Wednesday 3/16

Lou Reed and Velvet Underground Cover Night

(Comet) Rock bands will enjoy banging out the music of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground until time is dead. Ten years ago, a VU cover night at the Crocodile drew dazzling performances out of Kinski (who nailed "Ocean"), Harvey Danger (Sean Nelson delivered "The Gift" from memory!), and late-stage VU member Doug Yule (!!), who reprised his lead vocal on "Candy Says." Tonight's Reed-and-VU tribute at the Comet promises to be a more Comet-y affair, featuring bands such as the Harborrats, Magnificent Sons, and Blue Light Curtain tackling selections from the eternally rewarding Lou Reed songbook. If the all-bands-onstage closing number of "Sister Ray" fails to materialize or lasts less than an hour, they're doing it wrong. DAVID SCHMADER

Girl Talk, Max Tundra, Junk Culture

(Showbox Sodo) Tonight's Girl Talk show brings America's most ambitious, shameless, and beloved mixmaster to the stage to lord over a dance party that'll have sweat dripping from the ceiling. Where the crunk-meets-classic-rock concoctions on 2008's Feed the Animals kept me laughing, the similar creations on 2010's All Day keep me thinking—I love them both. Opening tonight's party: UK electronica wizard Max Tundra and Greg Gillis's Illegal Art labelmate Junk Culture. DAVID SCHMADER

The Ex

(Vera) Dutch socialist punks the Ex have been at it since their formation in the late 1970s, when they fused confrontational, tersely shouted lyrics with staccato and repetitive song constructions. While their latest album, Catch My Shoe, doesn't quite tap the nervous energy and tense charge of earlier work like 1983's Tumult or 1998's Starters Alternators, they are notoriously tight live, and they're coming here all the way from the Netherlands. Respect. GRANT BRISSEY

Grand Hallway, Y La Bamba, Denver

(Triple Door) Good news: The new Grand Hallway record, their long-awaited follow-up to 2009's Promenade, is just about done! The finishing touches are being applied as you read this, and while the band has yet to announce an official release date, we should know more very soon. In the meantime, you can soothe your cravings by seeing the band play tonight in the always-gorgeous Triple Door with Portland band Y La Bamba and Denver (featuring members of Blitzen Trapper). If we're lucky, Grand Hallway will be trying out a handful of the new material, so we can get a sneak peek at what just might be one of the best local releases of the year. MEGAN SELING

Thursday 3/17

The Staxx Brothers, Eric Tollefson

(High Dive) For seven years, Seattle's the Staxx Brothers (featuring the Staquelettes) have been developing a brand of hard-ass soul. Funk, rock, and groove abound. Helmsman Davin Michael Stedman preaches and sings of the good that comes from wearing hair in cornrows. Picture yourself at a barbecue. It is August and 82 degrees. A boom box sits on a picnic table with James Brown's Black Caesar soundtrack slowly pouring out of the speakers. Stedman is behind the grill wearing a purple choir robe and he's got a special recipe for a Ghost Fly Dry Rub. Meat that's been smacked around with a tenderizer is basted in a mixture of red pepper, Hungarian paprika, chili powder, and garlic powder. Stedman can cook his meat rare or well done—whatever your preference. The Staxx Brothers' full-length Jungle Cat will be out in May. It will make you want ribs—and James Brown. TRENT MOORMAN

Friday 3/18

Headhunter, 214, Ill Cosby

(Chop Suey) See Data Breaker.

Proem, Phidelity, b0t23, Manos

(Lo-Fi) See Data Breaker.

The Residents

(Neumos) See Stranger Suggests.

Magma Festival: Mecca Normal, O Paon, Sue Ann Harkey

(Chapel Performance Space) The great thing about Patti Smith is not that she's a musician; it's that she's a performance artist who happens to work with music as her medium of choice. Many have tried to emulate Smith, but of all those wretched attempts I've heard at open mics and on the internet, only Mecca Normal have that same wild, impulsive energy, unabashed activism, and conceptual energy. This isn't to say that the music is at all diminished, but Jean Smith (no relation, as far as I know) uses words as more than a way to get from one rhyme to another: To her, language is jazz, and combined with David Lester's deft instrumentation, they're an experience that's unlike anything else you've heard. They have a dense back catalog, too: Dive in and prepare to be blown away. PAUL CONSTANT

Tecumseh, This Blinding Light, Drowner

(Josephine) Portland's Tecumseh (who include the accomplished Seattle drone/noise composer Garek Druss) have a new album called Return to Everything coming out on the consistently challenging Beta-lactam Ring Records. The record oozes a low-key portentousness through the patient agglomeration of eerie tones and unsettling atmospheric events, at times approaching early Earth's fog-toned majesty. Combining some of the best traits of the Stooges and Loop, This Blinding Light continue to assert their place among the city's foremost trance rockers, as their powerful cut, "Soul on Fire," from the forthcoming Portable Shrines Magic Sound Theatre Vol. 1 comp proves. DAVE SEGAL

