with the impression that the past 10 years were composed of a series of disorganized, vaguely parasitic gestures, a theme party where every group of new guests seems to ape a different decade. Read more »