For a city just 7 miles wide, San Francisco packs in a ton of action. Just look at our wildlife: whales, coyotes and rats. Even with its dense lattice of roads, the city is an ecosystem, complete with predators, prey and scavengers.
In this edition, we witness a Bay Area band’s homecoming, pop into a new Outer Sunset restaurant and catch a book talk on one of San Francisco’s enigmatic companies. Read on for more highlights.
20 years later, this still might be ‘the best band in the world’
While listening to Deerhoof’s 2005 opus “The Runners Four” in my kitchen recently, I had the thought that maybe Pitchfork was right when it quipped that the San Francisco quartet might be “the best band in the world.” I turned the volume up, and after a couple minutes of guitar cacophony, I realized that my neighbors may very well think I’m listening to the worst band in the world.
Perhaps the most accurate word to describe Deerhoof’s music is “creative.” The band, whose career took off while living in the Bay Area, wields dissonance like a laser beam. The savant-level musicianship creates moments of pure chaos that resolve into sonic clarity. If you’re a musician, you’ve probably had a late night jam that feels revelatory until you listen back to a recording and find it to be total garbage. Deerhoof’s music is like that memory of the perfect jam, except their music is actually that good…