The best of the entire weekend

The Dismemberment Plan, performing tonight at the Black Cat (sold out), and Saturday and Sunday (also sold out) at 9:30 Club.

I loathe to admit, but I've yet to earn my D-Plan stripes. It's not looking like this will be the weekend to do so either. In all matters Dismemberment Plan, I defer to long-time listener Jon Fischer:

You don't need a good reason to love a pop song, just a personal one. And while there are plenty of good reasons to love The Dismemberment Plan's classic 1999 album Emergency & I—it's wit, its omnivorousness, it's simplicity, its chutzpah—fans tend to default on more individual explanations...So here's my D-Plan story: I've seen the band at least half a dozen times, and while the 2007 reunion show wasn't the best, it sticks out for a reason any lover of the band will appreciate: I finally made it on stage during "The Ice of Boston."

Share your own piece Dismemberment Plan nostalgia in the comments!  And for more, check out Aaron Leitko's look at the considerable legacy of the band.

Best of Friday:

Yo La Tengo. With William Tyler. $20. 8 p.m. doors. 9:30 Club. Nevin Martell writes:

There was a time when the midway at the county fair wasn't just creepy carnies, deep-fried Twinkies, and impossible-to-win shooting galleries. Back in the day, you could get close and personal with carnie fixtures like the bearded lady, go head-to-head in an arm wrestling match with The Strongest Man in the World, or see the only six-headed shark in existence. Another intriguing fixture was the Wheel of Fate, which would reveal your future in a single spin. Yo La Tengo has revived this clairvoyant tradition for its latest tour. The trio's shows will be divided into two halves, with the first set determined by a spin of the wheel. Who knows what the evening has in store? One thing's for sure: It won't involve any carnies

Francis and the Lights. Solo piano performance. Free. 6 p.m. Millenium Stage. Kennedy Center.

I'm not sure what to expect from the admittedly groan-worthy "Francis Farewell Starlite," who usually helms immaculately produced '80s synth and funk with his band The Lights. Though adult contemporary rock hasn't yet had a proper quasi-ironic send-up and rebirth, it's not likely to happen tonight at the Kennedy Center. Francis is booked for a solo piano performance,  and if you're curious about the man's tightly controlled image, tonight might whet your appetite enough to see more once he returns to DC9 in April.

Friday Night Eclectic with RAtheMC. X.O., and AB the Pro. $10/$12 doors. 8 p.m. Strathmore

Best of Saturday:

Little Dragon. Billy Goat. $15/$18. 9:00 p.m. doors. Black Cat.

In a quick game of word association, you might say "little dragon," and I'd reply "Peter, Paul, and Mary." My first image would be a lilting song from the mouths of babes, not genre-defying electro-dance stuff from the mouth of a Swedish-Japanese singer named Yukumi. A few years in the world of dance-pop might as well be a lifetime in most other genres. The band has significantly risen through the ranks, often with antlers all akimbo, to collaborate with the likes of TV on the Radio and Gorillaz. Whether those endorsements sway you or not, the lush landscape of "Twice" from their self-titled sophomore album just might.

Evan Dando. Juliana Hatfield. with Lady Lamp the Beekeeper. $20. 9:00 p.m. Iota Club.

Best of Sunday:

Eddie Palmieri – Brian Lynch Quartet.

Steve Kiviat is one of many who notes that were Puerto Rican pianist Eddie Palmieri Anglo,  he would be recognized as one of America's greatest musicians, and not just a top-notch Latin-jazz keyboardist." Collaborating with trumpeter Brian Lynch, Palmieri "is bringing his special brand of thundering ivory-bashing and animated between-song patter" to Blues Alley for the weekend. Piano and Trumpet. 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

An Acoustic Evening with Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt. SOLD OUT. Birchmere.

The Rest of Friday:
Javelin. 9 p.m. Free! Kay Spiritual Center. American University.
Marsha Ambrosius (of Floetry) at The Park at 14th. 7 p.m. show. Call for more information.
The Sights. The Blackberry Belles. The Milkstains. $8. 9:30 p.m. show. The Red Palace. 18+.
Du Brut. The Jones. Borracho. 9 p.m. show. $10. Rock & Roll Hotel. Joe Rathbone. With Shane Cooley and Bess Rodgers. $7. 8 p.m. show. Ebenezer's Coffeehouse.
Beatlemania Now. $55-$75. 8 p.m. Warner Theatre.
Kessler, Williams, Antonuick, Hawkins Quartet. 9 and 11 p.m. Twins Jazz.

