San Francisco is always busy with events the last week of June. From birthday parties to street festivals, to Pride activities and parades, there is a lot going on. The fog either rolls in at a certain time or burns off in the afternoon, creating that classic San Francisco “Hills and Clouds” environment. With everything going on though, this double album release show was the premiere psych event of the week. It was very fitting for this picture-perfect San Francisco summer day, as the sun gave a golden glow over Potrero Hill, with the fog encircling Twin Peaks in the distance like a giant cloud fortress. People lounged in the…
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WALKER PHILLIPS – “God’s Eye”
Walker Philips is the guitarist in the band Tabernacle, who brings back the Old English standards with a rock vibe. His solo work, however, is more “earthy” and folk inspired. Here, on his second album, the songs are more stripped down, but within the same direction of Celtic and old-world folk inspired music. The album has warm analog production, invoking the sounds of the ’60s and ’70s. The opening song, “Listen To Me > Ballad of a Cancer with a Libra Moon or How the Crab Got His Scales”, is a nice acoustic song to start off the album with a blissful harmony of male and female vocals. The song…
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OCCULT STEREO | A Temporary Utopia
Occult Stereo is a self-produced project from Alex Eliopoulos, previously of the San Francisco band, Impuritan. Recorded over three years in Athens, Greece, but with songs written in San Francisco before the pandemic, this is truly a unique album with high levels of experimentation and creativity. This project is an open collaboration with other artists as well, adding to ’its complex tapestry of “Occult” sounds. The band “embraces aural freedom in many forms, from ambient soundscapes to fuzz-guitar freak outs and drone-like psychedelic oceans.” Abrasive, yet soothing at the same time, the record speaks to the whole spectrum of musical tone, a yin yang of styles that can’t be described…
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LSD & The Search for God. Kraus. Launder. 5.2.2025
“Shoe-gaze” as a genre of music has been around since the 1990s. I like to refer to the genre as “Dream-gaze,” and I’ve also heard it referred to as “Sea-gaze. Both of which are less condescending names, while they more accurately describe the sound and appeal of the genre. The genre made a revival in the early 2000s, making it more well known to a wider international audience. And now it seems it’s making an even bigger comeback as a popular genre with the Generation Z crowd. This was evident at this concert at Great American Music Hall San Francisco, where the line to get in the door was wrapped…
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HUGE MOLASSES TANK EXPLODES | “III”
Residing in Milan, Italy, this neo-psych band is back with a new release on Tidal Wave Records. A spacey, instrumental, electronic, pulsed opener sets the vibe leading up to the first song, “Bow of Gold”. The shimmering of guitars and octave bass line now kicks in, taking us on a cosmic ride. Reverberated vocals gloss over the prevailing musical landscape as a blend of clean, pristine Fender guitars are mixed in over a wash of sound pulsating into tremolo waves. “Tenuous Form” has a grungy, thick baseline that drives the entire track with ethereal guitar and synth sounds, enveloping the lyrics in an abstract echo followed by a big, washed-out, heavenly…
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SPLIT MOON | More Clouds More Stars
Los Angles band Split Moon has released a new “dark dream gaze” style album with lush production and a trilogy of music videos to go along with it. The album starts off with a nice little palate cleanser intro, “Speak the Sky.” The record has a few interludes like this providing a break between long conceptual songs, ending with “Everything Ends.” The album starts and ends with these “musical bookends.” The album explodes with the song, “More Clouds,” with accompanying video showing a bird’s eye view of frozen ice landscapes and water. The video reflects the dynamic changes heard in the music, and the simple concept captures the blurred sonic landscape…
