THURSDAY 3/27

Nada Surf, Sea Wolf

(Showbox at the Market) See preview, page 37.

Club Pop: Tim Sweeney, DJ Colby B

(Chop Suey) See Bug In the Bassbin, page 59.

The Greyboy Allstars, Busdriver

(Neumo's) Out of the South Central L.A. Blowed Crew, Busdriver has carved a frenetic hiphop niche. His songs are a Masterpiece Ghettotech Theatre and he plays a speed-reading auctioneer. His Epitaph Records release of RoadKillOvercoat was produced by DJ Nobody and Boom Bip. Busdriver's flows are precise and freely associative. Topics cut quickly from casting agents, cowgirls, oxycodone, and suicide to brunch. "In the Polaroid at a get together/Wearing a corduroy vest sweater" he "negates the myth of the great black boyfriend." Busdriver's spitfire delivery conjugates the grammatical latticework of a sentence like a jazz drummer dices a beat. Content is scattershot, but there's balance. TRENT MOORMAN

Curtains For You, Daniel G. Harmann, Bad Dream Good Breakfast

(Tractor) "The Urgency of Nightlife" is Bad Dream Good Breakfast's strongest song—a vaudevillian combination of strings, drums, and dramatic lyrics about kissing "until your tongue turns blue." If they were to have a radio single, that'd be it. But the unassuming ballad, "A Ghost That Couldn't Let Go," gives me goose bumps. The song begins with delicate guitar and airy, high vocals, but it takes a darker turn, building up to an unexpected burst of emotion—soaring strings and threatening words about chilling skin and breaking limbs. Like the song, tonight's show is bittersweet—it's the band's last performance with violinist Saundrah Humphrey, who recently got married and is moving with her new husband to Denmark. MEGAN SELING

FRIDAY 3/28

Macklemore, Illmaculate, Kingzmen, Solstice

(Vera Project) See My Philosophy, page 45.

Comeback: Tronik Youth, Miss Toats & Joe E Irwin

(Chop Suey) See Bug In the Bassbin, page 59.

Saves the Day, Set Your Goals

(Neumo's) See Underage, page 57.

Nada Surf, the Builders and the Butchers

(Showbox at the Market) Alaska to Portland transplants the Builders and the Butchers assemble five people and friends to play guitar, bass, drums, mandolin, banjo, accordion, violin, xylophone, bells, washboard, etc. Singer Ryan Sollee's reedy voice and the band's old-timey instrumentation faintly recall fellow Portlanders the Decemberists, but where the latter band's anachronisms tend toward the twee Victorian, the Builders and the Butchers evoke something more like the grim dust bowl and boxcars of the Great Depression. Still, they're not strict historians—among their ballads of hard rains and "Spanish Death" is the odd lyric about lake-dwelling vampires. Whatever the subject, the ensemble's songs and playing are winningly dramatic and worn. ERIC GRANDY

The Corner: Cancer Rising, Silent Lambs Project, Candidt, Grayskul

(Rendezvous) Where is the true hiphop? One spot that has it regularly is the Jewel Box Theater at the Rendezvous. Here, once a month, there is a gathering of local hiphop heads. This gathering is intimate. Meaning, there is a close relationship between the audience and the performers. This closeness (and smallness) is its truth—a truth because this how it all began, in small spaces, in small rooms, in the small hours of the night. What is documented in the bibles of hiphop—Beat Street and Wild Style—is being practiced at the Jewel Box Theater. Tonight's gathering will have as its core performers Cancer Rising, Silent Lambs Project, Candidt, and Grayskul. As Pete Rock put it: "In the beginning, let it be like the record spinning." CHARLES MUDEDE

SATURDAY 3/29

Velella Velella, Locke, Umami

(Sunset) See preview, page 35.

Seattle Vision Care

(Lo_Fi) See Bug In the Bassbin, page 59.

Bhangra Bash

(Showbox at the Market) Did you know that every year bhangra dance troupes from across North America come to Seattle to compete for thousands of dollars in prizes? It's true, and this event serves as both the closing ceremony of the Bhangra Bash and also a big-old dance party for the general public. Bhangra nights in this town usually start out as exciting weekly celebrations, but they can lose their luster pretty quickly. Here's a chance to bhangra dance with people who actually know what they're doing, and a bunch of other amateurs, too, in a one-night-a-year event with live music. PAUL CONSTANT

Louis XIV, What Made Milwaukee Famous, Carolina Liar

(Chop Suey) Austin's What Made Milwaukee Famous just released a great full-length, What Doesn't Kill Us, on local label Barsuk. Like other acts on the label's roster, the band play infectious pop music that throws in a few curves. Not all their songs are memorable, but ones such as "Sultan" and "The Right Place" will get caught in your head for days and more than make up for the album's few bouts of mediocrity. WMMF are bright and perfect for singing along to, but they also surprise you with strings, horns, pounding piano, and the occasional slower tune ("Cheap Wine"). They're a pop symphony. They're fun. I have no idea why they're on tour with Louis XIV, a bullshit rock band made famous by controversial, vaguely sexist lyrics rather than interesting music. MEGAN SELING

