Weekends like this make me want to say things like, “Hey, there sure are a lot of concerts going on this weekend.” Which of course is kind of an asinine statement—this is D.C., it’s a city, there are always a lot of concerts going on. What I really mean is, “There are a lot of concerts I want to see this weekend,” but that doesn’t sound nearly as interesting.

Nevertheless, here are my picks for this weekend:

Friday:

• Woven Hand at Iota. When I first heard the delightful genre nomenclature “death country,” it was in reference to the band 16 Horsepower, whose principal composer moved on to form Woven Hand, a dirgey indie-rock group whose Christian-themed lyrics focus on humanity’s failings in the face of an angry God. Not preachy; indeed, almost doomy in a way. Perfect Friday night material!
• Little Women at Velvet Lounge. I profiled these guys a while back—if you like the aggressive punk-jazz in the vein of John Zorn’s more out-there band stuff, you should be at this show.
• Bob Drake at Orion Sound Studios. Orion’s a recording studio south of Baltimore that hosts a series of progressive rock concerts every spring and fall. Bob Drake is an indescribable musician, a former member of American avant-rockers Thinking Plague and possessor of a bizarre, humorous, and utterly unique solo discography. He recently finished mastering a 10-disc box set chronicling the live exploits of British improvisational rock pioneers Henry Cow, and is on a short tour with a four-piece band.

Saturday:

• Todesbonden at Jammin’ Java. Yes, the D.C. area has its own female-fronted gothic metal band, and a pretty good one at that. Todesbonden recently released their first full-length record, Sleep Now, Quiet Forest, and to celebrate are playing this, their first live show in two years. Early show; Todesbonden’s set starts at 6pm, followed by a set from another D.C. area gothic metal band, Brave.
• Salome (pictured above) at the Red and the Black. Listening to gothic metal often makes me want to listen to the heavier stuff, so I’ll be going here after the early show at Jammin’ Java. I wrote about being pleasantly surprised by this Annandale-based doom metal band a few months ago, and I’m going back for more. Also taking the stage at this show are raucous Seattle punk-rockers Akimbo.
• Kayo Dot at Orion Sound Studios. They’re opening for Pelican at the Black Cat next month, but if you can’t catch that show and you have a taste for nearly incomprehensibly complex avant-metal, here’s your chance.

Sunday:

• Lykke Li at the Black Cat. Yeah, so Swedish pop doesn’t really fit in with everything else I’ve pimped above, but hey, at the end of this weekend of dark, depressing music I could use something to pick me up.

Tribute bands are a funny thing. With no attempt at originality expected, they are free to hone their craft by aping, as closely as possible, the band from which they draw inspiration. By this standard, The Australian Pink Floyd Show (hereafter “Aussie Floyd”) are a top-notch act, nailing all the important stuff for Pink Floyd fans: the visuals, the spacy keyboards, that singular guitar tone. The only place they miss the mark slightly is in the vocals: their vocalist singing Roger Waters’ parts doesn’t quite have that same nasal, silghtly maniacal tone.

Aussie Floyd played the Warner Theatre on Sunday night, complete with elaborate stage show, lasers, backing dancers/vocalists… the works. They played The Wall in its entirety and then a lengthy “greatest hits” encore. I used to be an embarrassingly dedicated Pink Floyd fanboy, but The Wall has never been my favorite of theirs. (When Aussie Floyd played last year at the Strathmore, my favorite part was when they broke out “Set the Controls For the Heart of the Sun.”) Still, it was hard not to be engaged by this kind of theatrical performance, especially for someone like me more used to small shows at grungy clubs.

Sure enough, the audience—my completely unscientific sampling of the die-hards in the front row indicated a mix of fans who have seen “the real thing” multiple times and younger types who just missed Pink Floyd’s last tour in 1994—ate it up. “Comfortably Numb,” with a guitar solo worthy of those that David Gilmour used to rattle off regularly, earned a raucous standing ovation. “Run Like Hell,” accompanied by a seizure-inducing barrage of lasers and strobes, induced an epidemic of testosterone-filled fist-pumping. But perhaps most poignantly, the encore included a moving rendition of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” which seemed especially appropriate given the recent passing of Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright.

