[Sound Guy] Jessica Dobson's Connections Run Deep. Plus News From Local Natives and Jeffree Star

Jessica Dobson’s Connections Run Deep
Heard Mentality: The best of the music and culture blog for the week of Sept. 7-13

Paging through the contacts on Jessica Dobson’s cell phone must be like scrolling through the artists on a well-selected iPod. The Long Beach singer/multi-instrumentalist just wrapped a national tour opening for Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band with her project Deep Sea Diver, and she’s now on her next assignment: playing bass and keyboards for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on their current West Coast swing, including a stop at the Fox Pomona Theater that was scheduled for Sept. 15. Yep, this is the same Dobson who toured with Beck as his live guitarist. She’s rivaling Ikey Owens for the title of “most in-demand Long Beach musician.”

“I’ve been a fan of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs for quite some time now, so when they asked me if I could hit the road with them playing bass and keys, a sincere and elated ‘most definitely’ came barreling out of my mouth,” she writes on her MySpace blog.

Deep Sea Diver fans aren’t being left adrift. As Nate Jackson pointed out on Heard Mentality, the band’s Daytrotter Session is now available free to registered members (daytrotter.com). The site hosts minimalist recording sessions with acts who stop by Futureappletree Studio 1 in Rock Island, Illinois; Deep Sea Diver have now joined the ranks of Death Cab for Cutie, Fleet Foxes and Spoon—along with Orange County standouts the Union Line.

Aside from being an exceptional career opportunity, a tour with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs has to be pretty fun, right? For the daily sneak previews of Karen O’s wacky outfits alone?

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Speaking of well-traveled homegrown acts, Local Natives may currently live in LA, but they started here in OC and returned home Sept. 10 for a show at Detroit Bar in Costa Mesa. It’s their last hometown show for a while; from there, they headed up the coast for Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle dates. All of which was just a prelude to the really exciting part: a 19-date European tour starting next week in Oxford. They’re also hitting Dublin, Glasgow, London, Paris, Amsterdam and Berlin—the type of three-week international excursion usually reserved for music megastars or backpacking college students.

Given their recent success, megastardom might not be that far away for Local Natives. They played a successful residency at Spaceland in LA last month and have been working with big shots Red Light Management, whose roster also includes the Decemberists, Alanis Morissette and the Dave Matthews Band.

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Orange County native Jeffree Star is a megastar in a sense, what with the considerable cult of self he has created online. The gender-bending Internet celeb is about to release his first album (because that’s what you do when you’re an Internet celeb), Beauty Killer, on Sept. 22. The day before, Star’s set to perform at Chain Reaction in Anaheim. The album can’t disappoint with track titles like this: “Louis Vuitton Body Bag,” “Love Rhymes With Fuck You” and “Fame & Riches, Rehab Bitches.”

aching@ocweekly.com