The REVERB Festival Class of 2009

From The Maldives to Visqueen, Spaceman to Champagne Champagne, here's a look at the 60+ local bands performing at Seattle Weekly's Reverb 2009 on October 3. For comprehensive coverage of the festival -- including ticket and venue information -- visit SeattleWeekly.com/reverbfestival.

Leif Totusek and Freestyle Candela
In spite of Seattle’s large East African community, live Afropop bands tend to be hard to find even when you’re looking for them. Leif Totusek and Freestyle Candela are the needle in Seattle’s indie-rock haystack. Totusek, who’s been in the band for 15 years, plays an African guitar style called soukous that originated in the 1950’s in Zaire (currently the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Soukous make the same shimmery, arpeggiated guitar sound used by Vampire Weekend on the band’s critically-acclaimed 2008 album. Totusek, however, has gone further than lifting a few soukous riffs and adding them to pop songs. In a past interview, he describes traveling to London to study soukous from expat African masters, and when doing he writes his own songs, he’s gone as far as to write lyrics in English and have them translated to Lingala, a language from the Congo. At live shows, his playing seems to flow in all directions simultaneously: rising and falling, melting from one chord to the next, like miniature fireworks displays constantly exploding with color. Volterra, 8 p.m. Note by ERIK NEUMANN