More photos at Flickr.

The Residents performed their latest musical/theatrical concept, “The Bunny Boy,” at a seated 9:30 Club show last night—our resident Residents expert, Mike West, has posted a review, but here are the images. Click on any image for a bigger version, or see lots more here at Flickr.

Strange things are coming to the 9:30 Club tonight. Here’s a bit of footage from legendary experimental rockers The Residents‘ show last week in Santa Cruz, Calif., the first stop on their tour supporting their new album, The Bunny Boy:

The Residents play at 8:30 p.m. tonight in a rare seated show at the 9:30.

Just announced: the band behind this unbelievably hilarious video, Russia’s ANJ, is playing at Jaxx on October 27.

Go on, watch the video. I’ll wait.

Let’s ignore the uncomfortably blatant sexism here for a second. Any video featuring a muscle-bound, gladiatorial Mikhail Gorbachev killing evil Stalin zombies by shooting lasers out of his eyes, thus ushering in a new era of Twinkie-eating capitalist prosperity, must be good. OK, so the music is pretty bad, but that’s splitting hairs.

It gets better: ANJ is opening for none other than Yngwie Malmsteen. I can’t go to this show, if only because my head would probably explode at the terrible awesomeness (awesome terribleness?) of it all.

As promised, from the show last Sunday evening. These three sure put on a visually appealing show, and here’s the evidence. Some samples below.

Amorphis (melodic folk metal from Finland):

Samael (industrial/electronic metal from Switzerland):

Virgin Black (goth/doom/classical metal from Australia):

The Green Evening Requiem (opening; black-ish metal from Philly):

And you’ve seen the ones of Dark Dissolve, the first opening band.

A frequent knock on Jaxx, the metal-oriented club out in Springfield, is that it never seems to book shows with fewer than five bands. If there’s a big headliner in town, Jaxx will invariably stick four local bands onto the bill to warm things up. It’s a great gesture for local musicians, but the concertgoer interested in an efficient in-and-out experience is likely to be frustrated.

Sometimes, though, there are pleasant surprises. Last night, a diverse lineup of metal bands—Amorphis from Finland, Samael from Switzerland, and Virgin Black from Australia—hit Jaxx, and sure enough, there were a couple openers. For one of them, D.C.’s Dark Dissolve, it was their first public performance ever, which is pretty neat. Also pretty neat is that they had a harp onstage. Also pretty neat is that they put on a good show. No one would have guessed they’d never played live in public before until the singer said so towards the end of their set. (Three of the members did play together in The Groaning.)

Dark Dissolve played a melodic, straightforward brand of gothic rock—I only caught three songs or so of their set (but then they were the first group on the bill so that may have been most of it), but I enjoyed what I heard; their violinist stood out a bit as the one who seemed to hold the songs together and give them a unique twist. My only complaint was that I couldn’t really hear the harp—something tells me the sound guys at Jaxx might not be used to working a harp into the mix. Looking forward to hearing what these folks come up with in time.

I’ll be posting a few photos from all five bands that played last night soon.

The pairing of venerable Scottish post-rockers Mogwai with Fuck Buttons, a knob-twiddling duo who weave subtle melodies through waves of tribal noise, is inspiring. Both groups make mostly instrumental soundscapes, but go about it in entirely different ways. Mogwai (pictured above) use traditional rock instruments; Fuck Buttons use Nintendo GameBoys, toy microphones, laptops, and whatever else seems to strike their fancy. Both of them were awesome last night at the 9:30 Club.

Fuck Buttons opened, and while two dudes fiddling with toys on a table onstage isn’t the most visually interesting thing ever, their music was absolutely enveloping. I recognized a bunch of stuff off of their full-length, Street Horrrsing, but it was tough to make out individual pieces as every song ran into the next, creating an uninterrupted, gloriously noisy performance. The music was repetitive, but always with some element of sonic interest: the occasional yawping vocals, live drumming, gorgeous melody, or weird sound coming from an unidentifiable source served to ensure that the music never got boring.

