French Cassettes
O
DJ Honeycomb Brown
This event is 21 and over
$10.00 – General Admission (Advance)
$12.00 – General Admission (Door)
*plus applicable service fees
Tickets available at The Independent box office (628 Divisadero, SF) with no service charge.
French Cassettes music is filled with winding melodies that pop up unexpectedly but grab hold and don’t let go… and may leave you asking “who needs hands with hooks like these?”
The harmony-driven power-pop quartet’s new LP, Rolodex (Sophomore LP released on Tender Loving Empire), was conceived beneath a stairwell in the band’s adopted hometown of San Francisco, where frontman Scott Huerta spent months staying up until 4 am, obsessing over elaborate demos that would eventually become his band’s sophomore album. “I adopted the mentality, which was probably unhealthy, that every song I wrote needed to be my favorite song,” he remembers. “I lost my mind so many times in the middle of the night.”
The album was self-recorded by lead guitarist Mackenzie Bunch in just about every corner of the Bay Area, and the songs that were eventually stitched together are hook-filled and rooted in pop. But they’re also layered and intricate recordings: complex vocal harmonies and counter-harmonies, Rob Mills’ inventive percussion, Thomas’ (Scott’s brother) honey-coated basslines, and every shade of clean and fuzzy guitars stacked up like an orchestra. These uncommonly majestic, esoteric pop forms serve as the perfect delivery service for Huerta’s playful and verbose lyrics, which are often presented as semi-autobiographical puzzles.
Taken together, the eight tracks and 24 minutes that make up Rolodex are an epic statement of purpose in a decidedly taut package. One that brought a band back together, more mature and more ambitious than ever.
O (formerly Black Cobra Vipers)
Alternately compared to Roxy Music, Aphrodite’s Child, Klaatu, Salvia Plath, Madonna, The Buzzcocks, Jeff Buckley, Tim Buckley, Lord Buckley, the feeling you have when you wake after receiving dental gas, Mariah Carey played backwards, Prince, Booker T & The MG’s, Pere Ubu, Queen and the sound of plants recorded under microscopic conditions.. the rise of O (formerly Black Cobra Vipers) has been so rapid that that facts about where they actually came from have been lost in the litany of lawsuits over fainting and/or crushed girls and the copyright claims associated with sending and receiving telepathic imagery, especially from beyond this life.
Some things however are irrefutable facts [You can’t kill yourself by holding your breath / You’re born with 300 bones, but by the time you become an adult, you only have 206 /Slugs have 4 noses] and anyone who recently witnessed the spectacle of Gregory Di’ Martino, the 6ft 8″ lead singer of Black Cobra Vipers, silencing the crowd at a Monster Truck Rally in Des Moines, Iowa with nothing more than a gentle guitar and a searing voice calling out an impassioned hymn to an alcoholic beverage [“Colt 45”], knew that they were witnessing the birth of something special. Not just a new band or a new sound, but a new way of being. Motorcycle’s hung seemingly in mid-air and cigarettes fell loosely from the lips of men who were twice the size of other large men.
Regardless of whether they were eventually run out of town in a barrage of flames and shameful remorse [they were], for a brief moment a natural law had been circumvented, and all those who witnessed were never the same again.
The band have recently changed their name to O, when asked about the reasons behind this bassist Julian Borrego said that the band wanted a name that was as close to not actually have a name as you could possibly have whilst still having a name, if that makes any sense, and through a series of coincedences and blind drunk initiations, enlisted the services of the man who named another band who was known for their ability to, literally, destroy the existing order and replace it with something rawer, younger and more exciting, albeit 50’s years ago: The Who.
Richard Barnes, who came up with the name for both bands had this to say about O: “When The Who were forced to change their name from The Detours, we went through dozens of names, but none stood out sufficiently. I thought of The Who in order for it to totally different and to make people do a re-take, it worked almost immediately. I think names are very important but a great name only works with a great band, I think ‘O’ is a great name and ‘O’ are a great band.”
O’s debut release is coming out this fall and they will be embarking on a nationwide tour shortly afterward.