Sizzle & Fizzle: Highs and Lows from the Last Week in S.F. Music

Comments (0) By SF Weekly Staff Wednesday, Oct 31 2012

Sizzle

Matt Saincome

A$AP Rocky at the Fox

Hawa Arsala

L-VIS 1990 at Monarch

More About

• Just when you thought festival season had ended, Live 105 announced a two-day Not So Silent Night concert with Jack White, the Killers, M83, the Shins, Passion Pit, and more. It goes down Dec. 7 and 8 at Oracle Arena.

• A$AP Rocky showed off some famous friends at his Oakland show, bringing out Too $hort for "Blow the Whistle" and E-40 for "Function." Earlier, Schoolboy Q trotted out the megahot Kendrick Lamar. It was better than what you were doing that night.

• Christopher Owens announced his first solo album after departing the band Girls. Lysandre will be released Jan. 15, and Owens plans to perform it in full at an intimate S.F. show on Nov. 9. The first single, "Here We Go," is a delicate slice of baroque pop that sounds a lot like Girls' quieter moments.

Fizzle

• At Monarch on Friday, L-Vis 1990 showed off exactly how not to DJ a party: He let the room marinate in annoying shards of noise that sounded like a CDJ stuck in queue mode, but apparently wasn't a malfunction. His whole set was rough-edged and abrasive, and didn't fit the vibe of the night at all.

• Every Lana Del Rey song is a repetition of the last: sweeping strings, warbling vocals, and contrived drama, served with a giant dollop of pretension. But "Ride" is especially cliché-ridden and gross; Del Rey plays the hopeless victim, trying to glamorize being a man's doormat.

• Yay, the Giants won the World Series! But why were the National Anthem singers all so bland and boring? Oh! Because with the exception of Aretha Franklin, who was set to sing at Game 5, every one had a promotional tie-in with a TV show on Fox. Isn't that a bit much, guys?