Residual Echoes have always put on a fantastic show in their many previous visits to the area. This Santa Cruz band now calls L.A. home, but Davis/Sacto fans should always feel some kindred spiritness with them because of their ability and tendency to get totally free and wild and yet retain the solid heaviness, which is not totally unlike Blue Cheer (but funneled into a mixture of influences that is heavily steeped in Kraut).
From Portland, Oregon, Plants is primarily the duo of Joshua Blanchard (ex-Point Line Plane) and his lovely wife Molly, and they make totally enthralling folky psychedelic music with the stark simplistic beauty and innocence of post-apocalyptic neofolk, but plus the love and hope and minus the dreariness and zionism of such artists as Death in June, Nurse With Wound, etc. Flanked by friends from such bands as Point Line Plane, Mome Raths, Space Hawk, etc., they have made a third album called "Double Infinity" on the British label Paradigms, and it's a surefire stunner with a sorta spacey vibe on three ambitious opuses. When they played the DAM House last year, some thought the place was levitating under the power of their music, and they weren't even on acid.
You know Art Lessing & the Flower Vato are already your local heroes of the handmade with their skeletal claptrap rhythm and mesmermindmeldbliss, swirling and chiming and climbing to sneaky facemelt crescendoes.
But did you also know that Antlers has hit a whole new stride with their last performance at Fools Foundation which featured a more aggressive rhythmically forward attack that is exponentially more confident and economical than any of the eight other times I saw them? Yes, you need to see them again for the first time!