By the time Fuck Buttons finished their set, the club was packed, a marked difference from the lackluster audience that greeted Mogwai at their last show here back in 2006. Mogwai came on at precisely 9:30 p.m., opening with the first song from their first full-length, “Yes! I Am a Long Way From Home.” From there, their set meandered through pieces old and new, but mostly stuck to the quieter, lower-key compositions for which the band have become known. Mogwai has certainly mellowed with age, and fans can (and do) debate whether or not that’s a good thing, but it’s beyond dispute that they now do the “quiet and pretty” thing very, very well.

But last night they also proved that they can still rock. The set closed with the staple “Like Herod”—the song singlehandedly responsible for getting a decade of critics to lazily refer to Mogwai as “that soft-loud-soft band” - which then merged seamlessly into “Batcat,” the token loud rock song from Mogwai’s forthcoming new album, The Hawk is Howling (which you can hear in full on their MySpace page). It was an explosive ending that left the crowd cheering for more. More, of course, is what we got, and it came in the form of an encore that consisted of two more deliriously satisfying loud numbers—”Christmas Steps” and, of course, the noisy closer “My Father My King.” It’s as if the band structured their setlist to lull casual fans to sleep before blowing their eardrums out.

It’s worth noting that the sound mix was among the best I’ve ever heard at the 9:30 Club; each of Mogwai’s five instrumentalists stood out perfectly, even when picking a quiet guitar line amidst a sea of howling feedback. A good mix is pretty essential to music like this, which thrives on subtleties buried underneath walls of sound.

As usual, there are more photos here at Flickr.

In my show preview I said these two bands were musically way over the top. Turns out, they’re visually way over the top too: Sigh featured an extremely energetic frontwoman on sax and vocals, and while she naturally drew the bulk of attention (her choice of wardrobe was likely a factor here), bandleader Mirai Kawashima, pictured above, was one of the more animated keyboardists I’ve ever seen. Before them, Unexpect left the entire stage in front of the drum riser wide open—pedals, mic stands, etc all shoved to the side—to give them room to dance, headbang, and generally jump around spastically with massive amounts of hair flying everywhere.

Musically, Sigh were fun, although much more guitar-oriented than they are on record—though that might have just been because the keyboard and sax were mixed way too low. Unexpect’s live show seems to be getting better all the time, which makes sense since they never seem to stop touring. The two opening bands were both pretty solid. All in all a good night for a metalhead; shame the club wasn’t anywhere near packed (it was actually the emptiest I’ve ever seen Jaxx, which usually seems to get good attendance).

Tons more photos are here at Flickr, but here are some highlights from Sigh:

And a few from Unexpect:

If you’re in the mood for some absurd circus metal, tonight’s your night to head out to the ‘burbs. Two of the most ridiculously over-the-top experimental metal acts you’ll ever hear are headlining a night at Jaxx in Springfield. Japan’s Sigh and Quebec’s Unexpect (pictured) play the kind of symphonic metal that you can’t help but laugh at, at least at first, because it’s just so bombastic and (some might say) pretentious.

But criticizing either of these groups for being too bombastic is kind of like criticizing Britney Spears for being too pop. It might be a meaningful statement of opinion, but as any kind of objective description or evaluation it just misses the point. These bands revel in their shamelessness and take bombast to the level of art form. If there was ever anything deserving of the slightly horrifying label “prog metal,” these guys are it.

If that sounds awful, consider this: I’ve seen Unexpect play Jaxx twice already this year, and each time I saw them I came away a bigger fan. After spending enough time with their records to actually figure out what’s going on in their insanely twisty compositions, a certain naive charm emerges. You have to admire bands like these who are completely unafraid to throw it all out on the table at once - hitting the listener with obvious jazz, rock, metal and classical influences one after the other.

Additionally, Sigh are kind of a historically significant band, as the only non-Scandinavian group that was signed by the infamous and short-lived Øystein Aarseth (aka Euronymous) to his infamous and short-lived Deathlike Silence Productions label. If that’s not black metal cred, nothing is.