hearing aid

YES, PLEASE
11.06 REVEREND HORTON HEAT/
NASHVILLE PUSSY/ RECKLESS
KELLY @ LINCOLN THEATRE
In a world that whirls with change, the Reverend’s
consistently remained one of the finest guitarists and
live performers within earshot. Spiritual kin to neighbors Dex Romweber and Rick Miller, Heat lends just
that to his crackling rockabilly rave-ups that, over 10
albums, run from country to blues and lounge, but primarily honor that early rock “Rumble.” This excellent
bill comes bolstered by Nashville Pussy and Reckless
Kelly. $20-$23/ 9 p.m. —Chris Parker
11.07-08 RED CLAY RAMBLERS
@ THE ARTSCENTER
You’ve got your triple-threat actors and your five-tool
outfielders. However, when it comes to the long-standing local Red Clay Ramblers, you must up the numerical
ante. The band’s members are playwrights, novelists,
composers, actors, collaborators (teaming with everyone from Ralph Stanley and Randy Newman to Sam
Shepard and the late Doug Marlette), and a half-dozen
other things,
including multiinstrumentalists.
And, true to form,
the Red Clay
Ramblers’ music
is many things
to many people,
eh,whatever
11.07 THE CLARKS
@ LINCOLN THEATRE
Serving up the same dish of bland blue-collar rock to
audiences year after year has caused this Pittsburgh
staple to revel in the past and mostly discard the
future. With only a few punchy singles to fill in the
cracks of its otherwise flaccid catalog, most of a night
with The Clarks drifts in one ear and trickles out the
other. Aged ennui! $13- $15/ 9 p.m. —Kathy Justice
11.07 MATTHEW SWEET/ THE
BRIDGES @ CAT’S CRADLE
Matthew Sweet’s a fine guitarist with one particularly good album (1991’s Girlfriend) and a passable,
somewhat nasally croon. Like Evan Dando or Jay
McInerney, though, he’s translated youthful inspiration into a career of middling product predicated on
past glories. Doing karaoke with has-been Bangles
doesn’t impress, and while guitarist Richard Lloyd’s
return for the recording of Sweet’s latest, Sunshine
Lies, ensures some sweet six-string interplay, it hardy
thanks to its
era-spanning,
genre-hopping
mix of old-time, Irish,
country, gospel, capital-P
Pop, Dixieland, bluegrass
and any other style that can
call a fiddle, mandolin, piano
and/or bouzouki home. This welcome two-night stand begins Friday.
$17/ 8:30 p.m. —Rick Cornell
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11.08 MARK KOZELEK/ KATH
BLOOM @ CAT’S CRADLE
Matthew Houck leads
PHOSPHORESCENT
(11.06, LOCAL 506) with
a beautiful ache of a voice.
On “Wolves,” it opens the
door for cosmic questions
about the lines between violence and tenderness, love and
war. Download the song and read
an interview with Houck at
www.indyweek.com.
11.11 MAD DECENT TOUR WITH
DIPLO, ABE VIGODA, MORE
@ CAT’S CRADLE
A perfectly still soundtrack for an early autumn
night: It seems increasingly clear that Mark Kozelek,
who long led Red House Painters and still records as
Sun Kil Moon, could sing most any song in his thin,
slightly high air and turn it into something profound.
Aside from his own occasionally striking associative lyrics, Kozelek’s recorded albums of AC/DC and
Modest Mouse covers, somehow making both bands
sound like equal lyrical revelations. Live, he’s charming in a cantankerous way. Folk singer Kath Bloom
recorded with Loren Connors in the ’70s before retiring to raise a family. Her new songs resonate with
hard-won wisdom. $15-$17/ 9 p.m. —Grayson Currin
Has Wesley Pentz revolutionized the remix? Better
known as Diplo, Pentz etched a rivulet of bouncy
and exuberantly fun pop retakes while championing
bass-driven music from other shores. It’s since turned
into a rushing river. The world-bass infusion continues
with the latest installment of his Hollertronix series, which
includes Portugal’s Kuduro kingpins Buraka Som Sistema
and Angola’s DJ Znobia. His Mad Decent label also folds
together like-minded producers (say, Boy 8 Bit) and rock
bands made, nearly entirely, to be remade, ripe for remixing. Abe Vigoda and Telepathe provide ideal templates,
along with some beats of their own, tonight. Diplo and
his associates never seemed hungrier for ’em. For more
on Diplo, see www.indyweek.com. $12-$15 / 9:30 p.m.
—Chris Toenes
11.10 THE SHAKY HANDS
@ LOCAL 506
11.12 CALEXICO/ THE ACORN
@ CAT’S CRADLE
On last year’s self-titled EP, Portland quartet The Shaky
Hands took a two-tier approach to shambolic indie,
One imagines Calexico luxuriating in one of Albert
Beirstadt’s epic Western landscapes, the country
ameliorates his primary difficulty: His writing’s less
sophisticated than that on Three’s Company. As easy
as it is to slip into paisley power pop guitar, the lyrics
offer little traction, treading water until, bored stiff,
you drown. $18-$20/ 9 p.m. —Chris Parker
11.08 PELICAN/ KAYO DOT
@ THE BREWERY
Pelican still hasn’t fired its drummer, Larry
Herweg, who remains the hindrance for the
instrumental quartet: He seems to mostly stay on
point these days, but his brutish complacence
adulterates the accomplishments of dashing
guitarists Laurent Schroeder-Lebec and Trevor
de Brauw. Kayo Dot used to make massive artmetal statements with strings and drones and
drums and masses of guitars; on this year’s Blue
Lambency Downward, Toby Driver directed his
miasmatic tendencies to somewhere between
Jeff Buckley, The Mars Volta and Grizzly Bear,
except less than any of those three. Stephen
Brodsky, whose reputation rests on the laurels of
Cave-In, opens. 7 p.m. —Grayson Currin
the BLACK CROWES
SONG OF
THE WEEK
stringing sunny ’60s fuzz alongside
faux folk outliers. Older and a bit
wiser, the band’s distilled those loose
edges into a Strokes-approved fuse of
frenetic garage-rock and sinister urban
poetry that’s gritty and electrified. With
Carrboro’s Oscar Begat. $8/ 9:30 p.m.
