MUSIC

Two picks from Arts Desk contributor Steve Kiviat:

Tinariwen's latest album features Peter Gabriel-esque guest vocals from TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe, but tonight just expect their traditional desert nomad vocals and fuzzy guitar. With indie-pop act Architecture in Helsinki, Dom, Lo Fi Fnk, and Sophie Hunger at 9:30 Club at 6:45 p.m. $30.

D.C. homegirl Meshell Ndegeocello returns to town and appropriately heads to the Birchmere, where she'll support her mellow yet soulful new album, Weather. 7:30 p.m. Sold out.

BOOKS

Ex-Daily Show executive producer David Javerbaum reads from his new "memoir" by "God," The Last Testament. 7 p.m. at Sixth and I Historic Synagogue. $10.

Steve Stoute discusses the selling of hip-hop culture at 6:30 p.m. at Busboys & Poets. Free.

THEATER

FALL FRINGE.

There are two questions Sacramento, Calif.'s Ganglians say they're asked all the time: Is the band named after ganglion cysts? (Those are gross and kind of cool, frontman Ryan Grubbs said Tuesday, but no.) Also, what's it like to trip on ayahuasca?

Grubbs said he loves talking about psychoactive drugs almost as much as taking them. But he and his bandmates have never ingested that particular one, which is hard to find outside of South America. (Not that he wouldn't, he said.)

"We definitely talk about acid experiences a lot," said Grubbs, whose band opens for Wavves tonight at the Rock & Roll Hotel. "I think it was Rob [Enbom] of Eat Skull who told some guy from The Agit Reader that when we were on tour with him we were finding psychoactive stuff along the road like ayahuasca and ingesting it." Which is true, Grubbs said, except for the ayahuasca part. "Our bass player Adrian [Comenzind] is a botanist. He’s like the hippie of the group."

Well, more like the hippiest. Grubb's openness about drugs isn't particularly shocking, unless you've never seen the band (young, spaced out, and mostly bearded) or heard its latest record, Monster Head Room (out now on Woodsist), which isn't so much the latest iteration of this decade's freak folk as it is a direct tapping of poppy '60s psych acts like The Millenium and Love.

There's one final ingredient, according to Grubbs: The Beach Boys' radiant vocal harmonies. "If you're ever at the point [in an acid trip] where you’re hearing angel voices," he said, "we definitely try to replicate that."

Around the time Ganglians recorded Monster Head Room, Grubbs said, "there were a lot of mushrooms and acid, but we didn’t take it and record stuff. I would just take it and come up with ideas. Mainly we would just smoke weed. And we haven’t had a chance to do it lately."

When you're on tour, Grubbs said, "you have to be on the ball."

Which is still a challenge, to hear Grubbs tell it. The band was detained last week by U.S. Customs and Border Protection while trying to cross into Canada for a gig. They were held for several hours, Grubbs said, after a border agent discovered rolling papers in bassist Comenzind's wallet. The entire time, Grubbs said, he was high from a pot brownie: "It was totally insane, like Nazi Germany."

Grubbs is both an exhilarating interview subject (he is enthusiastic and utterly without guile) and an amusing one. Several times during our phone conversation, he asked me to repeat a question even though he already had spent several sentences answering it. (To be fair, neither of our phones had great reception.) When he told me that Monster Head Room is a coming-of-age epic structured like an acid trip—"it has a climax, it comes down, there’s the second climax and it comes down at the end"—I asked him what the post-bildungsroman Ganglians will sing about next time they record an album. Has the band cornered itself into adulthood?

The question puzzled Grubbs, and excited him. He said he needed to talk to the band about it, and get back to me. "Can I text you the answer later?"

I have yet to hear back.

Ganglians perform tonight at the Rock & Roll Hotel with Wavves and Tennis System. Photo courtesy of Ganglians' MySpace page.

Ganglians: "Lost Words"
Remember that scene in Animal House where John Belushi rips the guitar out of a hippie's hands and smashes it to bits against the wall? "Lost Words," by Sacramento's Ganglians, might insight a similar style of blind rage, at least for the hot tempered. Gilded in reedy falsettos and cascading waves of autumnal guitar, this is, ostensibly, a song about going to the grocery store.

Black Meteoric Star: "Death Tunnel"
A name can go a long way in techno. Were this song composed under a more upbeat moniker and given a title with a little more sunshine, it could easily be misconstrued as party music. But this is "Death Tunel," by Black Meteoric star, and as such, the track's pulsing sequenced synths suggest something more sinister. This is music for vintage-sci-fi dystopia and the darkest old-school Nintendo games.

Gang Gang Dance: "First Communion (TV on The Radio Remix)"
Less of a remix than a grudge-match between Manhattan and Brooklyn's two most widely discussed art-rock bands. But there are no winners or losers here, just judiciously programmed 909s. TV on The Radio hurls itself into one of the better songs from Gang Gang Dance's Saint Dymphna, stripping off some of the original's lush synthesizers and locking down the tempo to a steady, if jittery, pulse. It's hard to call it an improvement, but it's hardly a throwaway.

Red Onion just updated its new arrivals list. The stacks now include the new Ganglians self-titled LP. Shop  owner Josh Harkavy endorses the album, writing:

"Sacramento's Ganglians want an island somewhere where they can soak in the sun and prowl the canopy by night. It's not often that they do get out, but they can get down for that. Recording sometimes as one, sometimes as four it's a real game to figure out where the entity comes from and where it's going. First and foremost it's about uncertain pleasures."

Don't feel like decoding another Woodsist LP? There's more. Other new arrivals include the new Field LP, new Ducktails LP, and the new Real Estate 7-inch, as well as the new Dischord remasters.

Used vinyl list after the jump.

USED VINYL: