By: Chris Greacen - 03/17/2026
Through our label, Blerito Records Doubleplus Alright released a single on all the streaming services today.

Doubleplus Alright is:

Oakland's Doubleplus Alright blasts out bite-sized morsels of high-gain pop tremor. For fans of: hooks and melody festooned with chugging guitars - Doubleplus Alright runs a little hotter than power-pop, a little cooler than *-core. Chris (songwriting, guitar, vocals) & Nik (bass) met long ago in Manatee (SLR 113, 161), Chris plays guitar in blert as well as Elegant Trash, and he runs the annual Song-A-Day songwriting project. Chris also works with the bay area promoter Lee Hoffman’s Bang The Bay as the recording engineer responsible for all live recordings. Mark (drums) has been in a zillion bay area bands.

We find that we sorta fit into alternative rock and punk genres. We say sorta because it’s an imperfect fit: too poppy for punk, too much chugging for power pop… maybe you’ve heard this one before? Presently we choose to flex the freedom that comes from genre-bending music. We’re as happy to play the diy punk backyard show (e.g. Hank’s bbq) as an alt-rock bill at a Bay Area club.

February Burn is:

One good example of how we flex our genre misfit is February Burn - a song that Chris wrote as part of his Song-A-Day project (http://songaday.netscrap.com). It’s a slow and steady crescendo that starts with acoustic guitar and voice and blooms with explosive drums, guitars, and bass. This mirrors Chris’ writing style as song ideas often arrive while strumming in his living room. Then as the ideas develop, the band digs in.

Warm up the good old band
before it gets out of hand
We’ll make a brand new start,
something you can’t tear apart.
The February chill,
let your heart do what it will.
It takes a tender hand
and someone who understands
how terrible the curse
you cannot reverse.

Oh the February Burn!
Let your heart do what it yearns.
Oh the February Burn!

Why is February Burn so damn short?

A good question. Blame Chris. He’s been writing very spare but rocking pop songs for a while. It started with blert’s Leave The Lights On and continued through much of his Song-A-Day writing.

The idea is this: write a killer melody and just enough arrangement to get the idea across, to get a foot tapping, to get that hook deep into the ears of the listener - then booom! It’s done, move on. Enjoy it for what it was.

Tony Molina was an inspiration, as was the SST catalog from our youth: concision, brevity, leanness.

The thing to keep in mind is that there’s a LOT more where this came from. Expect more short-form epic songs from Doubleplus Alright.

February Burn cover art is:

A detail of a collage called Transmission by the master of mail art and collage, Serse Luigetti. Chris befriended Serse through a facebook group focusing on asemic art. Chris feels that Serse’s art captures the mystery, beauty, and confusion of modern life.

Serse’s art is used with permission by the artist.

More about Serse Luigetti:

• https://www.redfoxpress.com/dada-luigetti.html
• https://artistmatter.crosses.net/serse-luigetti/
• https://theindianapolisreview.com/featured-artist-serse-luigetti/
• https://gammm.org/tag/serse-luigetti/

By: Chris Greacen - 03/04/2026

Lee Hoffman's Bang The Bay books rock and punk shows at venues around the bay area. Between his Solar Van Saturdays at Point Emery and Rocky's Beach near the bay and his Wendesday night residencies at the Ivy Room in Albany and now the Fab Mab in San Franciso, Lee books MANY bands per month.

For the past year and a half, I've been helping to capture and mix recordings of all the Bang The Bay shows. This involves connecting a computer to the venue's mixer via usb to capture good quality mult-track recordings of each performance. Afterward, I take these recordings and mix them much like one would mix a studio recording - balancing the instruments and voices to yield a rocking record of the show. I'll write another post about the work that goes into mixing these recordings.

Many bands, many shows

Lee is a busy guy and connects with a ridiculous number of acts based in or coming through the bay area. In the year and a half that I've been working on this I've had the privelidge of hearing about 200 acts and about 340 sets (many bands have played several times). A typical show at the Ivy Room will have 6 or 7 bands, each playing about a 35 minute set. Lee books two-to-three shows per month at the Ivy Room, plus one at the Fab Mab, and one or two Solar Van shows each month.

I'll try to keep this spreadsheet updated as we produce more recordings.

A few of these acts are solo singer/songwriter types, but most are full bands - punk rock, alternative rock types. This has allowed me to see and hear a serious swath of the bay area music scene. You'll be happy to know that the bay area scene is thriving - chock full of great bands. I've been lucky to hear many of them.

What's it mean?

For a booker who aims to put on live events, this is kind of a game changer for their model. Live shows are really fun, but they only last a moment in time. Sure everyone has a small recording and movie studio in their phone that could capture the event. A phone-quality recording at least. As nice as these devices are the quality is of the audio they capture is still just so-so.

A good recording of a live performance can bring a good moment to a much larger audience. It's a much more permanent and tangible product of something that takes a lot of work. Bands will practice for many hours and spend time promoting their appearance before packing up their gear and heading to the club for their moment of glory. They try to bring their best. It would be really cool to have a high quality recording that captures that moment.

This playlist is embedded above features many of Lee's live recordings. Or view this on YouTube.

All this happens with the each bands permission of course. There's a high degree of partnership between band, booker, venue, and audience. This only works because everyone wants it to work.

Compilation in the works

At this point with 300+ recordings we're ready to start to share more. We'll be putting a best-of compilation together. We could slice a collection like this in a couple ways, but at this point we're thinking that we will start with a 'best of Ivy Room 2024/2025' and see where that takes us.

I'll write a few more blog posts covering what makes a good recording, what makes a good performance, and why the bay area is seriously amazing.

