08 August 2024

SHOTWELL

 



What can you say about SHOTWELL? Jimmy is as ubiquitous to San Francisco's Mission scene as the scene is to San Francisco - starting with X-TAL and STRAWMAN before starting SHOTWELL with Bay Area royalty in 1994. With a cast of former members longer than anyone (save Jimmy) can accurately count, SHOTWELL have popped in and out in various incarnations for longer than I've lived here. I've seen them perform accidentally brilliant sets and I've seen them perform so poorly that I couldn't believe they could even look at each other (much less the audience), but they (read: Jimmy) always do it with complete honestly. These twenty-one songs are perhaps the best collection of material I have ever heard from SHOTWELL. A lifetime on the fringes living life through stumbles, tyrades and genius seems to have manifested with the arguably perfect self titled Shotwell, released nearly three decades after the band was born.

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