Rating: 
If you haven’t heard of the riffy surf rock of Surfer Blood, where the hell have you been? No really, these guys have been to at least two SXSW’s and put out a killer first album. Well, if you haven’t heard of them before, they are a four part, all male band hailing from West Palm Beach Florida, who pack all the balmy weather of Florida into a neat sound package to be sent all over the world. I guess if you’re still a stranger to this band, Tarot Classics is an excellent place to start.
The first song, “I’m Not Ready,†comes out kicking and rocking, with hooking guitar parts and the gravelly vocals of John Paul Pitts’s familiar yells. Instantly, you’re bobbing your head along with that bubbling bass underneath and grooving along to the playful matching of vocals with guitar. At 4:24, this first song does go other places than what makes up the first minute of the song, which is excellent. Surfer Blood refuses to fall into that realm of already-done-before, and somehow manages to keep things fresh. Towards the very end of the song, they drop into this old-time swoony, beat, complete with backing ‘oohh,’ that brings the track out of, and then back into, its hazy garage rock zone that this group are the kings of.
 “Miranda,†is up second on this EP, and it comes across as Surfer Blood’s stab at a track devoted to a lady, and the chorus consists of just her name repeated over and over. While not as interesting as the first track, it does provide for a change in tempo. This second song explores more of a classic rock jam, one that you could hear echoes of from other bands. Yet, while it does go places other bands go, Surfer Blood manages to put their own flair on it, with the backing vocals giving it that extra dimension.
 The third and fourth songs are also excellent jams that add to Surfer Blood’s listening catalog. Both of them, well all of these songs, serve exactly as an EP should: as a lovely appetizer. These tastes of new material from this band make me hungry for their next full-length release album and if this is any testament to the merit of the next album, we should not be in for a disappointment.
The last several years have left me with a pretty solid impression of what to expect with San Francisco bands, so I was surprised when I started checking out the latest EP from The Bilinda Butchers, Goodbyes. Â If you can catch the allusion in the band’s name, then surely you’ll think you’ve got them locked-down, but they’re not out to blaze the trails of their namesake…though you could possibly throw the haze/gaze word around a bit. Â I like the rhythmic electronic of this track, with it’s vocals immersed beneath the song a bit. Â This definitely gives me a different idea of what San Fran is all about.
