Tomorrow is the first day of Noise Pop, San Francisco’s annual five day indie rock festival. The festival — now in its seventeenth year — has grown immensely from its humble roots, and it’s astounding the variety and quality of bands that they manage to lure out to the Bay Area for it. It’s also depressing as hell, because for me it mostly just serves to remind me of how old I am.
I mean, aside from the obvious — Noise Pop 17?!? I think I went to, like, Noise Pop 4 or something! — I’ve found the schedules of the last couple years to consist largely of: bands I’ve heard of but never heard, bands I’ve never even heard of, and bands that I used to listen to, but don’t anymore. Mind you, I’m not blaming Noise Pop for this (though they should really find a way to convince the Fastbacks to reform and play a one-off festival show) — it’s just that I’m getting older and losing touch with a lot of what’s going on in the indie rock scene. So whereas ten years ago, the Noise Pop schedule seemed like an impossibly awesome line-up of bands that I couldn’t possibly see half of (I was never gung ho enough to buy a festival pass and hopscotch to three or four clubs each night, like some of my friends did), now it just taunts me with how out-of-it I am. I’m not planning to go to a single show in the festival.
On the bright side, the Pains Of Being Pure At Heart are playing a free “secret” show at the Rickshaw Stop tomorrow, so hopefully I’ll be able to make it to that. I love the Rickshaw Stop because they have lots of seats on the second level, perfect for my old man legs 
Useless aside: Sorry for any typos, my PC suicided and I’m reduced to using my wife’s accursed Macbook. This keyboard warps my hands.
: I think this is what Buffalo Tom would have sounded like if they’d decided to record a shoegaze record. Big droning guitars, but the singer’s gruff vocals gives the proceedings a sort of American alt-rock flavor. The album doesn’t quite live up to the promise of the majestic instrumental opener “Cathedral City”, but it’s pretty good.
: Travis’ most recent album, written and recorded on a rushed schedule which resulted in a much more vital, rocking sound than they’ve tried in a decade. That said, my favorite song (so far) is “Song To Self”, which sounds much more typical of the band’s recent, anthemic output.
– An early Slowdive EP. eMusic was worthing signing up for if only to pick up all the early shoegaze albums and EP’s that they have (they just added the first two Swervedriver albums, too).
– I would’ve sworn this EP, with its seeming hodge-podge of tracks, was a promotional disc for the band’s second RCA album, 
, but it turns out it that it came out a full year earlier. Two songs off Fire appear here, the punkish “We’re Not Going To Crack” and an alternate (inferior) acoustic take of “There’s A Fire”. The EP’s title track may be the oddest thing I’ve ever heard by the band.
— Though they’ve only been mentioned in passing on this blog, I was a huge Church fan in my late teens (they were pretty much my Beatles until I belatedly got into the Beatles in the mid-90′s), and I’ve generally kept up with them since. This 2005 release contains acoustic re-recordings of nine songs from their back catalog (ranging their entire career, from “The Unguarded Moment” to “Chromium”) and five new ones. I have a hard time believing that they could improve on the original version of “Almost With You”, but I’m willing to give it a shot.
contains three of the four tracks off this EP, so I thought I’d pick up the missing one.
– I wrote a bit about this indie shoegaze band back 
– 2007 release by excellent Japanese shoegaze band. I got this one from 
– Longwave’s new album, I picked this up at their show in San Francisco Thursday night. I’ve listened to it a few times and it sounds pretty awesome so far.
– I picked this one up at the show too. It’s Longwave’s debut album from 2000, and I’ve been meaning to pick it up for years. I probably won’t actually listen to this until I’ve digested Secrets though.
is still one of my favorite albums out of the New York neo-post-punk explosion back in the early part of the decade, and based on “Shining Hours” and some of the songs on their MySpace page, I have high hopes for this album, too.
on MP3 from Amazon.
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in Alternative Press (I think) a few months later, I ran out and picked up the 10″ vinyl version. Translucent lime green vinyl, as I recall.
