Kites & Crows
July 1st | 11:00pm | $5

From one of the country's largest celebrations of history's most revered storytellers comes a trio of bona fide storytellers in their own right. Ashland, Oregon's Kites & Crowes got their start when the three band members met at the Oregon Shakespeare festival as stagehands and house staff, and quickly found a common thread in their penchant for sweet harmonies and ribbons of stirring melodies, played by whimsical string arrangements including banjo and mandolin. They're not quite as hard to interpret as Shakespeare, but there is a refined and classical quality to their indie folk styling, and a beauty as rich as his centuries-old verse.

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Misner & Smith
July 1st | 10:00pm | $5

An appropriate choice to share a stage with Kites & Crowes (for more than one reason), this charming folk duet likewise met while working on a stage production, and a downright modern one by comparison. This time it was "Woody Guthrie's American Song," and both the mutual love of folk and reverence to Guthrie's down-home, high-plains drifting ways are teeming from their tapestry of sound. At will, the two will switch gears between gentle caressing and deliberately saccharine picking of guitar and upright bass (pure Kate Wolf folk), to dense and up-tempo licks similar to those you might find at a Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds show.

Brooke Parrott
July 1st | 9:30pm | $5

Sometimes it helps to have a little brother who is a complete brat…or so goes the story of Brooke Parrot being sent to piano lessons in the stead of her brother, who threw a tantrum after spending only one week learning the ivories and refusing to continue. From life as a little girl who was known to sing songs into her Playskool recorder to developing her naturally sharp vocals at Berklee College of Music, she hasn't looked back while rumbling a path of down sharp, hip and inventive folk pop.

The Botticellis
July 2nd | 11:00pm | $5

There's something about what the Botticellis do that will constantly keep you guessing, and the more you try to figure it out, the more you'll feel like the last person still on the beach after the sun has gone down. There have always been comparisons to the sunny '60s pop melodies of the Beach Boys, but those fellas were never known to bend melodies and pepper them with art rock harmonies quite like this. Getting from the Beach Boys to the Shins is a journey that usually requires a couple of plane rides – they've gotten there with little more than a rusted jalopy with a busted radio, a few roadside pickups of Rainer Ale, and a dream.

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Yesway
July 2nd | 10:00pm | $5

They're up to something. No doubt about it. Kacey Johansing and Emily Ritz (both formerly of Honeycomb) as "those two girls" in the back of class cooking up some sort of scheme that will inevitably get blamed on the goth kids or the skaters while the two of them simply bat their eyes and ask "who, me?" Of course, that troublemaking is merely in the playful and jubilant brand of uber-hip coffee house indie pop rock that the two of them are brewing up as a duo, landing somewhere between Tegan & Sara, the Bowmans, and Bart Simpson.

The Range Of Light Wilderness
July 2nd | 9:30pm | $5

For a band that (in part) calls Big Sur its home, this would be about as serious or as quick as you'd want to take things. Resist the temptation to light a campfire on the floor when listening to the Range of Light Wilderness (Sophia's wooden deck would not respond well), even though they have the unmistakable feel of a group of friends organizing a backpacking trip into the deep woods, and hobnobbing over what extra weight they can leave behind so they can make sure and carry the guitars.

Not An Airplane
July 8th | 11:00pm | $5

Nick Shattell's pet project has gone through several incarnations in a fairly short amount of time, from Shattell's day's playing solo under the moniker in Modesto, to an acoustic-electric trio plunking out some narcotic Crazy Horse/Wilco inspired Americana rock, to a more stripped down bluegrass-inflected acoustic indie rock quartet splattering his intermittently brooding lyrics with sunny afternoon melodies and saccharine wanderlust. Not An Airplane's newest project, "It Could Just Be This Place," is yet another fork in the road, a concept recording that shifts gears like a four year-old playing an auto racing arcade game at the pizza parlor without ever putting any quarters in.

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The Whiksey & The Devil Chaplain
July 8th | 10:00pm | $5

"Music for the Hopeful and the Heartbroken" is the tagline of this jovial Americana act hailing from Visalia – and it is indeed an accurate one. The old-timey ramble and roll string-fueled blues (at times reminiscent of Old Crow Medicine Show) will at least temporarily allow any broken heart to palpitate for awhile, and make even the most hopeful soul even that much happier. Somewhere between Steve Miller Band's "Swingtown" and Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" lies songs like "Out in the Rain," and the guys from O.C.M.S. might rush past security to hit the stage and get in on jams like "Dolly Girl."

