As the Sacramento summer heats up so does THIS Midtown! A Second Saturday block party series with music, art, beer, food and local vendors, THIS Midtown is returning on Saturday, Aug. 8, 2015, for the second-to-last show of the series. The lineup of live talent for this one is seriously incredible and we all should be thanking the organizers for throwing a party like this that is free to attend! Headlining will be Oakland-based indie-pop band Trails and Ways, whose new album Pathology came out recently on Barsuk Records. Regional groovers Sunmonks are also on the bill, so if you missed their set at Concerts In the Park recently, you can catch them at THIS. San Francisco rock outfit Tiaras, which features ex-members of Sacramento’s beloved garage rock band Ganglians, will also be on hand jamming out and Young Aundee will spin a DJ set. The party kicks off at 4 p.m. and runs until 9:30 p.m. Once things on the block wrap up, the after-party will be cracking off inside LowBrau with DJs Shaun Slaughter, Adam Jay and special guests playing nu-disco, tropical, house and funk tunes. THIS Midtown takes place on the MARRS Building Block on 20th Street in between J and K streets. Learn more at Facebook.com/thismidtown.

Male Gaze Outruns Ghosts of Projects’ Past on Excellent Debut

Despite the fact that Male Gaze is essentially a brand new band, their collective pedigree has afforded the group the opportunity for larger shows and bigger stages nearly right out of the gate.

“We’ve all been around and we know everybody so it hasn’t been too tough to pull off,” says bassist Mark Kaiser. His matter-of-factness isn’t meant to come off sounding boastful; it just so happens that the folks who make up Male Gaze have logged time in some of Northern California’s more ballyhooed underground garage bands, including Blasted Canyons (guitarist/vocalist Matt Jones), the notoriously anti-Internet Sacramento crew Mayyors (where Kaiser manned bass) and The Mall (drummer Adam Cimino).

The question could remain whether or not that makes the sum of their parts something to write home about. And while it’s tough to get anyone anywhere to write anything down anymore at all, you’ll probably want to at least mention Male Gaze to someone sooner than later. With the release of their seven-song debut album, Gale Maze, on John Dwyer’s Castle Face Records, the band’s relative secrecy is slowly fading.

Before the band recruited second guitarist Adam Finken (also formerly of Blasted Canyons and currently in Tiaras), Gale Maze was recorded in a flurry by the core trio, Frankensteining tones and mixing approaches from their previous projects—if perhaps unwittingly—into a bewitching, fuzzy brew, rich in homage to the likes of Joy Division (Jones’ vocals practically exhume the flat bellowing of Ian Curtis) and a cornucopia of post-punk tinkerers.

The cold truth is that Male Gaze falls into that awkward category of too-soon-to-be-written about, although they did release a 7-inch in July 2014, a precursor to Gale Maze featuring the fantastic tracks “Cliffs of Madness” and “Think Twice” via Kaiser’s Mt. St. Mtn. label. They’ve played a handful of shows between San Francisco (where Cimino and Finken reside), Sacramento (where Kaiser lives) and Los Angeles (where Jones lives). And they have a lot of touring on the horizon, including a set at Boise, Idaho’s Treefort Music Fest this spring.

Even amidst their fledgling nature, the fact that their album resonates so completely forces the hand a bit.

Gale Maze unfolds organically, slowly and somewhat curious of its sonic surroundings on the lead track “Smog Dawn,” unfurling washes of crunchy noise atop otherwise darkly plotted garage-psych. Careful consideration is given to the balance of melody and grime, and to riding hazy waves of echo-delay vocals on tinny wormholes of hallucinogenic rock. It’s a trippy ride, to be certain, and one not altogether uncommon, it must be said, especially for alumnus of the vaunted Castle Face. Where Male Gaze separates itself, however, is in their ability to revel in space-dark choruses and not always disappear into the groove of a 12-minute-long freakout jam cycle. That crevice of psych has its place, it just doesn’t fit within Male Gaze’s current oeuvre.

And while Kaiser’s aware of the band’s past being a talking point for its future, he doesn’t seem concerned with talking much about how it affects how people will perceive his new project. In the interests of articulating the building blocks of Male Gaze, though, he did spend time chatting with Submerge about some of it.

