Thee More Shallows

Perhaps it's time to revive the ol' "Home Taping Is Killing Music" slogan, but with a twist. The plethora of sad boys sitting in their Garden State poster-lined suburban bedrooms clicking away at their ProTools has resulted in a Jersey-sized garbage heap of useless CDRs. It used to be lonely lads' journals would stay hidden in the nightstand; but now the music world, or at least its Pitchfork/MySpace precincts, must be inundated with the flaccid lullabies that indie rock has become.

Details

Perform Friday, May 26

Admission is $12-$14

621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

Bottom of the Hill

Related Content

• Best of Coachella Weekend One: Saturday, April 14
  April 15, 2012
• Live Review, 4/11/12: Radiohead Moves to the Beat in San Jose
  April 12, 2012
• Coachella 2012 Lineup: Radiohead, The Black Keys, Dr. Dre and Snoop, Pulp, The Weeknd, and More
  January 9, 2012
• Sizzle & Fizzle: Highs and Lows from the Last Week in S.F. Music
  January 18, 2012
• Is This the Coachella 2012 Lineup?
  November 29, 2011

More About

• Dee Kesler
• Phineas Bogg
• Radiohead

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Music Newsletter: Keep your thumb on the local music scene with music features, additional online music listings and show picks. We'll also send special ticket offers and music promotions available only to our Music Newsletter subscribers.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

San Francisco's Thee More Shallows have taken the easy self-indulgence of the digital recording era to task. Oh these Shallows are still pretty limp, but they add a slightly creepier edge (witness singer Dee Kesler's nervous, breath-down-your-neck whispering style), and song structures that slowly build to discernable ambitions. Somber symphonies like "Dutch Slaver" recall the fuzzy form of Eels or the ubiquitous sub-mood murk of Radiohead ("Phineas Bogg").

The disc is only a seven-song postscript to last year's More Deep Cuts CD, but it still stumbles into self-indulgence, though the dour inversion of the old Temptations' hit, "Can't Get Next to You" is pretty funny. Those hints of humor and the occasional slow dragging horns, sweeping somber background vocals, and a Spectorian, uh, Fence of Sound keep Thee More Shallows from the slumber indie rock is falling into.