Kandur at Bottom of the Hill
A few days before local Bay Area band Kandur was set to open a show at Bottom of the Hill, I got a message from frontman Ilkercan Kandur about the show. Hell yeah, I’ll be there.
I’d met Ilkercan a little over a month prior at Balanced Breakfast, a music industry mixer here in the Bay. I wasn’t familiar with his music, but I love the local scene here and I love Bottom of the Hill. So I was pretty stoked to finally go check them out.
They were on the bill with Wilderado, originally from Texas but currently based out of LA, and a Virginia-based band Super Doppler, formerly known as Major and the Monbacks.
Kandur was definitely my favorite of the night. I really enjoyed them and I’d totally go see them again. They’ve got kinda classic rock’n’roll vibes, which I’m almost surprised I don’t hear so much these days. It’s a timeless kinda sound, not trying too hard to fit into a genre box.
And they were super talented too. I say that as someone who doesn’t understand guitars at all, but ya know. They seemed talented to me. I was impressed by every solo I heard.
Me: I’ll only record the songs I really like
Also me: Records almost every song
Welp, enjoy all my footage!
They covered Audioslave’s “Like a Stone” in honor of the late Chris Cornell.
If you can’t tell by the name, Ilkercan isn’t American. He’s Turkish. But his accent completely disappears when he sings, which is kinda weird but also really cool.
Sidenote because I can’t not be real with you: I wanted to say something cheesy about how we all speak the same music language, but I mean… he speaks English and was singing in English, so that doesn’t make sense like at all. Cheesy doesn’t work for me. Carry on.
Next up was Wilderado. They were pretty good as well. They had a similar rock’n’roll vibe, but some songs were more chill and slow while others were the kind of upbeat jams I tend to prefer. I could almost hear the Texas roots in their music if that makes any sense at all. (Please don’t ever expect me to make sense. I’m just saying words.)
They said they were playing a bunch of new songs, but as a newcomer to the band in general, it made no difference to me. However, there were quite a few fans in the room who came just to see them, unlike me.
Girl: “How did you find out about this band?”
Me: “I didn’t. I was here to see the first band.”
Story of my life, basically.
There was a girl from the East Coast there specifically to see Wilderado, which makes my little fan-loving heart all sorts of happy.
The girl who asked how I discovered them apparently found them on Spotify. I’m still not sure about my feelings on Spotify. I don’t like the whole artists-only-get-1/32-of-a-penny-per-play thing, and I hate the ads and how you can’t play specific songs you want to hear when you want to hear them, and also I’m just a CD junkie, so the majority of my soul says no to Spotify. But I do really like that it gives people new music to listen to and introduces them to artists they may never have found otherwise. So for that, I’m thankful.
Last on the bill was Super Doppler. I’ll be honest and say I kind of tuned out by this point. I was tired and ready to go home (when did I become such an old lady?!), but I did want to catch at least a bit of their set, and it unfortunately wasn’t enough to make me want to stay and finish it out. It was just really different. They were more 60s-sounding psychedelic rock. Not bad by any means. They were pretty fun despite how I might unintentionally be making them sound, but just not really my thing. I still liked them enough to take multiple videos.