—Kathy Justice
FROM: Atlanta
SINCE: 1989
CLAIM TO FAME: Smashing the Allmans into
the Small Faces on hits like “Jealous Again,”
“Remedy” and “She Talks to Angels”
11.12 THE SWORD
@ LINCOLN THEATRE
twang cast
against
dwarfing
cliffs of rust
and burnt
umber
beneath an
Calexico
impossibly
spacious sky that stretches beyond the Mexican
border. For more than a dozen years, the Tucson
sextet has staked out Southwestern-flavored
territory of its own, highlighted by Latin-tinged
acoustic guitars, the sturdy, lazy thrum of standup bass, and supple texture and tone, hazy like
watercolor and quenching like cerveza (satisfying
for the moment and leaving you wanting more).
Calexico’s sixth album, Carried to Dust, continues
this legacy of embedded melody and subtle effect,
both rewarding additional listens. With the rootsy
amble of Ottawa’s The Acorn replacing canceled
locals Bowerbirds. $15/ 9:15 p.m. —Chris Parker
11.12 FINN RIGGINS
@ THE RESERVOIR
Though the band broods on occasion, Finn Riggins’
perky co-ed harmonies and bright, synth-heavy pop
jams more often recall The Anniversary if that band
had been more adventurous. Dramatic post-rock
awash in anthemic guitar—with epic peaks—is
Gray Young’s MO. Carrboro’s Where The Buffalo
Roamed opens with fuzzy, lo-fi synth-n-guitar
dreamscapes. Free/ 10 p.m. —Spencer Griffith
Introducing...
11.12 THE LISPS @ NIGHTLIGHT
If heavy metal can empower the meek (and
it can), you’d hope that The Sword’s frontThe Lisps walked
man, J.D. Cronise, would begin to absorb the
into the thrift store of
strength of the clattering trio that surrounds
American music, picked
him nightly any minute now. Cronise may
out some sincerity of
sing about epic conquests, but he sounds
folk, a nub of narrative
like a helium balloon trapped in a mighty
via vaudeville, and a dash
meteorological vortex. So many bands are
of the joy of pop, creating
making post-Sabbath sludge these days,
what guitarist and lead singso why worry with one that’s got a singer
er Cesar Alvarez terms “avant-Americana… We take really kind of
who sounds like a fax of a Xerox of a
hokey antique or outmoded musical gestures and forms and styles
telegram? The reason to see The Sword
and then give them a kind of contemporary tweak.” Alvarez sees
when they visited the Lincoln Theatre
songs as a “constant push and pull about narrativity, experimentation,
earlier this year—the great big Miami
and then just pure simple pop fun.”
bright lights called Torche—will be flyBass, drums, melodica, various percussive tools (including a large
ing home from a Japanese tour when
metal cabinet), and the bouncing female vocals of Alvarez’s erstwhile
The Sword hits the stage this time. Too
significant other create the sound, whose simple lyrics and humbad. With Year Long Disaster (which
worthy melodies build into accomplished, complex structures. With a
features Third Eye Blind’s drummer)
country tinge that is both warm and occasionally haunting, The Lisps’
and Broadslab. $10-$12/ 8 p.m.
next project is a sci-fi Civil War musical. Opening with Electrical Funeral
—Grayson Currin
for the indie dance pop of The Bloodsugars. 9:30 p.m. —Andrew Ritchey
vs.
SATURDAY, NOV. 8
Early success punches your ticket to later wander in the wilderness
from which many never return. The greasy, Southern-fried, British bluessoul of the Crowes’ first three albums gave way to personal decadence,
faltering focus and indolence, culminating in a trio of increasingly uninspired albums and the
band’s breakup. A three-year hiatus was more trial separation than divorce. Luckily, the subsequent revolving door of personnel and, in particular, the addition of North Mississippi
All Stars’ slide guitarist Luther Dickinson and keyboardist Adam MacDougall paid off with
Warpaint, the band’s best album since 1994’s Amorica. Creatively reenergized, Warpaint
doesn’t break new ground, but it rediscovers much of what was lost in the intervening
years. At LINCOLN THEATRE with Buffalo Killers. $35-$40/ 5 p.m.
THE BOTTLE
ROCKETS
FROM: St. Louis
SINCE: 1992
CLAIM TO FAME: Bridging the gap between
alt-country and The Replacements
The Bottle Rockets inhabits the same roots-rock neighborhood as the Crowes but isn’t as greasy or jam-ridden.
Frontman Brian Henneman had made music for 15 years, playing
with Uncle Tupelo before starting the Rockets. The Rockets’ raw, alt-rock spirit adds a scabrous
edge to its basic country boogie, both in sound and humor, beating Drive-By Truckers to the country rawk punch by several years. Lean but loud, the Rockets’ guitar muscle still body punches like
a champ. Henneman’s drawling wisdom resounds like a barroom prophet, the broken relations
like notches round his eyes. Wiry, strong and just underrated enough to fell the bigger Crowes by
upset, and for half the price. At BERKELEY CAFE with Jule Brown. $15/ 9 p.m. —Chris Parker