Saturday:

U.S. Royalty. The Rassle. Honey House. $10/$12. 9:30 p.m. show. Rock & Roll Hotel.
Tank. Jay Hayden. $25. 8:00 p.m. Cramton Auditorium.
Chrisette Michele. 7:30 p.m. Birchmere. SOLD OUT.

Sunday:
John McCauley and Ian O'Neil of Deer Tick. The Shivers. $12. 8:30 p.m. show. Rock & Roll Hotel.

Photo illustration by Brooke Hatfield.

• Leor Galil profiles D.C. grindcore trio Magrudergrind, who pissed off some of their peers by releasing an EP through Scion, the Toyota brand. But why are grindcore kids still hung up over "selling out" debates?
• Joe Warminsky reviews the debut full-length of earnest D.C. rockers U.S. Royalty, and finds it lacking in danger.
• David Dunlap Jr. reviews the new album by Tennis, whose girl-group-mining indie pop he finds a little too tedious.
• Tricia Olszewski reviews two films involving very distraught people: Another Year and The Company Men.
• Chris Klimek reviews Theater J's Return to Haifa, about an encounter between a Palestinian family and an Israeli one.
• In One Track Mind, Ryan Little talks to noisy art-poppers Phonic Riot about their new cassette.
• City Lights: Yo La Tengo! The Dismemberment Plan! Eddie Palmieri! Reel Injun! The video art of Brandon Morse! The Human Resources Manager! 9500 Liberty!

Oh, Moz. You love the colder months, don't you? The alienated king of isolation makes music for times such as these. As The Smiths perform "Bigmouth Strikes Again/Vicar In A Tutu," take time to appreciate the soon-to-be-bare branches in your neighborhood.

With soft harmonies that pine for a lover's arms, you can almost hear a fall wind beneath Ida's quiet songcraft. "Shotgun," one of its earliest pieces, brings home the seasonal change of guard.

The distant, reverbed vocals on Deleted Scenes' "Fake IDs" imply a calm longing, suitably complimenting the transitory weather. Mildly melancholic chords ask for permanence, when there is none. This Friday, the band will be tugging pre-einter heartstrings at Iota in Arlington.

BONUS: What? I left out the most obvious choice? Well, it's a pretty literal take on today's theme, but the music is more than appropriate (and this is a pretty nice performance). So, here it is folks, Yo La Tengo's "Autumn Sweater."

There's a reason AT&T has recently been using the long-deceased Nick Drake's well-crafted folk music to hock its wares—his music evokes such an immediate nostalgia and authenticity that it's easy to forget the company's coverage is terrible. Drop the needle on "Which Will" (or really anything from Pink Moon), and get lost in it.

The masters of longevity, Yo La Tengo, have stuck around for over two decades because they've got heart. "Our Way To Fall" shows the band at its softest and most sentimental, with honest, conversational lyrics that somehow escape sounding overly maudlin. If nothing else, the fact that songwriters Ira and Georgia have made it as both a band and a couple for this long ought to be inspiration enough to believe in new love.

The ever-adorable Vandaveer, which most often tours as a brother-sister duo, is deeply charming with its fragile harmonies. "Dig Down Deep" utilizes a rousing—but not too rousing—three-quarter time to get the blood flowing. If all goes well, maybe you can bring your new sweetheart to see Vandaveer play at Jammin' Java in Vienna, Va., this Thursday.

Alex Chilton has passed away. Whether you know it or not, you owe half your music collection to that man. And indie rock owes almost everything.

Here is a clip of Chilton with Yo La Tengo in 2007. I was at that show. I can remember when he popped up on stage as one of the surprise guests. I can remember screaming like a kid.  Now, watching this, it just gives me goosebumps.

Arts Desk contributor Brandon Wu photographs a lot of shows, but for our Music in Review issue, he did a 180 and pointed his camera at the crowds. His photo essay includes fans of Metallica, Lady Gaga (above), Britney Spears, Mates of State, Mudvayne, Yo La Tengo, and more. Check it out here.

Because I wrote about Title Tracks' versions of songs by The Flamin' Groovies and The Merseybeats earlier this week, and because Bob Dylan's truly atrocious new disc of Christmas standards leaked yesterday, I've been thinking a lot about covers.

Let's put aside the illustrious history of ill-advised tributes (read: the entire Me First and the Gimme Gimmes oeuvre). A good cover can both satisfy a simple, dorky impulse—to hear one artist you admire spin another in an interesting way—and prove rather instructional. For example, it can tell you that Title Tracks frontman John Davis is probably a sucker for semi-obscure gems (he is), as well as a student of infectious, pop-classicist hooks. With that in mind, I've collected some recent covers by local artists.

My short list, after the jump, is fairly folk- and indie-centric, and by no means complete. Tell me what I missed in the comments.

