Mark Matos and Os Beaches

Comments (0) By Jason P. Woodbury Thursday, Aug 5 2010

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So, Mark Matos is on tour somewhere in the American Midwest, gets real far out on an LSD bender, decides to quit his buzz band Campo Bravo and move away from the “tweaker dens” of Tucson, Arizona, where they’ve been steadily gaining attention for years. Returning to the Bay Area where he grew up, he puts together a rag tag bunch of indie-hippies called Os Beaches, and gets down to the business of peddling a soulful, electric piano lead blend of styles he dubs “acid gospel.” It’s the kind of story that sounds custom baked in some press release kitchen, but listening to the sun baked jangle of “Imaginary, Winnipeg,” from Os Beaches debut “Words of the Knife,” it’s hard not to get swept up in the mythology of it all. Instrumental tune “Tras-os-Montes” might be the record’s best track, a dusty, reverb-laden excursion to those magical places where the desert, the highway, a stack of your uncle’s old Dead bootleg tapes and two nation’s borders mingle, the kind of old-weird America you see in Wim Wenders’ films, a rattling guitar feeding back in the distance, lending unskeptical credence to ridiculous genre names, San Franciscan acid droppers and true believers.
Wed., Aug. 11, 9:30 p.m., 2010