This event is 21 and over.
$16.00 – General Admission (Advance)
$18.00 – General Admission (Door)
*plus applicable service fees
The general on sale begins Friday, May 17th at noon.
Tickets available at The Independent box office (628 Divisadero, SF) with no service charge.
All doors & show times subject to change.
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The Soft White Sixties
Alta California, the new bilingual album by The Soft White Sixties, finds the Los Angeles 5-piece expanding upon their contemporary concoction of rock ‘n’ roll and soul while also exploring some of their most relevant lyrical content to date (in both English and Spanish).
Produced by Elijah Thomson (Father John Misty, Delta Spirit, Richard Swift), Alta California was written and recorded at New Monkey Studio, a room formerly owned by Elliott Smith, over the course of several sessions that began on Election Night 2016. Lead singer Octavio Genera — a first generation Mexican-American who grew up in a bilingual Spanish/English family – always wondered what it would be like to sing in Spanish, it just didn’t occur to him to try it professionally, and he wasn’t sure there was space for it within the band. “Speaking and singing in a language are two different things,” says Genera. “There was a feeling of joy and passion when I sang these songs in Spanish that I wasn’t expecting. And then hearing the songs back — it was right.”
Packed with deep, thunderous grooves from the rhythm section of Joey Bustos and Ryan Noble, squealing fuzz guitars and roaring analog synths courtesy of multi-instrumentalists Aaron Eisenberg and Rob Fidel, and the signature soulful rasp of lead vocalist Octavio Genera, Alta California is an honest snapshot of a modern rock band in their prime.
King Dream
King Dream is a Bay Area rock ‘n’ roll band helmed by Oakland native Jeremy Lyon, a lifelong songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who crafts dive bar anthems with heart, brains and soul. Hard-rocking yet poignant, his music combines a love for American rock masters like Springsteen and Petty with ‘60s West Coast psychedelia and more contemporary torch-bearers like My Morning Jacket and The War on Drugs — all brought to life by a band of Northern California’s most in-demand players.
Lyon has played Outside Lands and Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, toured nationally and internationally, and also knows what it’s like to busk on the street. King Dream songs deftly balance hope and world-weariness. They seem wise beyond their years, and they also have a way of sneaking up on you. Their shout-along choruses and searing guitar solos are at home in a darkened saloon, to be sure, but also — you know the giddy, ragged vulnerability that arrives when you’ve been awake for way too long on a road trip? Between the good times and the clinks of beer bottles these songs inspire a wistfulness, deep in your bones, for a place you’ve never been.
Glory Daze is King Dream’s first full-length since the band’s 2018 self-titled debut, and it represents a massive leap forward. Ambitious in scale and scope, it clocks in at 24 tracks, divided into three parts. Technically, these songs are a record of Lyon not only maturing as a lyricist and musician — experimenting with different production styles, moving easily between fist-pumping anthems and ballads and electronic and R&B-influenced sounds — but also developing into a self-sufficient producer and engineer, a silver lining to the constraints of the pandemic.
But Glory Daze is also unmistakably a full-band effort, and its sound also reflects the group’s confidence and cohesion: What began as a studio band is now a tight-knit collective with decades of experience between them, including Adam Nash (guitar) and Nick Cobbett (drums), as well as Zak Mandel-Romann (bass), a close musical collaborator of Lyon’s since high school.
Narratively, Glory Daze traverses vast territory: a period in which Lyon separated from, reconciled with, and married his now-wife (Caitlin Gowdey, Rainbow Girls, who appears on several tracks and plays keys live with King Dream when she can); toured and recorded as a sideman with a slew of Bay Area artists (Whiskerman, the Stone Foxes, M. Lockwood Porter); dealt with the grief, anxiety and loss of community wrought by a pandemic and years of sociopolitical turmoil; and careened into his 30s with a healthy dose of reflection, self-doubt and, ultimately, an audible sense of confidence and satisfaction. The result is an expansive, multifaceted album that invites the listener to climb in, lean back, and trust that getting there’s at least half the fun.
“I make driving records,” says Lyon. “And this one’s about an hour-forty long, so I hope you’re going somewhere far.”