What can you tell me about how the band formed and what each of you were hoping to focus on with this project?
Basically, I was in the process of moving back from L.A. and I was talking with an old friend who was in one of the first Mt. St. Mtn. bands, The Mall [Adam Cimino]. He said he had a practice space and thought it would be awesome if we could jam there; he hadn’t been in a band in a while and was just kind of jumping in on people’s projects or recording with people or playing live here and there. We were just trying to get together and jam to see if we could come up with a concept. Once it started to solidify into feeling like we could totally play together—we had the space and kind of a loose idea of what we wanted to do—we started trying to bring people in. Blasted Canyons had broken up and Matt [Jones] didn’t have anything going on, so I reached out to him. He was someone I knew on the periphery because of Castle Face, who I know as business partners, and I was gonna put out a Blasted Canyons record a ways back, which ended up coming out on Castle Face. He came in and it sort of clicked.

There’s not a lot of material out there about your band, save for the mention of where the three of you came from, band-wise. I do know that the album sounds great though. Do you think it’s probably better that people take your band for what it is now and not for where it came from?
I don’t know. That’s what we’ve been mentioning too, because that just helps people put a face to the name. All those bands were pretty well-known at their time, so obviously we wanted to let people know who liked those bands that we’ve got a new thing going. With the Internet, we can get music out to everybody really quick. We had a single up online for a long time and it circulated a lot. Bios always drive me crazy. Trying to describe music is a painful process. Then it kind of falls into, “well, we sound like these bands” and then everyone names the same bands and we all kind of come from the same punk place of all the music from up here. There are no surprises here. We just wanted to keep things short and sweet. Let the music writers write about us.

Music-wise, do you feel like there are real strong links between some of your past projects?
Yes and no. We weren’t fumbling through those previous projects; they were pretty well thought-out and we were seasoned musicians and we’re older. I feel like those bands all had a bit of…we jelled into each of our own style of playing. We each have our own style of playing, style of writing, so naturally we just kind of shuffle the deck and sometimes there are elements that sound like Blasted Canyons, or sometimes mildly Mayyors-ish. It’s more in sounds and tones as opposed to how we’re writing, and certainly there’s Matt’s voice, which was all over Blasted Canyons. I feel like it’s a pretty radical departure from what we were doing before.

When you first got together and cemented the trio, you had a single up really quickly. That’s in pretty stark contrast to your previous band, Mayyors.
Yeah, I put it out on Mt. St. Mtn. originally, and then we debated. I’d just come from a band who was off of the Internet and really very well-hidden, but that’s not how these guys wanted to play. So we ended up putting the single up on Soundcloud, and I was gonna do that for the label anyway. We had that up and kept recording; it was still really early on. We took what we learned from that and started applying it to recording the whole set and finding out through mixing what we wanted to sound like. It took some time; we recorded and re-recorded a few times figuring out what we wanted to do, and we definitely mixed that record about 10 times. So there was a lot of fine-tuning; we were still pretty new and the set was pretty fresh and we’d only played a few shows. We were just figuring out how we wanted to sound. It’s more of a first attempt than anything, but we’re real happy with how it turned out. It was a good starting point to continuously evolve.

Male Gaze will be joined by Tiaras and Vasas on Sunday, March 29, 2015, at the Hideaway Bar and Grill (2565 Franklin Boulevard, Sacramento). This all-ages show starts at 5 p.m. For more info, visit Last.fm/music/Male+Gaze

Ex-Ganglians member Kyle Hoover on the first album from his new group, Tiaras

All eras are defined by the fact that, eventually, they will end. There can be no Summer of Love Without a Winter of Discontent; no Woodstock without an Altamont; no old guard without a new wave; no lo-fi renaissance without a hi-fi takeover. Tiaras, a San Francisco rock outfit forged from the remnants of other groups (Blasted Canyons, Fine Steps, Sacramento’s own Ganglians), is starting the year by releasing a full-length illustration of this principle. The self-titled debut album, out Jan. 14, 2015, is a clear step away from the modes and methods characterizing the earlier work of its musicians. Where Ganglians once stood for a wild, heat-shimmery psych pop indebted to bands of the ‘60s, Tiaras glides—not leaps—further into music history (say, about two decades), emerging into a clearer, moodier intersection of mid-‘80s jangle-pop and new wave. Whatever the eras and styles that reverberate in Tiaras’ music, a few things are clear: their melodies are strong, their production is crisp and Tiaras may be one of the first great rock albums of 2015.

To get a deeper insight into the new record and its prehistory, we dialed up guitarist Kyle Hoover, who was spending his weekend hanging out in the illustrious Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. When considering the changes his band has been through, I wondered beforehand: how much of a hold does the past still have on that place? Does the feverish, acid-drenched zeitgeist of yesteryear still contain a slight hold on the City by the Bay? As numerous other bands from the local scene begin to decamp for other horizons, we can tell a lot about the current landscape from the musicians who have opted to stay. The music of Tiaras, for one, seems well suited to its locale. While traversing the bittersweet highs and lows of standout track “In the Room,” you can imagine the swift changes of elevation and climate one comes across while traveling through the city: the top of a tower, the bottom of a hill; burning sunshine and bone-chilling fog crowding into a single moment.