Sioux City Kid
July 8th | 9:30pm | $5

You know those situations where you start listening to a band online, but you feel something went wrong and your iTunes is playing something else instead? If you have any Tom Waits in your collection, you'll be double checking it when queuing up Sioux City Kid. Lead vocalist Jared Griffin has an eerily similar whiskey-soaked bite and growl in his throat, and in the same way as Waits himself, manages to make rocks in a blender sound twistedly beautiful – with the rest of the band backing him with haunting and dense blues rock melodies and deliberate zip in their riffs.

Paleo
July 9th | 11:00pm | $5

David Strackany, better known in musical circles as Paleo, has that rare conversational quality in his voice, where every song feel like little more than a casual sit down in the living room with a cold pale ale and a string of "remember whens." Very little semblance of excessive effort or attempt to impress ever makes an appearance in Paleo's brutally honest repertoire. He is merely the kind of rootless wanderer who has made a friend in every small town or big city in America, shrouded in mystery to all but paying his way into constant couch surfing with warm embraces in every song he sings.

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Garret Pierce
July 9th | 10:00pm | $5

Indie folk troubadour Garrett Pierce's musical race across California is a bit like those dreams where you are trying to run, but your legs will not cooperate and everything feels like it's stuck in slow motion. Swirling from eerily hollow to brain-tinglingly plush, his tunes will take you by the hand and rush you up to a Sierra mountain top to take in a sunset, only to scamp back down across the plains of the Central Valley and then into San Francisco's concrete jungle. But no matter how fast you try to move, it always seems like the journey is collapsing upon itself – but somehow, there's nothing to fear.

J. Irvin Dally
July 9th | 9:30pm | $5

"Daydreams for 19 Years" is the first song on J Irvin Dally's debut album – it's hard to say whether that song title, or the title of the album itself, "Kicking an Alive Horse" is more indicative of this enigmatic young singer. His flying-high vocal pitch and creative plucking are indeed like the soundtrack to one of those daydreams you just can't explain, and he's enough of an original to avoid kicking the proverbial dead horse. The living horse has yet to buck him.

Paper Bird
July 15th | 10:00pm | $5

Where we're going, we don't need roads. Paper Bird may have had the misfortune of being born several decades too late, but somehow they've managed to find a time machine to get them back to days of classic dusty Depression road American junkband ditties and juke joint tomfoolery – and they remembered to bring enough plutonium to power back into a soul-meltingly sweet brand of offbeat indie folk, somewhere between Preservation Hall Jazz Band's heyday of slamming sloe gin fizzes in the backlights of an urban hooch parlor until the sun comes up, and the earliest pure coffeehouse days of a young Ingrid Michaelson, when she just hoped someone would take notice.

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New Heirlooms
July 15th | 11:00pm | $5

Hey, what's the rush? Jesse Lee Miller, formerly of the now defunct Missouri Mule, and the rest of his bandmates don't seem to be ready to jump into the rat race with this new outfit, Davis' own New Heirlooms – that's slightly contrary to tunes like "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead," a porch-parked Americana rock ballad that exudes about as much haste as a trip over to the cooler for a fresh beer. The group's calculatedly subtle and richly alluring and mildly disjointed instrumental daydreams bear resemblance to likes of Murder By Death, and the whispers of Cooper McBean's (of Devil Makes Three) touch behind the boards of their self-titled 7" can't be ignored.

Shelby Earl
July 15th | 9:30pm | $5

Sometimes musical dreams refuse to die, even when they've been interrupted by years in the band booking business, a few failed shots at stardom, and yes, even weekly TPS reports at a corporate music biz job. Sometimes you fall asleep just hoping that that wonderful dream you were having (before the dog started barking and woke you up) will magically start all over – and for Seattle's Shelby Earl, it actually did. Her sharp and mature urban folk delivery reflects years of precise refinement (along the lines of a young Sheryl Crow or Neko Case) without a trace of bitterness that it's taken so long. After so long, it's finally happening now.

Generationals
July 16th | 11:00pm | $5

It's not just a clever name. The songwriting and multi-instrumentalist tandem of Ted Joyner and Grant Widmer have been frolicking through seemingly dissimilar generations of music since they were roommates as teenagers, from late 50's doo-wop and surf guitar riffs to British invasion Beatles pop to the new wave club beats that never were able to be contained by the '80s. The mish-mash of hip-shaking anthems has come to fruition on the group's breakout album "Actor-Caster," a sweatband-soaking batch of twisters that could easily score them slots playing alongside anyone from Dr. Dog to Phoenix.

