It’s already several weeks into 2012 and—WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED, YOU GUYS? Last year was a tumultuous time for this greenhorn music editor, but 2012 is gonna be golden for everybody, ’cause there’s already a party-sized jumbo hoagie sandwich full of goodness to jam up your radar in the upcoming months.
Wednesday, January 11—i.e., the day you’ll see this edition of the paper hitting the streets and internets—two-piece doom band the Body play Black Lodge. The Body run the gamut of doom-metal experimentation—some songs feature chopped-up sampling over submerged, low-end dirge, while another project found them touring with the 24-member female choir Assembly of Light. That same night, Kill All Redneck Pricks: A Documentary Film About KARP, filmed by Federation X’s Bill Badgley over the course of four and a half years, screens for its second time around at Grand Illusion, with showings at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. Badgley will be in attendance.
Wolves in the Throne Room will convert the Crocodile into a swirling pit of ecstatic black metal on Tuesday, January 17. Celestial Lineage, the band’s third full-length in a trilogy, feels like their most fully formed work yet. This is the kind of planet-shifting sound you get when you sequester yourself in a dilapidated farmhouse outside of Olympia.
Seattle’s the Pharmacy release their latest EP on Friday, February 3, at Black Lodge. Recorded at Jack Endino’s Soundhouse, the four-song Dig Your Grave will hook you in like a prostitution sting hooks johns. The title track brings more urgency than is customary for the group, and the tape-hissing melancholy and Northwest imagery of “Burn All Yr Bridges” vaguely recalls early Modest Mouse, only with more sophisticated melody. The night sees them off on a two-month tour, so send ’em out right.
Way out in March, Sub Pop will drop Father Creeper, from South Africa’s Spoek Mathambo (real name: Nthato Mokgata). Mathambo’s self-described “township tech” sports multilayered constructions, backward-rearranged beats—sometimes coming off like American hiphop tracks in reverse—and Mathambo’s conversely velvety croon. Make no mistake, this stuff may be daunting at first, but you’ll be hooked in no time. Just like drugs!
Just this week, Elvis Costello, Neutral Milk Hotel founder Jeff Mangum, and Radiohead announced upcoming Seattle dates. Costello plays the Paramount on April 12, and Mangum plays the Moore on April 16; tickets for both go on sale Friday, January 13, at 10 a.m. Mangum’s shows have been selling out in minutes ever since he came out of hiding to curate All Tomorrow’s Parties. Radiohead play KeyArena on April 9, with tickets on sale Saturday, January 14 at 10 a.m. Get your trigger finger ready. 
