Tremor Low

#5 Dominant Legs (San Francisco)
Saturday, February 4th @ The Independent, SF

#4 Tremor Low (Oakland)
Friday, February 3rd @ Cafe Du Nord, SF

#3: A Tribute To The Smiths/Morrissey: This Charming Band (San Francisco)
Friday, February 3rd @ The Blank Club, San Jose

#2: The Trims (San Jose)
Friday, February 3rd @ Bottom of the Hill

#1: An Exclusive DJ By: Lyrics Born (Berkeley) w/ DJ Franchise (San Francisco)
Hosted In The Den At The Fox Theater, Oakland (FREE) Friday, February 3rd

- Live 105 Radio - Miles the DJ

Tremor Low were at home Friday night. The four piece band had a decent amount of beats to get the crowd moving, but when you’re the opening band, that can be quite hard at times.

Tremor Low

Tambourine master is what you should call the lead singer of Holy Rolling Empire. His dance moves are a sight to see. The band hails from Tucson, but that didn’t stop them from having all of their friends in the crowd singing and dancing along to their catchy songs.

Holy Rolling Empire

When ones goes to a show, they expect to see dancing, movement…or something. If you’re the lead singer of Mister Loveless, that just doesn’t happen. Yeah their music is better than decent, but if the lead singer looks like he’s not even into it, then why would I be?

Mister Loveless


Mister Loveless

The Hundred Days are an absolute must-see; they pretty much sound like if Franz Ferdinand and OK Go had a love child (in a good way). One thing’s for sure, you can’t be shy going to their shows. It becomes quite inevitable to sing-a-long to songs titled, “Sex U.” - The Owl Mag

Oakland Indie Music Examiner
May 13, 2011




In March of this year, former Bauhaus frontman Peter Murphy played a show at San Francisco’s Mezzanine. During the show, a member of Oakland, Calif.-based band Tremor Low, attempted to throw a copy of its newest single, “Peter Murphy is Dead,” onto the stage. Unfortunately, the attempt failed.
“We threw a CD. Like, we threw it hard, on the stage,” lead singer Don Bellenger said. “And it looks like it was going onto the stage, but the way it spins, it kinda doubled back and hit someone in the head. It was too bad.”
Although it didn’t go according to plan, the band still hopes that Murphy will someday hear the song, the name of which is likely a play on the Bauhaus song, "Bela Lugosi's Dead." However, contrary to what the song name might suggest, the band doesn’t wish any ill to Mr. Murphy. Instead, they simply hope that when his time does come, they can take his place as the kings of goth-rock
Tremor Low, a self-described post-punk new-wave band, has been in existence since early 2009, when three of the four members connected through Craigslist. Originally, just guitarist/lead singer Bellenger and drummer Fabian Paredes were members, but after a couple practices together, they both acknowledged the need for a bass player. Brian Grupé was the first bassist who auditioned, and all three immediately knew they had something special together.
Not long after its inception, the band also added Bellenger’s wife, Jen, to the mix.
“Originally I tried to play keyboards and guitar, and that was a really stupid idea,” Don said. “I think that lasted for two or three shows. And then we brought Jen in just to kind of fill in live.”
The arrangement worked well, and the keyboards rounded out the band’s sound, so Jen became a permanent member.
“Now all our songs are super synth-heavy,” Don said.
Although he had a handful of songs he’d written before the band formed, Don said the songwriting process now involves everyone.
“We still play those songs but we really re-tooled them once we got together,” he said. “[And] each [new] song kind of comes to life differently.”
Where, in the beginning, he and Grupé each used to write songs at home and then present them to the band, now the process is much more collaborative, with songs being written during practice.
“We don’t really jam much but we try to at least be constructive when we do,” Don said.
“Sometimes, we will switch instruments,” Grupé added, referencing himself and Don. “Just because we play really differently.”
And while Paredes stays behind the drumset, the other members agree he is the most vocal drummer they’ve ever worked with, because he’s not afraid to speak up about things he likes and dislikes.
While the band has been together for just beyond the two-year mark, it's only in the past year that the musicianship of the band has stepped up a notch, with the members working hard to be more than a band that plays together for fun. However, each member lives for different moments.
“Everything has its place, so I enjoy the writing part of it and the show part,” Grupé said.“I don’t like always rehearsing for shows. That can be kind of strenuous because we’re just nit-picking.”
“I like when we first get a song together and it’s really exciting,” Don said, mentioning that two of these songs will be debuted at the band’s next show. “I just love playing them.”
The whole band loves to play shows, but practicing and writing songs can sometimes be frustrating to them. This is because the one thing the band members tend to disagree on is what’s more important in a song – the overall mood or the specific details.
“But that’s why we started recording ourselves,” Paredes said, explaining that Tremor Low records each practice and then listens to that recording together.
“That’s probably the most valuable thing we’ve done this year,” Don added.
Listening to practices together allows the members to hear the music outside of themselves, and make decisions on the direction of a particular song. Meanwhile, the input of each person is considered equally.
“This is definitely more of a democracy,” Jen said. “Nobody’s afraid to share [his or her] opinion and I think that helps the creative process in writing the songs and making them sound good. The songs don’t all sound the same.”
To date, Tremor Low has one seven-song self-recorded release, “The Lead Balloon EP,” to its name.
The songs themselves span the entire tenure of the group, with some being the first demos recorded, while others are a more recent representation of the band’s sound.
“It’s kind of all over the place,” Don said. “[But] it was such an effort, such a labor.”
This labor is constitutive to what the entire Tremor Low philosophy is, which is something that transcends simply being in a band with other people.
"We hang out when we're not playing," Jen said, of the group's close-knit relationship. "It's just become part of our lives."
Tremor Low plays Café du Nord tomorrow night with Stripmall Architecture/Halou and Excuses for Skipping. The show begins at 9 p.m., tickets are $12, and the show is 21+.


