Explosions in the Sky (due tonight at the Boulder Theater) is an instrumental rock band based out of Austin, Texas. For the last thirteen years, the quartet has been creating a kind of anthemic, instrumental guitar rock that sparkles with impressionistic melodies building to a cathartic apex, not unlike a…

mr. Gnome (due tonight at the Hi-Dive) tours more than most bands. The act’s music is often thrown under the umbrella term “psychedelic.” But clearly this Cleveland-based duo isn’t really trying to sound like another psychedelic band. From the way Nicole Barille and Sam Meister present themselves in their press…

Richmond, Virginia’s Municipal Waste makes no bones about its influences. It’s easy to hear the frantic pace of D.R.I. from Crossover in the act’s music, not to mention the dynamics and pacing of Anthrax circa Spreading the Disease and some guitar-style nods to early Slayer. Like all of those bands,…

Kawabata Makoto, the founder of Acid Mothers Temple, started his career in music in the late 1970s. Whether he experienced Flower Travellin’ Band’s motes of resonating distortion or the dark, haunted droning of Les Rallizes Denudes firsthand is anyone’s guess. But since founding Acid Mothers in 1995, Kawabata has forged…

The Skeleton Show (due at Bender’s Tavern on Saturday, April 7) exemplifies the free-spirited fire of ’60s garage bands who sat on the cusp of psychedelia and waded deep into that dirty musical water more than half the time. With a raw live performance in which some bandmembers come dangerously…

TIM HECKER @ ODD FELLOWS HALL | 3/30/12 “Normally I don’t sit down when I play,” said Tim Hecker with some bemusement before starting his set. “But this chair looked inviting. This will be a special, Stephen Hawking-inspired performance. No disrespect.” With that, noises, tones and sounds trickled in and…

Rachel Thoele of Flipper (due tonight at the Lion’s Lair) got her start in the Bay Area punk scene in her first band God (or G.O.D. aka Girls On Drugs or Girls Over Dosed). But the first band she was in that many people got to see was Frightwig, the…

FLIPPER @ LION’S LAIR | 3/29/12 “How do you get a hippie girl pregant?” asked Rachel Thoele before Flipper even played a note. “Cum on her Birkenstocks, and let the flies do the rest.” Bruce Loose had a chuckle and asked her if she had any more jokes. She did…

Flipper (due tonight and tomorrow night at the Lion’s Lair) got its start in 1979 in the creatively fertile arts and music scene in San Francisco. Formed after the break-up of Negative Trend and including two former members of that band, Will Shatter and Stephen DePace, Flipper didn’t set out…

You’d think the psychedelic-classic-hard-rock-revival vein would be completely tapped at this point. But Amphibious Jones didn’t target the usual suspects in terms of sounds to appropriate, and that’s what makes this album stand out. You get the sense that these guys watched Heavy Metal dozens of times and contemplated the…

Although she grew up in New Jersey, it wasn’t until Sharon Van Etten went to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, that she became exposed to the music that inspired her to write her own songs. Getting an early boost of encouragement from TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone, Van Etten started writing the…

If you haven’t heard of K Records, you should seek it out immediately. The label’s founder, Calvin Johnson, has embraced the idea of the eternal teenager in all of us as articulated by filmmaker John Cassavetes and run with it from the beginning. The history and catalogues of his bands,…

Over the past few years, Ryan McRyhew has been a perpetrator of innovative electronic music that more people should have heard. As a member of BDRMPPL, he hashed together worldbeat rhythms and dub with experimental electronic music, and as Thundercade, he’s put out albums that explore various edges of electronic…

White Rabbits (due tonight at the Bluebird Theater) moved from Columbia, Missouri to Brooklyn within a year of forming in 2004. The group’s music had, from the beginning, an ineffably energetic spirit that could be heard by broader audiences first with its 2007 debut album, Fort Nightly. But it was…

THE JOY FORMIDABLE @ BLUEBIRD | 3/17/12With a sample of spoken words as an intro, one of the moments in the set where The Joy Formidable shined the brightest was during “Buoy.” From its moody, murky beginning to its steady, rapid progression into something altogether more bombastic and expansive, the…

GIRLS @ GOTHIC THEATRE | 3/16/12 When Girls took the stage at the Gothic Theatre last night, it was like seeing something out of the early ’90s, the time when not having a fashion statement was a fashion statement, when the attitude of the musicians and their performance spoke volumes…

The Joy Formidable (due this Saturday, March 17, at the Bluebird Theater with A Place to Bury Strangers) is one of the most aptly named bands of the last several years. Its dream pop atmospheres and sheer exuberance as a live band have wowed audiences wherever the band plays. Part…

Unknown Mortal Orchestra (due Friday, March 16 at the Gothic Theatre) is based on Portland, Oregon. The band’s frontman, Ruban Nielson, however, spent nearly a decade in punk band the Mint Chicks while based out of Auckland, New Zealand. After a few records on the legendary Flying Nun label, Nielson…

Update 3/14/12: Radiohead and Other Lives at 1STBANK Center review posted with photos and setlist. Other Lives (due at 1STBANK Center tonight with Radiohead) started in Stillwater, Oklahoma, in 2004 under the name Kunek, but when one of the founding members of the band left, the remaining members switched to…

At the outset, the cutting build of “Extractor” lets you know that maybe these guys listened to a bit of Shellac. Bryon Parker’s impassioned vocals wouldn’t be out of place on one of those classic records out of Louisville from the early ’90s, owing to their ability to be melodic…