Arts DEVO

Everything old is still young to me Arts DEVO has become quite a reminiscer as of late. And it’s been made even more pronounced the past month or so as I’ve packed and unpacked 11-plus years of accumulation at the old DEVO compound. This week, the CD collection was unpacked at the new pad, and I paused and recovered a memory from nearly every disc before it hit the shelf. As I dusted off a succession of melodic uptempo classics that included The Get Up Kids, Jimmy Eat World and Knapsack, I was struck with the realization that emo music used to not suck! And, in some kind of serendipitous aligning of the rock planets, I also got word this week that former Chico emo gods Number One Gun are reuniting the original lineup— Jeff Schneeweis, Trevor Sellers, Ben Tietz and Jordan Mallory—to record a new album and go on tour! And, turns out, you can help realize the dream by finding the band on kickstarter.com and contributing to the funding of the self-produced recording.

Get out of my dreams, Sesar! Even though his picture is right there, and it’s taken from a video for a song by his band Teeph, I am not going to talk about Sesar Sanchez in this column! (How the hell does he keep sneaking in here!?) Instead, I’m gonna talk about Tom Skowronksi, aka Tom “Botchii,” mastermind of one of my all-time favorite local bands, Botchii. Tom is in Sacramento now, and while his noisy guitar-busting days may be behind him, he’s still making a racket in video production, including this impressive gem for the hectic “A/S/L” (off Teeph’s new album, the extremely hectic Vietnamaste) featuring the-frontman-who-shall-not-be-named tied up and being buried alive. Good stuff.

Get yer jazzercise Portland, Ore., indie-jazz crew the Blue Cranes has an impressive collection of press clippings, with a shower of praise for its genre-hopping art-rock/jazz sound coming from everyone from the L.A. Times to NPR. But I think I like best how Josh Fernandez, a brother at our sister paper, the Sacramento News & Review, described them: “Blue Cranes provide a new amplification of jazz, allowing listeners to hear a stream of water pass through a storm drain thick with sediment.” Let ’em wash over you this Saturday, July 14, as they join returning Chico fave Zach Zeller for a summer evening at Café Coda.

Stop the presses! The CN&R didn’t get word of this last-minute show in time to get it into our calendar, but Austin, Texas, minimalist-pop duo Deep Time (formerly known as Yellow Fever) is coming to Café Flo on Wednesday, July 18. The band’s new self-titled album was just released on Hardly Art this week and has already been gettin’ the good word from the usual suspects, including a glowing, if jaw-droppingly pretentious, review by the taste-makers at Pitchfork. Go to www.hardlyart.com/deeptime.html and fall in love with the simple, catchy and slightly gloomy-sounding “Clouds.”

Stop the presses again! This show we did know about in time, but we didn’t get this awesome poster for the Friday the 13th CD-release party (at Origami Lounge) for local alt-rockers Furlough Fridays (featuring FF frontwoman Minnie Mental standing in for Jason Voorhees) until the last-minute, but I had to share. Enjoy.