Sam Mickens’ Ecstatic Showband & Revue – Saturday @ Artistery
As the front man for The Dead Science, Sam Mickens pushes his gorgeous warble into the crevices and cracks left behind as his nimble trio lays waste to the structure and signifiers of what we call “rock”. For this side project, Mickens finds himself playing front man to a large horn-driven outfit that takes ’50s/’60s pop and R&B, and sends it down a black hole, stretching it out to a single pulsing thread. It’s a fabulous turn for this fabulous artist to have taken.
The Standells – Saturday @ East End
The venerable venue known as East End is celebrating their 2nd anniversary this weekend, and to help them blow out the candles on their birthday cake, they’ve brought in garage rock legends The Standells. Though they are from California, this group will always be remembered for their chugging ode to Massachusetts, “Dirty Water”. While that song was immortalized on Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets collection, the group put out a half dozen other singles that mixed the rumble of British rock with sun baked surf rock, including “Good Guys Don’t Wear White” and the track that quite appropriately leads off the recently released box set , Where The Action Is: Los Angeles Nuggets 1965-1968, “Riot On Sunset Strip”.
Terraform – Monday @ Valentines
Celebrating the release of their first album is this crazed Portland quartet. Their music is a troubling whirlwind of saxophone enhanced no-wave punk, something like an amphetamine crazed DNA with James Chance sitting in. Containing the band’s unbridled energy on to a compact disc or a cassette likely took a Herculean effort on the part of some lucky record producer, but if it comes anywhere close to capturing an nth of their raw power, they will have made an album to be cherished, and possibly feared.