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band

(KeyArena) I wasted a lot of my life hating Bruce Springsteen. My older sister's devotion to Born in the U.S.A., which mostly began and ended with the photo of Springsteen's ass on the record album cover, annoyed the fuck out of me. Later on, I classified Springsteen in the much-loathed "classic rock" corner of my mind and didn't really think about him again. It wasn't until I heard last year's We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, that I finally understood Springsteen's appeal: He really likes to play music. He always sounds like he's having a hell of a good time, and he's keeping folk music alive and viable while doing it. And what's wrong with that? Absolutely nothing. PAUL CONSTANT

Bob Mould Band, Saturna

(Neumo's) Even if you've fallen out of touch with former Hüsker Dü/Sugar frontman Bob Mould, his new solo album, District Line (Anti-), sounds a lot like you might expect: an older, more grown-up version of his old bands. Its instantly catchy tunes such as "Very Temporary" and "Old Highs, New Lows" sound almost eerily like modern alt-rock radio fare, until you remember how many of those jerks got their ideas from ol' Bob in the first place. It's not Zen Arcade or Flip Your Wig, but then again, what is? Mould can do what he wants at this point, and he's still worth keeping up with. WILLIAM YORK

Ministry, Meshuggah

(Showbox Sodo) Meshuggah's recent Nuclear Blast release disc has a title (obZen) and album cover that only a mother could love (although it's uncertain how many mothers could really love a computer-generated image of a bloody, three-armed android doing yoga). The music, on the other hand, is another installment of their patented tech-metal, which has been inspiring awe among metalheads, prog rockers, and other heavy-music geeks for the last decade. It's an improvement over 2005's Catch Thirty-Three, with a healthy balance of convoluted rhythms and crushing, surgically precise guitar work. WILLIAM YORK

SUNDAY 3/30

Bell X1, the Submarines

(Nectar) In their native Ireland, Bell X1 are pretty much the biggest rock band since U2. Coincidentally, both bands are named after U.S. military jets—Bell X1 was an experimental supersonic jet; U2, a spy plane. Like modern-era U2, Bell X1 aim squarely for prime-time television placement with their brand of gently soaring soft-rock mope, landing songs on popular programs such as The OC and Grey's Anatomy. Of course, dubious licensing isn't really the kiss of death for a band these days—quite the opposite—and Bell X1's songs are fine as far as unsubtle emotionalism and budget-rate Radiohead are concerned, but they're unlikely to achieve anything like the ubiquity of their similarly aeronautical countrymen. ERIC GRANDY

X, Skybombers, Mark Pickerel & His Praying Hands

(Showbox at the Market) More Fun in the New World, X's fourth (and last great) album, is hands down my favorite from their considerable catalog. It's a far slicker sound than they'd had before, but goddamn it worked. John and Exene's vocals go together like bourbon and barbecue—smoky, sticky, spicy-sweet. Like hot vinyl seats and Venice Beach. It's also the last record the OG lineup played on together—remarkable here because this tour features all four of the originals; hopefully they'll pick up today right where they left off back in 1983: "Honest to goodness/the bars weren't open this morning/they must have been voting/for a new president of something...." LARRY MIZELL JR.

MONDAY 3/31

The Cribs, Ra Ra Riot, Jeffrey Lewis

(Chop Suey) See Stranger Suggests, page 21.

X, Skybombers, Guns & Rossetti

(Showbox at the Market) See Sunday's preview.

TUESDAY 4/1

Le Loup, the Ruby Suns

(Chop Suey) See Stranger Suggests, page 21, and Album Reviews, page 43.

Beats for Obama

(Nectar) See Bug In the Bassbin, page 59.

WEDNESDAY 4/2

Subhumans, Snuggle, Walls

(El Corazón) Seattle's Snuggle hark back to a time when pop punk was still more punk than pop—loud, dirty, barely held together with duct tape and black patches, without a hope (or a want) of making it onto mainstream radio or TV. Their songs are fast and rollicking; simple, caffeinated chord progressions animated by pogoing drums and wobbling bass, guttural vocals snarled and barked with enough heart to make up for their lack of tune. So they're a sensible choice to open up for stalwart and recently reactivated punks the Subhumans (UK). Walls are, among other things, a difficult band to find on the internet. They comprise three-fourths of defunct hardcore band Cold Sweat, including Jensen of Iron Lung on drums; their 7-inch is out on Iron Lung Records. ERIC GRANDY

Little Wings, Cock & Swan

(Sunset) Kyle Field, the man behind Little Wings, is an enigma. His website, www.kyledraws.com, showcases mostly his surreal drawings, and redirects you to K Records' website for more information about Little Wings. But when you get there, there's no information—only a photo of a man on the phone with his face obscured by a blue T-shirt. His Wikipedia page tells stories of working in liquor stores, living in camper trucks, not settling anywhere for more than about a month. His music is just as hard to pin down. He has a deep voice, like Jonathan Richman or Jens Lekman. His songs sometimes focus on lyrics, telling specific stories, sometimes the songs are more musical, light constructions of guitar, piano, and synthesizer. They're always tender and lovely. MEGAN SELING