arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC When Black Sabbath comes on, I'm instantly transported to those high school days of driving myself to class and headbanging to every track on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (Warner Bros., 1973) so hard I could barely see the road. Led Zeppelin forced me to do ridiculous amounts of air guitar in my room, while the Beatles saw me go through puberty and live in fear of the male species. Read more »

arts@sfbg.com

Call it revenge of the G-funk era.

Yes, the sound that sparked a bicoastal beef and led to the murder of two rap superstars has made a roaring comeback. It invited mimicry (Kriss Kross' 1992 "Jump" and the Notorious B.I.G.'s 1994 "Big Poppa"); scorn ("It's the money," DJ Shadow noted with dripping sarcasm as he queued up that bleating keyboard line once more on "Why Hip Hop Sucks in '96"); and eventually got played-out like flannel shirts and Doc Martens. But now, it has returned. Read more »

superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Say what you will about trance: it happened.

In fact, it happened two ways. The first, in all its flaming-poi-twirling, shaman-transcendentalist, goa-gamma-psy-matrix glory, is rooted in underground dance movements of the 1980s, and still provides a few subversive, head-pounding kicks. Read more »

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC MLK's and Bobby Kennedy's assassinations, shaken confidence in Vietnam after a bloody and vengeful Tet Offensive, Haight-Ashbury's rapid dissolving into a breeding ground for lost and burned-out hippies pathetically clinging to the idyllic notion of a "Summer of Love," and a free Charles Manson settling in Laurel Canyon to plot the perverse and gruesome murders his "family" would soon commit. Yes, 1968 was the year the darkness had arrived. Read more »

molly@sfbg.com

There is something hauntingly beautiful — if not downright sexy — about the cello: a musician straddling the feminine curves of a human-sized instrument, bow sliding slowly and elegantly over the trembling strings, fingers plucking and vibrating in alternately gentle and assertive motions, and tones emitting from the smooth wood that range everywhere from soft whispers to deep moans.

It's no wonder the cello has been compared to both the human voice and, in the many portraits of women's backs painted to look like string instruments, the human body.

So perha Read more »

arts@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Bend an ear toward Fuck Buttons' ecstatic second album, Tarot Sport (ATP), and you're only a card flip away from shuffling the Rider-Waite deck of the mind and coming up with visual corollaries for the tracks. Frenetic opener "Surf Solar" obviously boogie-boards to the freedom-first of the major arcana's card zero, the Fool, whereas "Rough Steez" burrows into the deep 'n' dirty low end of the Tower card, and "The Lisbon Maru" cozies down amid warmly glimmering Doppler synths, akin to the Sun image. Read more »

superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Apparently there's some sort of "recession" happening, which explains all the cat-hair wigs, duct-taped platforms, sideways boob-jobs, and flask-filled socks on the dance floor. And yet, peculiarly, new SF clubs continue to open at the rate of one a week. Among the recent delectations: SOM (2925 16th St., SF. Read more »

arts@sfbg.com

"Anything can really fly in a song with me," says garage-rock savant Ty Segall. Fast cars, and ugly attitudes pasted on pretty ladies, anyone? "But I don't like writing songs with the words girl or baby in them. It's rock 'n' roll, but the bad part of rock 'n' roll is it's been done too much."

Don't get Segall wrong. He may have recently graduated from the University of San Francisco with a degree in media studies, but he's still an avid student of an ear-popping sound. Read more »

Saviours had their backs against the wall. Their new album was languishing without a title, and their record label was threatening to banish its release date to the wilds of 2010 if they didn't think of one — by the end of the day. Suggestions like "The Shlong Remains the Same" went nowhere. In these dire circumstances, it took a snippet of half-remembered conversation to germinate the perfect name, one that would encapsulate the band on-stage and off. On Oct. Read more »

marke@sfbg.com

Believe it or not (and you better believe it), until a few years ago, gay club music was a monolith, a Spandexed, Botoxed, over-toxed Easter Island rictus of fake-techno squeals and outrageous divas. There's nothing inherently wrong with that (except: yawn), and as far as such a thing called "gay club music" exists, the Gaga-Rihanna-Madonna industrial complex still reigns.

What's different now is the music available in the gay clubs, from punky no-wave, old-school vogue, and bathhouse chestnuts to Berlin minimal, nu-IDM, and space disco. Read more »