Destroyer, the War on Drugs, Yuni in Taxco

(Crocodile) If you've only fallen for Destroyer in the past few months, consider yourself fashionably late. While Dan Bejar is also a pivotal contributor to the New Pornographers, with his vast back catalog—nine albums and counting!—Destroyer teems with records that sound quirky to the point of off-putting. Happily, the new Kaputt marries Bejar's eccentricities to spacious productions arrayed with heat-shimmer synthesizers and muted brass; hell, there's probably some fretless bass in there, too. The results evoke arty 1980s touchstones like Prefab Sprout's Steve McQueen, the Blue Nile's Walk Across the Rooftops, and David Sylvian's Brilliant Trees. Your tardiness might prove fortuitous, too—rumor has it, Destroyer's erratic live show just recently began to hit its stride. KURT B. REIGHLEY

Saturday 3/19

TRUST: DJ Riz, SunTzu Sound, Kid Hops

(Baltic Room) See Data Breaker.

Sunday 3/20

Warpaint, PVT, Family Band

(Neumos) Soothing and desolate vocals from Warpaint members Emily Kokal (guitar), Theresa Wayman (guitar), and Jenny Lee Lindberg (bass) combine with shimmering guitars and steady but soft-focus percussion and synthesizer to form a sound that's both poppy and shoegazey; it's downright lovely stuff. "Undertow" is the most immediately striking song off last year's The Fool, but the rest of the record doesn't take long to fall into regular rotation either. GRANT BRISSEY

Oroku, Bell Witch, Nautilus

(Highline) There was a migration of punks from the Memphis scene to Portland in the early part of the last decade. No offense to that Southern city, but no one can blame the dudes in From Ashes Rise and Tragedy for relocating to a more open-minded hood. Similarly, it was probably a good call for gloomy hardcore band Oroku to get out of Kansas and claim Seattle as home several years back. Like those Memphis transplants, Oroku are a part of a dark musical tradition stemming back to early crust bands like Amebix and Antischism. And while every major city in Tennessee and Kansas has at least a few kids with Crass shirts, few towns have dive bar havens like the Highline where those kids can let their freegan flags fly. BRIAN COOK

Monday 3/21

Music for Animals, the Foreign Resort, Ambulance, Can the Boy Tell Time

(Comet) The Eric Bana–looking lead singer of Music for Animals has a really fucking great voice. Sometimes he's doing his best Robert Palmer impression, a kind of skeevy 1980s come-on whisper, but there are hints in some of their best songs—especially the opening of "If Looks Could Kill"—that he could really open up and blow us away with something exceptional and possibly early-Bono-ish. But for now, Music for Animals are wallowing in a retro groove, and that's fine. As long as they're tossing out juicy disco cuts like "Nervous in New York" and hippie freak-out "Love Love Love," they're keeping me entertained. PAUL CONSTANT

Dull Knife, John Krausbauer, Fielded, Hair and Space Museum

(Josephine) Seattle's Dull Knife (Garek Druss and Adam Svenson) have sharpened their attack of sinister drones and desolate, concentric guitar ripples to a fine point. Their sound sneaks up on you and then makes you tremble in not unpleasant ways. Hair and Space Museum—the alternate-reality project helmed by Midday Veil's Emily Pothast and David Golightly—engage in a kind of quest for the most transcendent and pure tones possible via keyboards, guitar, percussion toys, and voice. They exult in a hypnotic minimalism that burgeons to aurora borealis–style brilliance, as evidenced by their Double Rainbow in Curved Air performance at Hedreen Gallery last year. Terry Riley would be proud. DAVE SEGAL

Tuesday 3/22

Grand Atlantic, Dirty Sidewalks

(Comet) The songs of Brisbane, Australia, quartet Grand Atlantic toll familiar bells to anyone familiar with 1990s psych rockers reviving 1960s psych rock. In other words, they sound like a carbon copy of a carbon copy, but the original thing is so pleasurable that even third-generation replicas possess estimable charms. Grand Atlantic's facile way with soaring melodies and alluring hooks, along with Phil Usher's smooth vocals, add up to a sunshiny stroll down somebody-else-who-knew-this-guy-in-the-late-1960s' Memory Lane. Still, the vicarious thrill perceptible in Grand Atlantic's amiable psychedelic-pop facsimiles is undeniable. DAVE SEGAL