Stay tuned!

PS the photo collage at the top features these bands: (all shot by me)

1. Tektonic, Sparkle Plenty, Super Apes, Nick from Phantoms Forever, Louiza, The Rinds
2. Ultrafiend X, Stone Dog, Ultra Sounds, Sacripolitical, The Diversions, Ansible
3. Right Proper, Lost Cosmos, Out Of The Ring, Angry Aztecs, Can't, Baltic Kiss, Sleepers A.D.
4. Family Obligation, Dark Satellite, Somebunny Else, Fancy Dad, The Hajj, Davinski And The Haute Pantzz, Cuva Bimo

By: Chris Greacen - 03/27/2025
I was bummed to see that 18f got the axe as part of DOGE's cleanup of "radical leftist" government waste (sarcasm). The loss of 18f is a shame because their mission was in fact related to efficiency and value - they were striving to operate in a way that yields reliable, usable software. Software that serves a purpose. In this case, making government software more reliable and more accessible.

This way of looking at software is critical today as more and more of our government services are delivered through some digital channel. We learned hard lessons about the state of software development in the early days of the ACA. It was an actual mess, armies of expensive consultants built bloated systems that weren't reliable, weren't able to talk to each other, and ultimately didn't serve the people whose medical coverage was at stake.

18f sought to reverse the trend in gov-tech by deploying small teams to work with modern tools and techniques to understand the users, their needs or jobs, and craft just enough software to get the job done.

Were they successful? Kinda. They were able to apply their approach to a few high profile systems and ended up helping many people.

One thing I really appreciated about the group was the way they captured their practice in a set of guides. These guides became the gold standard in some gov-tech circles. In fact during Lab Zero's entry into the ADPQ pool, the California Department of Technology required that all entries refer to the 18f playbooks and guides. You can see an example of how this works in Lab Zero's git repo where we captured an example of how 18f plays apply to the craft of software product development.

There are some real basic common-sense concepts that show up here:

• understand your users and what they need
• think about the entirety of your users experience
• keep it simple
• work, build, deliver incrementally, iteratively
• have a leader on your team
• use modern open source tools

But you know what? There are many places where these ideas are still exotic and rare. With some exceptions gov-tech is still one of those places.

So when it became clear that 18f was in the crosshairs of the DOGE-purges, I decided to grab the guides and make a private copy.

Take a peek: https://greacen.com/media/guides/

Need a usability test script example to help get started with user testing? There's a guide for that. Need to lay some ground rules for how your engineers will handle incident responses? There's a guide for that.

Is my hand-made scraper-script mirror/archive special? I thought it was for a bit, but then I came across 18f's git repo (still not deleted!) and saw that they've made it easy for you to grab it. Tip: grab it.

Similarly, Lab Zero put a lot of energy into< creating resources that describe how we work. We use these to align with our clients or sometimes teach them something to help refine the way they work (want to know more about Speclets? let's talk!).

Teams that share skills and know-how for highly complex topics like delivering quality software products are worth paying attention to. So I pour one out for 18f.

By: Chris Greacen - 11/18/2024
Doubleplus Alright is psyched to have their song Feelin' It included in a fantastic compilation that just arrived on all the streaming services. This Is A Compliation Vol. One includes songs from some of the best independent punk, rock, and alternative bands playing in the bay area right now.

If you want to know the state of music in the bay area today listen to every bit of this thing asap.

Through Lee's Solar Van Saturday and Bang The Bay events, Doubleplus Alright has been able to see and get to know folks in a bunch of great bands: Family Obligation, Dark Satellite, CuVa Bimö, Fuzz Kit, Delta Wave, The Strange Ones, and of course Elegant Trash. Great music all around of course, but more importantly great people. Worth following all of these bands.

Couple notes on our song - we recorded our song Feelin' It at our home in Oakland Music Complex with our previous drummer Jackson. This song is from the first batch of Doubleplus tunes that Chris wrote back when we formed the band (contemporary with Um, No, Turn It Around, Bye Bye Bye). Jackson turned it up several notches on this tune with his background vocals and a killer drum fill at the very end.

Hoping to share much more music with you.

++

By: Chris Greacen - 08/09/2024
In the late stage of the pandemic, I was looking for ways that Doubleplus Alright could play a show. Our extended band-family was contending with compromised immunity, essential healthcare employment, and a general desire to avoid getting covid. There weren't too many venues hosting shows at that point so there weren't many options.

Eventually I came across a guy who installed a solar charger and batteries in his van in order to host outdoor shows on a beach in Berkeley right on the SF Bay. He booked about 6 bands on occasional Saturday afternoons and he called it Solar Van Saturdays.

I went to a couple Solar Van Saturday shows. I met the bands, I met their fans, and I met Lee. Lee is also the lead singer of his band Elegant Trash who plays every one of these shows.

Doubleplus Played a couple of the Solar Van shows as well as helping Lee to bring his regular festival to the Baltic Kiss club in Richmond. (Note: we're playing Sunday evening 8/18/2024, be there!).

At some point along the line I got to know everyone in Elegant Trash and learned a little about what they were working on - more recordings, a world tour (Brazil in 2024!), as well as balancing this with the rest of their life.

As it turned out, I have some of the skills that the band needed to get unblocked with their recording. I saw a chance to pitch in and help with some of the recording and mixing of Elegant Trash's next record and jumped on it.

It's out TODAY. Check out Taking over All of the Land on Spotify:

I'm really psyched about how this came out and how it represents the band at this stage. If you're curious, I'd love to tell you (or show you) all about it - how it was recorded, how we mixed it.