These United States and Vandaveer—the folky side project of  TUS's bassist, Mark Heidinger—contributed cuts to Dylan Mania, a French tribute compilation that slipped under the radar when it dropped in May. Vandaveer's take on "The Man In Me" is fairly straightforward, if not nearly as creepy and self-satisfied as the 1970 original. These United States' version of "To Ramona," meanwhile, is more animated and unhinged, benefiting greatly from a galloping rhythm and some thickly applied pedal steel. You can hear both songs on the groups' respective MySpace pages.

Ugly Purple Sweater has a cover of the Woody Guthrie-penned folk standard "This Land Is Your Land" up on its MySpace page. No surprises here, really—except that the duo has tweaked the title a bit, and decorated the song with a fairly silly falsetto. Which, strangely, is pretty awesome.

Last Tide—whom I wrote about in this week's One Track Mind—includes a swirling, eerie cover of Talking Heads' "Memories Can't Wait" in its live set. Cover Me—a blog that, yes, covers covers—has an mp3 of the song from the band's recent appearance on WMUC’s Third Rail Radio program. Also, Last Tide frontman Nate Frey's other band, Detox Retox, does an, um, interesting cover of Joy Division's "Transmission":

The gloomy art-punk outfit Screen Vinyl Image taps one of its sonic forebears in this live cover of an early Slowdive B-side. Bonus! The woozy video quality and seizure-inducing lights are straight out of any shoegaze music vid circa 1989:

Ted Leo doesn't make music in the District anymore, but I like his tense, crescendoing cover of Robert Pollard's "The Numbered Head"—from the recent Score! 20 Years Of Merge Records: The Covers! comp—enough to include it here. You can stream the song at the Merge Records online store. It's got nothing, though, on the all-adrenaline cover of "Suspect Device" that Leo played at Fort Reno a few years ago.

Yo La Tengo hails from Hoboken, N.J, but the group played a pair of (kinda) D.C.-related covers at its 9:30 Club show recently: "Firecracker, Firecracker," by Half Japanese, and "Nervous Breakdown," which L.A.'s Black Flag wrote about three years before the District-born Henry Rollins joined the group. Rollins' provenance was a shaky excuse for Yo La Tengo to play the song, but the crowd was happy to forgive the trio. You can stream the entire set at NPR.

Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley, of Hoboken, N.J.'s Yo La Tengo, are married. Despite the rumors, Matt Johnson and Kim Schifino, better known as the Brooklyn band Matt & Kim, are not.

At Matt & Kim's sold-out show at the Black Cat Wednesday, Schifino showed off what has to be indie pop's most expressive face, while Johnson—with his Von Trapp good looks and overstimulated banter—spent half of the band's hyperactive set pogoing on his stool. No drums-and-keys duo is more animated and entertaining, nor more modest, nor more, well, annoying. The set was all minute-long brat-pop nuggets and synthed-up arena themes ("Rock And Roll Part 2," "The Final Countdown," ODB's "Shimmy Shimmy Ya"), and the crowd (youngish) ate it up. As for me, it was hard to begrudge Johnson and Schifino their success: They were too adorable.

Kaplan and Hubley (along with their bandmate James McNew) offer little in the way of body language. A shared smile and a quip from Kaplan after the couple forgot the lyrics to a Beach Boys cover ("Farmer's Daughter") was about all the physical rapport on display at a sold-out 9:30 Club last night. Here was a headier affair, and a nerdier one: Yo La Tengo opened with an acid test ("Here To Fall"), continued with 10-plus minutes of deep drone and blissed-out harmonies ("More Stars Than There Are In Heaven"), dug deep into its repertory (covers of Black Flag and Half Japanese), and even deeper into its celebrated discography (I counted a half-dozen crowd-pleasers, give or take).

Its indie cred and noisy propensity notwithstanding, Yo La Tengo has long nurtured a profoundly poppy sensibility while just as often thriving on repetition; their best songs—of which the band played quite a few last night, including "Autumn Sweater," "Tom Courtney," and "Sugarcube"—combine those impulses. To wit: Yo La Tengo's may be the smartest take on record-collector rock.

For "Avalon Or Someone Very Similar," from Yo La Tengo's new Popular Songs album, the trio scrapped the studio version's Bacharachian sheen, favoring noisy economy. In "Let's Save Tony Orlando's House," meanwhile, the group hewed closer to the original's cool, sophistipop reading. Even during its most consciously unintellectual songs—like "Periodically Triple Or Double," which sports the lyric "I never read Proust/seems a little too long"—Yo La Tengo appeared less like a band playing its material than one thinking about it out loud. Once or twice, that meant longish, slow-building songs best consumed in solitude, not in a packed club. Most of the time, it meant a nearly perfect Yo La Tengo show.

