MIDDAY VEIL With Décollage • Tjutjuna • Mike Zorman Nightshark • Night of Joy 05.13.11 | Rhinoceropolis This was one of those Rhino shows that started early. Opening the proceedings was a group calling itself Décollage, a sort of five-piece, with a guitarist, a drummer, a bassist, a singer/keys player…

The Donkeys (due tonight at the Hi-Dive) from San Diego often get lumped in with anyone inspired by the country rock of the ’60s and ’70s. But even a casual listen to its latest release, Born With Stripes, reveals a band not beholden to a specific aesthetic of times past,…

At the risk of alienating and outraging vast swaths of music fans, there’s really no polite way to refer to bands with a career spanning fifteen years plus as a whole. So here are ten “oldster” bands — written by a self-proclaimed oldster — that kept making great records long…

Started by childhood friends Yuzo Nieto and Mike Neff in early 2007, Pink Hawks initially explored an nearly pure jazz-improv musical route. Those early shows incorporated performance-art elements that tried to engage multiple senses, with cohorts of the band passing out items frozen in ice cubes, or live painting, or…

You have to give credit to a band writing relatively dark music that leads off its album with a song called “Clown Car Suicide.” Amid sometimes biting, melodic guitar rhythms, string filigrees and Melati Olivia’s classically inflected vocals, the music of Choke the Word often recalls Loreena McKennitt if she…

Ric Ocasek has famously and repeatedly said there would never be a reunion of the Cars after his old band broke up in 1988. But in a recent NPR interview, Ocasek graciously explained that his change of heart in not just re-forming the Cars for a tour but also in…

Two years ago, Gritt Hitter (due at the Gothic Theatre this Friday, May 13) was a promising three-piece metal act that was clearly inspired by the new wave of British heavy metal, with a thrash undercurrent. Even though some of its sound was familiar, the band seemed caught up in…

HUNX AND HIS PUNX Lust-Cats of the Gutters • Thee Goochi Boiz • Shannon and the Clams 05.07.11 | hi-dive Almost literally straight off of a roughly sixteen-day of tour, Lust-Cats of the Gutters would have been excused for showing some of that fatigue in its set. But, instead, Alex…

Hunx and His Punx (due at the hi-dive this Saturday, May 7, with Shannon & the Clams, Thee Goochi Boiz and Lust-Cats of the Gutters) started in the Bay Area in 2008 when Seth “Hunx” Bogart of Gravy Train!!!! decided to do something very different from the band he had…

“Looking Down the Barrel,” Altitude Sickness’s opening track, leads with a Celtic feel and a tinge of bluegrass, with the fiddle pulling the melody along. James Campbell’s vocals seem informed by hip-hop in both his delivery and the flow of the lyrics, but the music never really crosses over into…

Formed in Lafayette, Louisiana, this Bay Area band will immediately sound familiar to anyone who has been paying attention for the last handful of years to acts like Washed Out and Small Black, mainly because there is a similar effervescent, sun-washed flavor to Painted Palms’ electro-pop. But there is also…

In the last decade or so, many metal musicians realized that while writing songs about demons and wizards was kind of cool, it was also a little silly. So they turned to largely instrumental music with titles that hinted at that world without the potential embarrassment of having to come…

MOGWAI With Errors 05.02.11 | Bluebird Theater Errors, from Glasgow, Scotland, started things off with what seemed like the intro to an ethereal, somber set of music. Turns out, though, the foursome was just getting warmed up with a slow drift into its first song. Clearly the band had spent…

COLLAPSE AND SWELLS With Barnacle, Reproacher and Clinging to the Trees of a Forest Fire 04.30.11 | Blast-O-Mat The pedigree of Barnacle is fairly impressive (former members of Elucidarius and Ascaris and Nick from Cephalic Carnage), but the music stands on its own. If guys with genuine technical chops to…

Formed in 1995, Mogwai quickly made a name for itself with adventurous guitar work and a sound that loosened and opened up the imagination. Over the course of the next sixteen years, the Scottish band very much plotted its own course through exploring every sonic whim without losing a strong…

In the middle to later half of the 1990s, John Vanderslice (due tonight at the hi-dive with Damien Jurado) was a member of the respected Bay Area alternative rock band, MK Ultra. When the band split in 1999, Vanderslice took the delicate intensity and experimental edge he had brought to…

Reverb and the Verse isn’t the first act to bring together hip-hop with experimental electronic music. The lyrics that flow across this release aren’t just rapped, though; they’re delivered like a soul song. “Split” sounds like what might have happened if Trent Reznor had tried his hand at hip-hop a…

Mogwai’s evocative, largely instrumental rock adventure first gained notice in the mid-’90s with a promising debut album, Young Team. Since then, the Scottish act has produced some of the most breathtakingly cinematic compositions of recent years. The group’s textured melodies induce moments of claustrophobic anxiety, transcendent peacefulness and catharsis —…

As the primary songwriter for Dinosaur Jr., J Mascis influenced a generation of guitarists by bridging the gap between hardcore, experimental guitar rock and psychedelia. Mascis’s songs perfectly balance sonic aggression with fluidity, and his lyrics speak deeply to a generation of people who came to realize that they will…

The music of Slakjaw sounds like the members of the band took Eddy Joe Cotton’s book Hobo to heart, hopped a train and then stumbled off the rails near the 20th Street viaduct somewhere around 1992 and spent the intervening years crawling their way through all the bars, collecting and…

MIKE WATT & THE MISSINGMEN With Il Cattivo and Lion Sized 04.22.11 | Larimer Lounge There are a small handful of bands that would have been great openers for a show like this, and Il Cattivo and Lion Sized are two of them. The former started off the show with…

The world of heavy metal can be an exercise in absurdity and uninspired imitation played at blistering volume. With the relatively recent (and fading) popularity of “stoner-rock” and “doom metal,” as evidenced by tours including the reunited line-ups of Sleep, Saint Vitus (read our recent interview with Dave Chandler) and…