Examiner.com Tremor Low: "it's just become a part of our lives" - Oakland indie music - The Examiner

Pop quiz, ’80s goth-nerds: What happens when you mix Bauhaus with Specimen and Christian Death, add a sprinkle of Sisters of Mercy, a dash of Clan of Zymox, and garnish it with, I don’t know… Interpol? A desperate need for Prozac, no doubt; but also the shadowed synthy tunes of Oakland’s Tremor Low.
This four-piece likes to turn out the lights and get in touch with the darkness… or at least that’s how singer-guitarist Don Bellenger tracked his haunting vocals for new EP Kingmaker. With recordings at Hollywood’s Bright Street Recorders and the pitch black ambiance of producer-engineer Jamie Hill’s (Jens Lekman, Nada Surf) shoe closet-vocal booth, five mood-tastic tracks were born: the fourth of which, “Like Birds,” we’ve secured as an exclusive download for your post-punk goth consumption.
Come get your dance ‘n darkness on at the EP release show this Friday, February 3rd at Café du Nord as Tremor Low supports Sea Lions and Jeremy Jay! TL is up first, so plan your outfits now and get thee to du Nord for doors at 8:30pm (show at 9:00pm, $10). - The Owl Mag

Tremor Low is an Oakland, California based four-piece who play strident Post-Punk Goth inflected music. The group’s second EP Kingmaker (released today, January 17, 2012), showcases their diverse musical backgrounds, propensity for dynamic song craft and insistent emotional conveyance. Kingmaker will be supported by a release show at San Francisco’s Cafe Du Nord on Feb 3rd. The band will also be featured as Rasputin Records’ band of the week at the time of their release.

Kingmaker by Tremor Low

Tremor Low’s Dave Weckl trained drummer Fabian Paredes broke onto the scene with Los Mocosos (Six Degrees Records) and toured extensively in the US, Canada, Europe and Australia opening for artists like Carlos Santana, Michael Franti, Ozomatli and Meshell Ndegeocello among other notables. Bassist Brian Grupé has twelve years of classical training playing Carnegie Hall and touring Europe before the age of twenty. Keyboardist Jennifer Bellenger studied at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and was a member of the ensemble choir for San Francisco Symphony’s Grammy Award-winning “The Firebird, The Rite of Spring, Persephone” by Stravinsky, directed by Michael Tilson Thomas. Singer-guitarist Donald Bellenger is a self-taught polymath whose early exposure to The Cure’s “Love Song” cassette single sparked a love affair with the sound that would eventually build and define Tremor Low.

“The goal was never to become a Goth band or to reinvigorate a genre. The purpose of Tremor Low will always be to write moody songs that defy any easy categorization,” says singer Don Bellenger.


The group’s underlying philosophy has been to strip a song to its bare essential structure and to tell a story in the most efficient way possible–a technique learned from the late Jay Reatard and countless other punk icons. Each Tremor Low song is meant to be an immutable work which can only function in its presented form. Even without vocals and lyrics, the mood of the song must be communicated through its individual parts.

The loud parts of Kingmaker were done at Bright Street Recorders in Hollywood, California, but to capture and evoke the mood Tremor Low was looking for on the record, producer-engineer Jamie Hill (Jens Lekman, Chris Bathgate) locked the band in his house for three days to do vocals in his wife’s shoe closet-vocal booth. To get the darkest vocal performance possible, lead singer Don Bellenger turned out the lights and sat in the pitch black booth for hours, eliminating distractions and absorbing the intensity of the songs. After each take, Hill and bass player Brian Grupé would scream into the talkback mic, “DARKER! DO IT DARKER!” The end result was the impassioned tracks that became Kingmaker EP. - Rasputin Records