No, Glassjaw didn’t invent post-hardcore, but neither did they damage it any during the two decades they’ve been around. If anything, the band’s impact has been dazzling but infrequent, due for the most part to …

“This is the monster-truck version of the lute.” Kyle Patterson grins. “It’s a lot louder than your standard lute.” On his smartphone, he has a photo of a type of lute known as a theorbo …

J.D. Wilkes is a backwoods renaissance man. The singer/banjoist/harmonica player may have invented punk bluegrass when he fronted the Legendary Shack Shakers and later, a tamer version of that same ethic with his wife in …

“Do I play the ukulele? Yeah. I actually do,” Quinn Boylan, the former Tan Sister Radio bassist tells the Reader. “When I was coming up with this project, I decided I’d better learn how. It’s …

Magma sounds like a mini-opera company performing the music of Yes or King Crimson. But that doesn’t come close to describing the complete package. The full Magma ride is about prog rock with drums, electric …

When Scott Tournet last checked in with the Reader, it was three years ago. He’d moved to San Diego from his native Vermont the year before and he’d recently recorded his first solo album at …

It’s worked out that way so far for a 2012 San Diego Reader notable band: “All three of the kids in Big Bad Buffalo were students here,” School of Rock regional music director Tyler Ward …

A ’60s-ish rock-and-roll experience that recalls Phil Spector and doo-wop and leisure suits and even a slew of one-hit-wonder bands from back in the day are somehow updated and given present-day indie-rock treatment in this …

Last summer, San Diego singer/songwriter Itai Faierman had a new band and a new record. Critics called the band (Speaker in Reverse) his best effort yet. The six-piece delivered a lean, stripped-down song collection that …

After 16 years in San Diego as a band, tours of Asia, an appearance at San Diego’s one and only Super Bowl, and numerous hometown gigs, the ’80s metal cover band 6ONE9 is calling it …

“It could be a cute girl who plays pool pretty well,” one of the members of Sharkmuffin told a reporter in answer to a question about the band name that some think of as slang …

I had to ask — what did Paula Boggs’s dad say when she announced that she was ditching her career as lead counsel for the Starbucks corporation in exchange for a career as a musician? …

Inside the protected and ever-dwindling world that is modern blues music, John Hammond Jr. is a rock star. In a notable career that spans back to the 1960s, the Blues Hall of Famer and Grammy …

Itchy, scratchy techno-tronica that makes my eardrums feel mistreated. Glasmus has that, along with the capacity to re-create the sounds of a ’90s Tijuana disco band. Or weird polit-tronica: “New World Odor,” for example, is …

A band named “Girl”: at least that’s what the group’s members (none of whom are Russian, by the way) claim Devotchka stands for in that particular language. No, this is a four-piece based in Colorado, …

“This area is my mobile studio,” Cathryn Beeks says, sitting in the forward passenger area inside an old bread truck painted lime green and black. On Facebook, the singer/songwriter/show producer now also lists her occupation …

Over the years, Black Sabbath has proven to be an easy mark for the creative tribute band. In a recent issue I wrote about Mac Sabbath, a bona fide tribute that, while keeping the music …

Alas, once again Los Lobos got snubbed by the nominating committee that oversees who does and who does not enter the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Fans have expressed indignation via social media, but …

Wayne Hancock. His nickname is “the Train,” and his act is what remains of honky-tonk, a scarce form of entertainment these days. In truth, honky-tonk defines a type of venue and an era more than …

The White Buffalo and Jake Smith are one. It’s not an alter ego so much as a nickname that stuck. When he calls the Reader from his home in Los Angeles, I ask him about …

The Internal Revenue Service is on fire! Red-and-blue emergency flashers scat about the structure, but this is a fire that will never, ever be put out. “As you can see,” Nick Pecoraro offers, “the firemen …

What do Stewardess bassist Grant Reinero, Vinyl Junkies record-swap founder Eric Howarth, No Knife’s Brian Desjean and Mitch Wilson, Rebecca and Demetrius Antuna from art-metal band Kata, and Ghetto Blaster guitarist John Cota have in …

Forty years of Robert Cray: all the while, some among us are waiting for that guitar of his to quicken into flames, rather than smolder like last night’s fire. Not a very heroic guitar hero, …

Cats are a problem. We gotta enclose the areas where we’re growing.” Diane Moss breaks it down for a visitor. “You gotta be careful with your compost. It’s composting,” she explains, “and that brings the …

Yep, it’s country music through and through, with plenty of South Carolina drawl, reverb, guitar twang, and liberal amounts of pedal-steel guitar to close the deal. But don’t be fooled by Nikki Lane’s alt-rock roots …