If Yo La Tengo demands patience and rewards it with smart pop, Matt & Kim make music for short attention spans—think loud drums, farty bass lines, carnivalesque melodies, and infectious choruses about nothing in particular. At one point Johnson, who plays keyboards and sings, told his giddy audience that "Daylight," from the band's recent album Grand, is the most meaningful song he's written. Its chorus goes like this: "In the daylight, I don’t pick up my phone/cause in the daylight anywhere feels like home." Would that we all had it so good.

Photo from Brando Wu's (really awesome) set. You can listen to the complete Yo La Tengo show at NPR.

Jon Fischer will be recapping last night's Yo La Tengo show at the 9:30 Club. In the meantime, check out some photos from the evening after the jump and at the full gallery.

The next four photos, plus the headline shot, are all from the awesome, lengthy Ira Kaplan guitar freakout that is "Pass the Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind."

Full gallery here.

"When it comes to interviews , it’s whatever people ask, and I try my best not to answer it," said Ira Kaplan, Yo La Tengo's jocular guitarist and singer, at the end of our phone chat yesterday, dodging the most customary of questions: "Do you have anything else to add?"

It wasn't his first demurral. I floated a few theories about the deceptively simple title of the Hoboken, N.J., trio's excellent new album, Popular Songs—how the band has long been indie rock's best synthesizer of cool aesthetic and good (read: rock-nerd) taste, and how now, more than ever, the group seems to be playing with ideas of nostalgia and shifting media. "Well I think that ... ," Kaplan said, trailing off. Strike one. "I’m not really going to tell you. We had the title for a while, and when we approached [cover artist] Dario Robleto about using his work, the way he used physical materials in his work seemed to really resonate with the title."

Our conversation turned to the group's current tour (Kaplan and his bandmates, drummer and singer Georgia Hubley and bassist James McNew, perform tomorrow night at the 9:30 Club) and then back to the new album—specifically, its dramatic string arrangements by the Chicago bass player Richard Evans. I told Kaplan that the ominous, swooping arrangement on "Here To Fall"—the album's opener—reminded me of a Serge Gainsbourg song. Strike two. "I suspect Richard wasn’t thinking of Serge Gainsbourg. Richard made some incredible records in the '50s and '60s, so maybe it’s that Serge Gainsbourg heard what [Evans] was doing. Or maybe great minds just think alike."

Things picked up as we discussed "If It's True," a concise love song whose effervescent bass line and amorous orchestrations wouldn't feel out of place on a vintage Impressions record: "That was a song that structurally didn’t change that much. When we were rehearsing it I was primarily playing piano"—not Kaplan's strongest instrument, he conceded—"so James carried some of the more melodic weight. He started playing this much more complicated bass line and the song was getting much more into the Motown bag, and it had kind of started there to begin with. At an earlier point in the band's life, if we had a song that was really Motown, we’d come up with an element that would make it less so, but lately, we try to come up with an element that will make it more so."

He said that sometimes a song will emerge fully formed, Athena-style, from the band's head—like "Avalon Or Someone Very Similar," the bounciest slice of AM pop on Popular Songs. Most of the time, though, "our writing tends to be pretty loose," Kaplan said. “Almost every song has some sort of genesis as one of these long sprawling things."

Given that methodology—in which songs are molded more than written—Yo La Tengo's prolificness can be surprising: In 2009 alone, the group has released a proper album, a film score (Adventureland), and a disc of covers under a pseudonym (Condo Fucks' Fuckbook). "In some ways it becomes a decision to not do [nonalbum projects]," Kaplan said, "because somebody asks you do something and it seems like such a cool opportunity. And at a certain point we realized we hadn’t done a record in a long time. 'Maybe we should say no.'

"Basically we went to Matador [Records, the band's longtime label] and said, 'If we were to put out a record, what day would be good for you? What day would you shoot for?' And they looked at their record schedule and said Sept. 8. And we used that as a finish line."

Kaplan said Yo La Tengo will tour through the rest of 2009—a year that, not coincidentally, marks the band's 25th anniversary. And so I posed the obvious question. "Is it weird? It is a little weird," Kaplan said. "It’s like being on a long line, and you feel the line's not moving, and then you look behind you and see how many people have got on the line, and you say, 'I guess I am moving.'"

Yo La Tengo plays with Endless Boogie tomorrow night at the 9:30 Club. Tickets are $20, and doors open at 7 p.m. Photo courtesy of Yo La Tengo's MySpace page.