You’ve mentioned before that you’ve been living in the Excelsior area of San Francisco, how it’s fertile creative ground, but a lot of the old guard are moving south for greener pastures. What’s your point of view on these changes?
I’d say the curtains have been drawn back a little bit. I was joking around with my bandmates about the “endless summer of lo-fi ‘09.” It was this big thing—lo-fi garage, it was huge, it was everywhere. I mean, we were part of that too back in the day, but, I mean, me personally, I got over backing that stuff pretty quickly, and that’s part of the reason for the change. There’s definitely a message that we wanted to send going forward with Tiaras, like, “Alright, we live in San Francisco. We used to be kind of a garage band. Now let’s do something different.” A little more solemn, little more pop-oriented. We just wanted to do something different, and lo and behold, a year later, after the record finally comes out, there’s a bunch of other bands who are sort of shying away from that [lo-fi] scene as well.

A lot of my friends moved away—that’s just how it is. It’s super hard to live in the city. But it’s not the end of the world, there’s still cool stuff. I think if anything, it’s for the better that the garage thing has kind of faded a bit from the spotlight in San Francisco. More room to breed different genres.

The genre shift—going to the hi-fi sound, concentrating on the pop melodies—did you have anything to model yourselves on?
With this record, we definitely wanted to make it sound as good as possible. I’m a fan of using the best of both worlds—digital recording is super convenient and makes for a much less stressful recording environment; however, going analog is beneficial for different sounds. You can have the best of both worlds and get really experimental. With Ganglians, we were always trying to be hi-fi; it just always sounded lo-fi because we didn’t know what the fuck we were doing. But the idea was always to try and sound as good as possible. Genre-wise, the shifts…we just started listening to different stuff. I knew Ryan [frontman for Ganglians, Tiaras] in ‘08, and we were like, “Dude! Pet Sounds!” And the influence of that album is super evident in Ganglians. For the new record, Ryan and I were getting into a lot of weird, obscure ‘80s music, along with the rest of the world, apparently—but I guess that’s just how it goes. We just wanted to disassociate ourselves from our previous sound, which is hard because I still sound like me, and Ryan still sounds like himself. Now we have three other awesome dudes with their own take on things, and I think it works. People aren’t saying we sound like the Beach Boys anymore, so that’s fine.

When you say you all started listening to different stuff, was there anything in particular that you got excited about?
Ryan and I got really into Chrome, which was like this super weird, kind of avant-garde ‘80s rock thing. I don’t even know how to describe it. We’d heard about them from back in the day, but we started listening to them all the time. I personally started listening to a lot of Echo and the Bunnymen…just a lot of weird ‘80s stuff that I knew was good but that I’d never really taken the time to listen to. When the Cleaners from Venus record was reissued a few years ago, that was being played around our house 24/7. That was definitely a record I was super stoked about.

Was there a good deal of downtime between the dissolution of Ganglians and the recording for Tiaras?
Oh yeah, definitely. I think we stopped playing together after our last SXSW, which must have been the spring of 2011. Ryan moved to San Francisco, our drummer moved to Brooklyn, our bassist moved to Oakland and I was stuck in Elk Grove. I was living at my dad’s house for a good eight months until I finally saved up enough money to move in with Ryan in SF.

Did a lot of the ideas for the new group and album come out of that eight-month period?
That would be nice, but definitely not. That was more of like a—I don’t know, we were so worn out. I think at that point, we’d been on the road almost constantly for like a year and a half. We were starting to argue a lot, and it was kinda gnarly. So I was mostly just being miserable in Elk Grove, commuting to Davis with Alex’s [Ganglians drummer] mom every morning. That’s basically what I did. If anything was going on idea-wise during that period of time, it was with Ryan and Antonio in San Francisco while they were jamming together.

It seems collectively like you have decades of band experience—you’ve been in a lot of bands, you kind of know the drill. At this point, is it easier for you to tell when the chemistry is right, or when you’re ready to call it a day?
Yeah, I’d say so. This is probably only my third band, but this time, the songs came together easier. Ganglians was like a shitload of trial and error. That was kind of a turning period, because we were all new to what we were doing. With Tiaras, it was super easy to make things work. I’d say there was a year’s worth of time where we were learning to play with each other. And it wasn’t super natural at first, but now we all understand what we’re trying to do.