When finally we connect by telephone, Holly Golightly is in transit somewhere in Minneapolis, recovering from two weeks of road flu. The conversation is abbreviated by random bouts of coughing. The Brokeoffs — two people, …

Houndmouth is one of those bands for which the songs seem to play themselves, minus fanfare or any particular direction. That’s an illusion, of course. The melodies and the storylines rise above the sloppy musicianship …

“The scene here’s really healthy,” says Mike Benge. The Helix High School band director is talking about the popularity of reggae music in San Diego. “It’s one of the more healthy music scenes here, next …

These are the last days to catch Bushwalla performing as Bushwalla. According to his own crowd source funding campaign, the singer/songwriter plans to retire the stage name and alter ego he has performed as for …

Years ago, blues guitarist Walter Trout (who recently came back from the near-dead) saw the handwriting on the wall. “Every town I go to has got its own teenaged guitar slinger these days,” he complained …

Possibly no one that saw this band live in 1988 expected them to be around for more than a few weeks, let alone 30 years, and not because they were awful, but because Mudhoney was …

Gram Rabbit, from Joshua Tree, California, has been around for at least a decade and has released several albums, beginning with 2004’s Music to Start a Cult To. An underwear manufacturer broke them out in …

Sometime during the final weekend of August, Ari Bejar made a decision that would reverberate throughout the downtown La Mesa Village. He carefully hand-lettered his final message in chalk on a menu board, and come …

“The last gig I played with Phil Woods was in April, in Newark, New Jersey,” hometown bebop saxophonist Charles McPherson tells the Reader. “It was one of his last shows. It was kind of a …

She is the embodiment of every one of the best of the blues stylists I grew up listening to during the ’60s and the ’70s. Beth Hart has got Janis Joplin and Etta James and …

It’s the new big thing: pairing a soul-singing frontman with a hard-driving rock outfit. Vintage Trouble may be to blame (in part) for the success of the trend. They’ve been strong ever since they went …

Starlit has been called one of the best new releases to come out of Portland in the past year. The song collection centers around Jackson Boone’s new-found sobriety, they say. Whatever. Here is a singer/songwriter …

“She raised the bar,” KGB FM morning-show cohost Coe Lewis says of the radio personality who held her same position some 32 years ago. “Sue Delaney was a game-changer,” Lewis explains. “I think she was …

A NOLA super-group, if ever there was one. The New Orleans Suspects started out under a different name a few years ago as the result of some jam sessions at a New Orleans nightclub called …

From one mom’s basement to your ears: the four core members of Twin Peaks (nothing to do with the television series of the same name, they once told a reporter) know each other going back …

Not a good start to the week for early risers or musicians: on Monday morning, September 1, the regulars at Cosmos Coffee Café in La Mesa arrived to find locked doors and a hand-chalked sign …

It seemed at first like another Internet prank: last summer, someone posted a video of a quartet of hillbillies out in the snowy woods, surrounded by farm implements and barn animals, playing on accordion, banjo, …

“Yeah, Mookie and I are doing Homegrown Hour,” Josh Damigo tells the Reader over lunch at a La Mesa coffee shop. Mookie is San Diego Uptown News reporter Marc “Mookie” Kaczor. “I’ve always thought I …

“I know what the weather’s like back home. My wife keeps bloody complaining about it.” This, followed by a case of the giggles. It’s Pinch, the Damned’s drummer of the past 16 years, on the …

Stranger than fiction by a country mile: the Kentucky meat shower, as reported by the New York Times in March of 1876 was a filthy (and thankfully short-lived) rain of little pieces of raw meat …

I met Teagan Taylor, the singing pop-jazz trumpeter, a few years ago at a party. Not just any party — it was Larry Zeiger’s pre–New Year’s Eve annual goody. Taylor was in her early teens …

That a fan base committed themselves to Metz post haste is further proof, I think, of the theory that every person has at least one big primitive scream locked up somewhere deep inside them that, …

Everybody’s got a primal scream locked up inside they just can’t let out, right? Reason enough to go to Cowboy Mouth — they’ll do it for you. I think the fomenting of public catharsis is …

“All my friends and family are here,” country singer/songwriter Suzanne Harper tells the Reader, “but it’s time to go.” Go where? She and her husband Ross, their two children, and a fellow band member named …

In 2010 a singer/songwriter and guitarist named Ruban Nielson posted an original track to his Bandcamp site. Pop music bloggers got their hands on it, reposted it all over the internet, and due to the …