Artist Photo | Album Cover |

s/r | For any other band, it'd be unreasonable to say you want to be the first band to play on the moon, but for BATTLEHOOCH, it only seems natural.

Formed by a group of UCSC music students, the men of Battlehooch have taken the Bay Area by sheer will alone after moving to San Francisco in 2006.  Living in a single house in the outer Sunset district, the band began showing up at every local show, adorned in self-silkscreened headbands proclaiming BATTLEHOOCH.  Quickly garnering a following of musicians, artists and captivated spectators, the band's early shows saw them playing with the same abandon as their marketing techniques, a raw blend of future prog, electronic compositions and raw 60's maximum R&B.  Selling out their entire 1000 copy pressing of their self-released EP, Battlehooch became the favorite band of every SF band pursuing what came next; perhaps more than their music, their attitude toward their work and the art of their peers had the Bay Area underground embracing Battlehooch as the way forward.

Often taking to the streets armed with little more than a saxophone, an accordion, a few toms and masks, the band made their presence known with performances all over the city.  Guitarist AJ McKinley explains, "there's a whole system that exists about how people experience music and we want to move against that as much as possible. Instead of having our music only be available in recorded form, and in bars that have a cover charge, we bypass all of that and take our music directly to the streets, cutting out the middle man completely and just throwing it out there. Street performing also has an organically chaotic element to it that you don't find often in shows. any number of strange characters, friends, hoodlums, foes, whatever can come by while we play and it's interesting to see what happens sometimes."

Their debut LP, which was self-recorded and produced in their collective home, reflects their seemingly unending musical palette, equally drawing on Roxy Music glam, big band jazz harmony and noisy spazz freakouts of today's DIY scene.  "Piecechow" careens through nine tracks that heap melody on melody, programmed beats on lo-fi drum loops, huge guitars on top of echoed flutes.  The mix clatters with layers and ideas, then gelling into muscular climaxes that show the band's live prowess and cohesive vision.  The album's final track, "Looks You Can't See" peaks with a yearning, anthemic melody that caps off four minutes of more sounds than are usually found on a band's entire debut LP.

Dizzyingly kaleidoscopic and wildly ambitious, "Piecechow" finds San Francisco's latest group of freak flag flyers ready to introduce themselves to the world.  Maybe after that, the men of BATTLEHOOCH can get to work on those lunar ambitions...

Albums

• Piecechow

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On Tour

No dates posted at this time.