So Blue: Still Flyin' at Ocean Beach.

Having had dozens of synth-pop bands who ape the sounds of the '80s for one long, lame "ironic" joke, there's now another good one doing it for serious. And S.F.'s Still Flyin' even started as a gag -- with band leader Sean Rawls assembling more than a dozen rotating friends to play in what was envisioned as a joke reggae band, complete with its own festival held on a cruise ship (or, fantastically, under the sea).

But there's almost nothing jokey about the band's second full-length album, On a Bedroom Wall, which comes out today: Assembling lean, danceable pop out of the familiar '80s-era tools -- chorus-drenched guitars, pastel synths, Rototom rolls -- Still Flyin' turn out 10 songs that feel indebted to the John Hughes decade, but not quite of it. Tunes like "Big Trouble in Little Alabama" and "Spirits" exude an adolescent naivete cast in bittersweet tones. The sense of hopeless yearning -- "I don't wanna need a jacket in July," Rawls whines on the final track, like a true San Franciscan -- is so blunt that it's disarming. Still Flyin' capture you with their charm. And the songs are positively addictive, especially first singles "Travelin' Man" and "Spirits":

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Remember all the hand-wringing last year over the so-called disappearance of protest music? As the Occupy movement hit its peak, capturing the attention of the country, commentators and older musicians were accusing contemporary artists of failing to grapple with the major struggles of their time in song.

The accusation was dumb -- any Google-savvy person looking for new protest music shouldn't have much trouble finding it -- but it was also revealing. Protest music hasn't had a prominent place in our pop landscape, but that may be because it's often more satisfying to make than to listen to. It feels great to sit down with an acoustic guitar and sing your indictment to the Man, but good luck finding lots of people who want to listen to that, much less pay you for it. And as a general rule, songs filled with positive-minded cliches about widely agreed-upon political and social principles (the worst caricature of protest music, but still a valid description of lots of it) tend not to be very interesting.

Today's Occupy This Album -- a 99-track omnibus of protest songs from unheard-of drum circle members to Joan Baez to Thee Oh Sees -- illustrates this perfectly. Like the movement itself, Occupy This Album is sprawling, inconsistent, occasionally deluded, and sometimes devastatingly incisive.

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Billie Joe and his shagadelic haircut.

So what is Green Day up to in a world where Obama is president (for a little while, at least) and the U.S. is extricating itself from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Well, besides playing surprise shows in small venues like S.F.'s Mezzanine, and bringing the Broadway musical version of American Idiot back to San Francisco, it seems Billie Joe Armstrong and Co. have been working on a new studio album -- and finding inspiration in the bedroom.

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Hunx

Without a doubt, Hunx and His Punx's Seth Bogart is one of the most colorful characters in the Bay Area's underground rock scene. So we're excited to learn that next year, Bogart plans to release his very first solo album, Hairdresser Blues, under the simple name Hunx.

The title is of course a reference to Down at Lulu's, the hair salon and vintage boutique that Hunx owns on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. But there's more to it than that: "Somebody once described my music as 'Hairdresser Pop,'" Bogart says in a press release about the new album. "I don't know what that sounds like. I do know that it seems appropriate in describing the sound of this record."

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SF's The Sandwitches

There is something unassuming yet special about the 7-inch, that tiny disc of vinyl only big enough to hold a song on each side. They spin faster, they cost little, yet they wield all the magic of a real record. They are, in other words, the perfect format for a post-album collectible release, and that's probably why we see two of our favorite San Francisco bands -- Girls and the Sandwitches -- releasing new 7-inches in a year when they've both dropped new albums.

Folk/Americana trio the Sandwitches dropped their new single, "The Pearl" yesterday." The song is a low-key meandering haunt recorded by Mike Donovan of Sic Alps. And since it's the Sandwitches, there are harmonies to spare, layered over a dragging pace that feels of another time.

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Tycho is the moniker of San Francisco-based electronic musician and graphic designer Scott Hansen, who has a lovely new album called Dive out digitally today. Warm, hazy, and atmospheric, Dive is like a summer afternoon daydream on disc -- a smooth, potent disassociation from time, place, and reality that is exceedingly pleasant. As would befit a man who is as much into visuals as sound -- Hansen is the noted graphic designer ISO50 -- Dive is a vivid watercolor of casual beats, soft textures, and long, slowly arcing synthesizer melodies that bubble up and roll around in the music. It feels like are worlds in here, worlds that are nicer and more hopeful than the one we occupy most of the time. So Adult Contemporary haters beware: This is extremely soothing electronic music. But we mean no disrespect by saying Dive is maybe the best album to wake up to we've heard in a while. Stream it via Spin after the jump, and get soothed in person when Tycho headlines the Independent (with a full band!) on Dec. 10.

