Pitchfork, the simultaneously celebrated and maligned music reviews site that continues to serve as an musical divining rod for the bet-you-haven't-heard-of-it set, posted a comprehensive view of San Francisco's New Garage Rock this morning. Thankfully, the city isn't getting one of the site's notoriously prickly 1-10 reviews, but today's piece provides a detailed history of San Francisco's current dominant music scene.
It's a long reader, but among the bands profiled are some up-and-comers that have been up-and-coming for awhile now: The Fresh & Onlys (who made the leap from local scene to music festival today), Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall, Kelley Stoltz, the Sandwitches and Sonny & the Sunsets all get the Pitchfork profile treatment to tease out the "complex web of relationships" between them.
While others have pointed out Pitchfork's crush on San Francisco in the past, today's piece isn't afraid to poke fun at the tinge of hippie-ness that automatically comes along with anything based out of San Francisco. We're especially enamored with this spot-on analysis of the atmosphere at Amoeba Music on Haight:
...it's the Altamont of record stores. The racks are lined with awesome records, but the aisles are jammed with tragic, itinerant hippies. The headphones at the listening station are slick with the grease of unkempt dreadlocks.
Amoeba's greasy headphones aside, the currently-in-trouble Eagle Tavern gets a mention for the leather bar's role in booking these bands early on and Amnesia on Valencia gets a nod for being at the center of the scene's orbit. Obsessive followers of vintage recording equipment, homebuilt studios and a largely non-digital scene centered around vinyl singles and cassette tapes can read on over at Pitchfork. Less intense local music fans will want to jump to the bottom to get a listen at what they're missing out on.