Playing TBD this past October was sort of a mini-Sacramento homecoming for you guys. How was the experience?
It was fun! It kind of felt like a Sacramento Burning Man or something. Everyone was walking around with scarves on their face and dust was everywhere. I definitely partied too hard, because I stayed there for the whole weekend. I think we were all hungover for like a week after that.

Finally, how do you feel about Tiaras as a group at this point?
When Tiaras first started, I had known Ryan pretty well from being in Ganglians. I’d known Antonio pretty darn well—I think I’ve known that guy since he was like 16—and I had just met Adam and our bassist Ryan Hansen, so I was getting to know them, and we were figuring out how to play together and what our sound should be like. Needless to say, we’re still fucking with our tone settings and our amps to figure out what sounds we have and stuff like that. But I feel like the songs are getting better, and we’re getting better at writing them.

See Tiaras live at Harlow’s in Sacramento on Feb. 10, 2015. Tiaras will be playing in support of The Dodos. Tickets are $15 and can be purchased through Harlows.com. Doors open at 7 p.m.

Youth Lagoon, TIARAS, Roxanne from the Sandwitches

Harlow’s • Sacramento • Aug. 9, 2013

Recently turned on to Youth Lagoon, I’ve since been pairing their two albums, The Year of Hibernation and Wondrous Bughouse, with my daily morning coffee intake. Their dreamlike, underwater qualities make for an easy transition from half asleep to wide awake.

The brainchild of frontman Trevor Powers, Youth Lagoon hails from Boise, Idaho, and is signed to Fat Possum Records. Trevor describes his songwriting process as a mechanism to sort his thoughts and transfer his fears, and his music is accordingly not dissimilar to a roller coaster ride. Naturally, I was excited to hear about their appearance in Sacramento, booked by Abstract Entertainment, at Harlow’s.

Early into the first set, it was apparent that Youth Lagoon would be enjoying a decent turnout from Sacramento fans—the nightclub was already teeming with hipsters confusingly donning flannel shirts in spite of the warm summer night.

My mother always warned that if I couldn’t say something nice, then stay mum. So I’ll say little about the first act of the show, Roxanne from the Sandwitches. Her off-key soprano narrative atop her acoustic guitar made me feel uncomfortable, like an accidental voyeur peeping a broken-hearted amateur’s cathartic practice session.

After an inordinate amount of time following her exit, a quartet of scraggly musicians in tight jeans emerged nonchalantly from the green room and took the stage. This San Francisco-based, newly formed alliance called TIARAS was promoted as being partly comprised of ex-Ganglians and Fine Steps members. Three electric guitarists, a bassist and their menagerie of pedals created a beautiful, psychedelic soundscape, but TIARAS had an upbeat, danceable quality thanks to the drummer and cadence of the vocalist. The lead singer, Kyle Hoover, who resembled a hungry lion, brushed his long, side-swept blond hair out of his face, requested more reverb on his vocals and cuddled his guitar throughout their well-received set.

Then came the moment the now completely full house had been awaiting: Youth Lagoon assumed the position within an arc of giant canvas jaws lit up by a rainbow of colors, while exhalations of pink smoke seeped from between
the teeth.

Trevor Powers manned two stacked keyboards, adjacent to which was a tiny organ synthesizer. His touring band was made up of a guitarist, bassist and drummer, too, which sometimes rescinded into the background quietly to let the keys speak alone, to let Trevor sing softly.

Characterized as neo-psychedelia, Americana, indie rock and dream pop, Youth Lagoon’s genre-bending music dynamically transitions many times mid-song from calliope, to hymnal, to spacey, to driving, to noise—to pretty much anywhere on the spectrum of sound—seamlessly, skillfully and strategically, taking the listener on a journey through internal and external galaxies. Trevor beat his fists against his keyboards while playing restless arpeggios, and his band lifted the feet of the audience off the floor with climbing crescendos that culminated in eerie, cosmic plateaus. Then after carrying us across a starry expanse, Youth Lagoon cast us down cliffs, and we plummeted gladly in dramatic dirges before being hypnotically lifted up again.

Just as someone who’d nearly succumbed to submergence, Youth Lagoon left me feeling like I’d sunken into a deep, murky pool, struggled, panicked, gasped for breath—then, mercifully, a cloak of peace draped my consciousness and plunged me into a lucid euphoria. The bony fingers of death wrapped tighter and tighter around my throat until I was about to surrender…then let me go. It feels good to drown, and even better to live to tell about it.