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Who remembers the old days of Halloween in the Castro? It wasn't that many years ago -- only the mid-2000s -- that thousands of revelers of all genders, orientations, and shades of nudity would gather in the city's most fun-loving hood for a massive street party. Castro Halloween parties were huge and wild enough to go down as legendary -- they helped define the area's spirit over the years.

Then, after four stabbings one year and a massive shooting that wounded nine people another year, the big, official party died.

But S.F. singer-songwriter Chuck Prophet remembers. For his new upcoming album about San Francisco, Temple Beautiful (Out Jan. 24 on Yep Roc), Prophet wrote an ode of sorts to Castro Halloween parties the way they used to be, while sadly noting the violence that caused the city to stop the event. His first line is, "When the shots rang out/ And two men died/ You took off your mask just to see me cry."

The song itself is a gleaming, breezy rocker, anchored by Prophet's everyman voice. We're happy to premiere it this Halloween on All Shook Down -- so download the song and read Prophet's lyrics after the jump.

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"As hated as a band can be?"

Music criticism is as much an affliction as an occupation -- especially these days, it's far more reliable as a sickness than a paycheck. While critics vary in their particulars of taste, most share a generally similar set of symptoms, leading to widespread prejudice in their ranks against certain artists, sounds, and fads. Things Music Critics Hate is an occasional series that will attempt to diagnose and explain the broadly shared beliefs and biases that shape the landscape of music criticism -- and also to discover what qualities (if any) professional observers generally agree make music good.

Is there any band more hated among music writers than Coldplay? Probably not. The British quartet is a more favored target among rockscribes even than Train. The written dismissals have been accumulating for years, and have found a cause for revival with today's release of Coldplay's new album, Mylo Xyloto. In advance of the new album, the New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones -- the pop critic most music writers wish they were -- indulged himself in a full-fledged (and hilarious) investigation of his negative views toward the band, exploring why "it's hard to deal with vexingly adequate music." Prejudices abound, but the new music itself has equally disappointed writers: The L.A. Times' Randall Roberts gave the album a tepid response -- "Coldplay is an expert at pleasure or at least poking into pockets of emotion without disturbing anything too much" -- and 1.5 stars out of four possible. Entertainment Weekly awarded it 2.5 stars out of five, asking whether the band members were tired of themselves. (Of course, Rolling Stone found cause for a 3.5 out of five, but we must take that with a grain of salt.)

Yet, as many of these reviews take pains to point out, Coldplay is wildly popular. Its shows pack arenas, and its records sell like half-off Viagra -- more than 15 million albums were unloaded in the U.S. alone since 2000. So why such a vast chasm between what fans adore and critics loathe?

Here's why: Coldplay to a music critic is like a Toyota Camry to a motoring enthusiast, or Applebee's to a foodie -- it's a denial of the artform, an abdication of nearly every interesting potential of the medium. And the search for new and interesting music is the very thing that keeps critics from selling out and getting better-paying jobs as high-school janitors.

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After months of waiting, a big thud came: The Great Hyperbole Engine of 2011, aka Lou Reed and Metallica's collaborative album Lulu, is streaming on the project's website right now.

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The Jealous Guys

Here's yet another promising release from rising S.F. rappers the Jealous Guys: It's the Audiobook EP, a four-track collection of dimly ethereal beats capped with some of the more vivid rhymes we've heard -- especially from an S.F. outfit: "Headed to Pier 39/ Start an Arcade Fire that turn Tron into Phoenix ash/ My soul rise fuck a gravity overcast/ In sync with graffiti crying me a river/ Under the overpass, at last," goes a verse on "Genesis."

This collection of songs is what we might call cinematic -- a step or two more abstract than the hoes-and-blunts street hip-hop we get a lot around here. (Although its lyrics deal a lot with S.F. -- there's even a song called "Miss San Francisco.") The EP seems to sprout more dimensions with repeated listens, too; check it out after the jump.

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