Shinobu: “Hamilton Avenue Manic” from Tangram Sailors/Ashtray Sea

Shinobu stared in 2002 and have conspired with some of the greatest underground punk bands of the 2000′s including Bomb the Music Industry! (with whom they’ve shared guitar/trombone/keyboard player, Matt Keegan), Andrew Jackson Jihad, and 銀杏BOYZ (pronounced “Ging Nang Boys”). Though championed and celebrated by their fans, Shinobu have stayed pretty underground since its inception, though they’ve been getting a good bit of press for their recent LP, 10 Thermidor.

Hamilton Avenue is a street in western San José, which serves a brief stint as a major street. In the 5 miles that make it up, it outsets from a complex near a mall, curves this way and that, adds and drops lanes, crosses railroad tracks and rivers, intersects major streets, offers exits and entrances to Highway 17, passes the eBay headquarters, and then suddenly changes names to Pine St before petering out. From personal experience, I can vouch that it can be a crowded, pushy, and anxious experience, all coded into one of tens of thousands of suburban streets, outwardly unassuming but inwardly deranged.

(Arguably, Hamilton Avenue is more in Campbell than San Jose, but we’ll get to that mess at a later date.)