SOL, SHAD, BROTHERS FROM
ANOTHER, DJ SUPREME
If you’ve started 2012 with some New Year’s blues, shake them off at the release party for Seattle MC Sol’s sophomore album, Yours Truly. With each listen of “Stage Dive,” I find myself with a little bit more spring in my step as Sol raps about the exalted ambitions of his craft over a subtle, sparkling beat. By the time the chorus rolls around, an uplifting “Love life/Don’t waste another night/Stage dive/Jump like you could fly,” my habitual rejection of anything sounding like a Positive Mental Attitude has been overrun and I’m pressing play again. You also don’t want to miss this show because it could be one of Sol’s last performances in Seattle for a while. As a recipient of a Bonderman Travel Fellowship for UW graduates, he’ll soon be traveling across the world for the greater part of the year. Neumos, 8 pm, $10.
LARKIN GRIMM, ARRINGTON
DE DIONYSO, HAIR AND SPACE MUSEUM
If any one genre of music calls to mind globe-trotting, it’s probably freak folk, with its collection of nomadic artists, songs sung in varying (or original) languages, and hirsute appearances. While some of the genre’s luminaries have settled down (in 2003, could you have pictured Devendra Banhart dating Natalie Portman? Or Animal Collective releasing an accessible and danceable record like Merriweather Post Pavilion?), plenty of musicians still peddle in the “freak” part of the equation. Larkin Grimm has lived in Georgia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, the Yale University campus, Thailand, and Guatemala, and her music reflects these disparate locales, shuttling between shamanistic intones, academic pondering, and Appalachian finger-pickin’ lushness. Arrington de Dionyso, one-time frontman of the incredibly polarizing Olympia outfit Old Time Relijun, further rounds out a globalized bill with a hybrid of Indonesian influenced bass clarinet and Tuvan throat-singing, making this one night where we don’t all have to be international scholars to hear so many different sounds from the world. Cairo, 8 pm, $5.