Bay Area favorites The Morning Benders drop their sophomore release, Big Echo, today. Judging by the album’s coastal artwork alone, we might assume that the Berkeley-founded and now Brooklyn-dwelling band is sticking to their beach bum ways. But as The Morning Benders have grown, their techniques have matured as well. Big Echo moves away from [...]

San Francisco’s Honeycomb is an eight-piece ensemble led by Emily Ritz and featuring members of Geographer, Stitchcraft, The Dirty Snacks Ensemble. This beautiful live video was put together by One Night Music, a collective of volunteers who film intimate live performances of independent songwriters and bands in the Bay Area.
You can soak up some more [...]

This amazing video features San Francisco’s The Morning Benders performing “Excuses” with The Big Echo Orchestra. Yup, that’s John Vanderslice, Christopher Owens of Girls, and many others. Their anticipated release, Big Echo, is due out March 9th.

Thanks, Pitchfork. You win this round. The initial lineup for the 2010 Noise Pop Festival is now out in the open: the Magnetic Fields, Atlas Sound, Rogue Wave, Four Tet, the Soundtrack of Our Lives, Mark Kozelek, John Vanderslice (who helped out last year as a bartender at Noise Pop 2009’s Mountain Goats show), Foreign [...]

Photos by Jay and Laura; words by Anna.
Outside Lands 2009 could have been a lot of things: a failure, a disappointment, a misplaced attempt to draw a wider range of music fans. The slightly off-kilter lineup largely paid tribute to the ’90s (Pearl Jam, Incubus, Dave Matthews Band, Q-Tip and The Beastie Boys — before [...]

With so many bands (over 90 at last count) ready to diverge on San Francisco for the second annual Outside Lands Festival this weekend, we thought it’d be helpful to provide some playlists so you know what to look forward to.
With that in mind, here is the third and final installment of our daily playlists. [...]

[Locals Only is a regular feature where the Stranger Dance staff focus on the best and brightest of the San Francisco Bay Area music scene. Feel free to hit us up with any information on local bands, musicians, shows, and other music-related events and projects.]
In continued dedication to Bay Area music, the folks over at [...]

Initial announcements regarding the lineup at this year’s Outside Lands Festival may have received a more varied reaction, seeing as it branches pretty far beyond the more indie-centric lineup of 2008. Perhaps this announcement of the OSL daily schedule will help sway those teetering on the “not-sure-how-I-feel-about-the-Black-Eyed-Peas” fence.
Single-day tickets go on sale here on June [...]

[Locals Only is a weekly feature where the Stranger Dance staff focus on the best and brightest of the San Francisco Bay Area music scene. Feel free to hit us up with any information on local bands, musicians, shows, and other music-related events and projects.]
Highlights this week include two musical crown jewels of the Bay [...]

D Tour is a documentary about Rogue Wave drummer Pat Spurgeon’s battle to survive with just one kidney. At the age of 25, his kidney began to fail and he was forced to perform dialysis on himself routinely – yes, even on tour. ipickmynose recently posted some great photos of the San Francisco Film Festival [...]