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Gardens & Villa
July 16th | 10:00pm | $5

It doesn't seem that there are that many places left on Earth where no one really gives a crap - which might explain why it sounds as though Santa Barbara's Gardens & Villa boarded a mythical rocketship and headed for outer-space to start a dance party with the comets and nebulas. Their throw-it-to-the-wind brand of cosmic electro funk and bass-driven indie pop is a cosmic voyage away from the day-to-day, the kind of adventure we used to dream about when we were kids wearing foil helmets and yielding plastic blasters. They'll fly you back to the grassy hills of Central California eventually, but that doesn't mean the party will stop.

Hosannas
July 16th | 9:30pm | $5

A natural tendency with bands that use synthetic beats and electronic stitches like Hosannas does is to overlook the quality of the songwriting that lies beneath. Maybe it's the tired image of "songwriters" being limited to an acoustic guitar, but in a similar vein as Birds & Batteries, the tandem of Brandon and Richards Laws has taken a lushly penned stable of think-piece tunes and intensive ballads with jigsaw lyrics and wrapped them up in the kind of electric circus that could easily serve as the soundtrack to the darkest (weirdest?) points of your average Tarantino flick.

Jeremy Messersmith
July 21st | 10:00pm | $5

Inevitably, there will always be comparisons of fluid singer/songwriter Jeremy Messersmith to the enigmatic Sufjan Stevens – and they're not entirely inaccurate. They both sport a natural sweetness and familiar quality in their honeysuckled vocals, and the leaning toward chamber pop melodies and a dousing of string accompaniment are equally prevalent. Where Messersmith stands apart is in the everyday people quality in his music – he's the kind of guy you could hang out with without having to go behind the proverbial velvet ropes. The connection with anyone kind enough to give a listen to his blues and folk-tinged, enveloping pop melodies is immediate. There is no disconnect, just the soundtrack to your afternoon drive that you're not sure is at its beginning or its end.

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The Lumineers
July 21st | 9:00pm | $5

Give a listen to Denver folk trio the Lumineers' video for "Hey Ho," and there's no way that the visions of the Devil Makes Three aren't going to pop up – in particular Wesley Keith's similarity to a more chilled out version of front man Pete Bernhard. But that's not to say that the Lumineers' ramshackle country folk follows in the footsteps; there's hardly a punk riff to be found. They have a deliberate mellowness to them, where the melodies just seem to pour forth from their instruments in an uncontrollable stream, leaving the three to assemble them into a sunny day soundtrack of saccharine.

Superhumanoids
July 22nd | 11:00pm | $5

Although common are the bands that will claim to, rare are the bands that can legitimately find themselves at home in any of the last five decades of popular music – or at least can find a nice apartment to rent for awhile. Superhumanoids pack it all it: Sunshiney '60s pop harmonies, flips of '70s garage rock, loads of slightly sub-pop new wave electronics from the glory days of the '80s, a little of that alt-pop weirdness that bounced around the '90s, and the never-say-die electro club rock culture of the '00s.

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Rademacher
July 22nd | 10:00pm | $5

Rademacher's reputation as a sprawling, scrappy, lyrically driven, basement band precedes them. The group has been around since 2006 creating songs that manage to transform the depression of double-digit unemployment and pollution into music that is honest, optimistic and even a little soulful at times. Sure, there's a bit of Malkmusian lethargy and wit, but in essence, Rademacher fit the modern indie mold with tom-tom-fueled sunshiny songs that rely heavily on the big glorious hook.

Wooster
July 23rd | 11:00pm | $5

Everybody loves some good in schmaltzy indie-pop ballads vying for iPod commercial fame. Wooster's Brian Gallagher and Caroline Kuspa sing of love and romance, as boy-girl duos do, but they do so with the aid of some smooth and refined 311-like rock-reggae vibes, providing a breath of fresh, cool air during the warm months upon us. The laid-back rhythms of this Santa Cruz outfit are guaranteed to get you on your feet, swaying and dancing and losing yourself in the summer breeze.

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Tha Dirt Feelin'
July 23rd | 10:00pm | $5

For a group so polished with their fusion of genres, a name like Tha Dirt Feelin' seems like a bit of a misnomer. Effortlessly blending elements of rock and hip-hop with old-school soul, these five local guys are out to prove that Davis' funk music scene is a force to be reckoned with. Their weapon of choice: frontman Marque Cass, who possesses the same vibrancy and passionate charm that funk legend Maurice White once brought to his own energetic group, Earth, Wind & Fire.