WEDNESDAY 4/9

LA FEMME, YOURYOUNGBODY, LOW HUMS

If you listen to La Femme and it sounds like a familiar place or somewhere you've been before, please take me with you on your next visit. The many voices of La Femme sing almost exclusively in French, a language I studied for six weeks in high school, so I can't tell you exactly what their songs are about—and maybe that lyrical ambiguity makes their music even more enjoyable to me. Their songs are shape-shifters, like characters running through Scooby-Doo doors in a haunted hotel, stretching out, gaining momentum, picking up and discarding genres as they go along. For English speakers, the title of La Femme's debut album, Psycho Tropical Berlin, can give you a few clues about the group's musical conjuring: Among the most prominent sounds, you will often hear something resembling sci-fi B-movie soundtracks, space-age surfing competitions, and post-psychedelic krautrock, along with some playful French yé-yé music spiked into the mix. Brian Jonestown Massacre and Stereolab have treaded in some of these heady waters before, but those bands can sound practically monolithic compared to the nimble work of La Femme. Come early to see Seattle's Youryoungbody, whose electronic cooing and propulsive beats are quickly making this city a better place to flail our bodies. Vera Project, 7:30 pm, $10 adv/$12 DOS.

SATURDAY 4/12

WIMPS, DARLINGCHEMICALIA, THE DUMPS

Darlingchemicalia's new album, Spun in White, is a claustrophobic web of gothic post-punk. This Sacramento band's intoxicating songs combine bleakness with hedonism, revealing moments that can be strange and beautiful, infectious and funereal. Ian and Stephine Bone, a husband-and-wife duo, trade vocals like baying black wolves under a brightly lit moon, and their sound might be perfectly executed on their catchiest song, "Marijuana," which begins with the line "Suicide, suicide, suicide on your mom." Elsewhere on this bill tonight, you'll see the Dumps, Seattle's preeminent scatological garage-rock band, along with Wimps, who bring a workmanlike punk approach to songs about eating dog pills and escaping mundane modern lives. Heartland, 8 pm. recommended