There’s a whole wide spectrum of interesting international music events in the D.C. area this weekend. While there’s no denying that some international music is marketed to 50-something white guy NPR listeners, here in the D.C. area many international concerts are instead aimed at emigres from the respective countries. That’s the case with many of this weekend’s shows. But whether or not one fits into a targeted demographic, these shows are worth checking out.

Friday night May 2nd brings the first of a trio of May salsa shows. Orquesta Guayacan from Colombia meshes polished, romantic vocals with booming horns and a percussive clave beat. They’ll be with Los Internacionales del Vallenato con Wilmer Manga & Pete Rodgers at El Boqueron II, 1330 East Gude Drive, in Rockville. Advertised only in the Spanish-language media, expect the club’s large dancefloor to be filled with dancing couples (many familiar with the group from back home).

Meanwhile, back in-town at the Kennedy Center, Luciana Souza, a Brazilian female singer most recently heard on Herbie Hancock’s Grammy album of the year, brings her folk, bossa nova and jazz stylings to the Center’s Family Theater for two shows at 7:30 and 9:30.

Nothing ever starts early at Zanzibar on the Waterfront, but if you’re willing to wait around till well after midnight Friday night (Saturday morning), longtime Jamaican sweet-voiced crooner Luciano headlines a reggae triple-bill. His latest “Jah is My Navigator” has received much acclaim.

Saturday night May 3rd offers a tribute to an artist, the late Andy Palacio from Belize, whose 2007 CD did impress those middle age American world music tastemakers and fans. Sadly, the 40-something Palacio suddenly died in January just as he was preparing for a U.S. tour. So instead Lisner Auditorium will be offering a free homage at 8 p.m. to Palacio’s pop, which combined West African, Arawak Indian and European influences. The show will feature Palacio’s band the Garifuna Collective, all women group Umalali, and others.

Sunday May 4th is the 2nd salsa show of the month–the Spanish Harlem Orchestra at the University of Mayland’s Clarice Smith Center at 7:30(the third one is El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico on May 17th at the Dulles Expo Center). This frequently touring ensemble that includes “salsa dura” (hard salsa) trombonist Jimmy Bosch, is sneered at by some purists simply because they play more crossover gigs and get more Anglo media attention than other salsa combos, but don’t hold that against them. Plus, I’ve seen folks dance in the aisles at the Clarice Smith Center, so this may just as lively a function as the other weekend Spanish-language gigs (none of which have received any Cinco de Mayo related publicity, by the way).

Last night, seven local bands gathered at La Casa to play a benefit show for victims of the Mt. Pleasant Fire. Proceeds (I’m still waiting on a figure) will go to Neighbor’s Consejo. A round-up of the line-up:

1. The Coats. I love the Coats. This three-piece does the ol’ switcharoo, taking turns on guitar, bass, drums, and keys. They rock hardest on the keys. They sound kind of like the Doors, except good! Boy, do I hate the Doors.

2. Wild Fictions. I missed most of this band’s set while buying a chocolate donut from the 7-Eleven down the street. I’m sure Wild Fictions was just as delicious.

3. Fever. The high-concept catch behind this benefit was that every band had to pen an original song entitled “Queen of the Water Dolphins.” Fever—first a two-piece, now a new and improved three—was the only band to pull off an ode to Her Majesty that deserves to stick around for future shows.

4. Kitty Hawk. I had never heard this band before. They whisked me away to a tropical paradise of calypso beats and casually tied forehead bandanas. And rock.

5. US Royalty. I’m not sure what it is about this band, but when lead singer John Thornley stripped down from a sweater to a button-down to, finally, a light-pink, deep v-neck tee, the crowd went fucking wild. The key to the band’s je ne sais quoi may be their haircuts: all immaculate. There’s something almost too polished about them … they may be androids.

6. Ra Ra Rasputin. Sexy.

7. Sugarcane Crawl. I first saw this band around six months ago. I was immediately drawn to the matching red, wavy mullets sported by two of the band’s members (seriously, check out the pictures). I later learned that they worked for Vidal Sassoon, so I was a little surprised that their haircuts were roughly the same about half a year later. They broke a lamp.

Update, 1:52 p.m.: The benefit raised $1,354.

Friday night is apparently retro night at the Velvet Lounge as the three bands on the bill all look back. While revivalism has its drawbacks, this trio appear to reach into the past in interesting ways.

Locals Black & Tan Fantasy, featuring onetime Fugazi percussionist Jerry Busher, bassist Ashish Vyas (who has played with Thievery Corporation), and busy keyboardist Will Rast go for American funk and soul.

B & TF, named after a film featuring Duke Ellington, cite James Brown, Stax, Sly and the Family Stone, although the cuts on their MySpace page remind one of the Meters.
On a visit to Peru, Frenchman Olivier Conan, owner of the Barbes club and indie label in New York City, discovered ’60s Peruvian chicha music. Named after a corn liquor reportedly favored by the Incas, chicha was Latin American cumbia gone garage rock. Conan quickly snatched up all the records in the style that he could find. Last year he released a fine collection of some of these songs entitled “The Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias from Peru.” Not satisfied with simply reissuing this stuff, Conan was also playing it himself. Soon Chicha Libre was born. With Conan on cuatro and other band members on farfisa, bongos, bass, and guitar, the group recently released “Sonido Amazonico!” At times more loungey than psychedelic, the cd nevertheless is a fascinating look back on an era that most never knew existed.

Os Magrelos, from Richmond, rounds out the night by looking back instead to Brazilian samba and funky ’70s jazz-rock sounds.

The show starts at 10 p.m.

The much-anticipated Green Apple Festival got doused with sobering sogginess yesterday, on what would have been the greatest 4/20 spectacle since 1908. Yeah, there’s the well-observed irony that Mother Nature rained on her own parade…yeah, there’s the fact that the day was more gray than green…and of course Toots, the Roots, and Gov’t Mule in toto (among others) never even made it to the stage.
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Thanks to the 2003 focus on Mali at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, repeated appearances by Tinariwen, and the recent “Art of Being Tuareg” exhibit (with art and video) at the Museum of African Art, North African desert nomad music is not a complete novelty in this town. But it’s not a sound you hear regularly, so tonight’s Etran Finatawa appearance at Iota should still prove unique. Formed in 2004 from members of the Tuareg and Woodabe tribes that have often feuded in Niger, this ensemble’s second effort, “Desert Crossroads,” melds hypnotic African blues electric guitar with calabash percussion and chanted folkloric vocals. While the vocals are an acquired taste, the guitar and percussion draw you right in.

Just like the Old Days, 9353 is gigging around town. Just like the Old Days, 9353 is making cool posters. Just like the Old Days, 9353 singer Bruce Miles Hellington is covering every available surface in said town with said posters. “9353 has never sounded better than it does at this moment! what’s that about?” Hellington says in an e-mail, adding in another that the dates on the poster are a little wonky: “the last one is cancelled and the next to the last one is iffy,” he says. Still, that’s at least three chances to catch the last shows in which 9353 will be “playing exclusively oldies” Hellington says. Below the jump, 9353’s new poster.
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When your stock-in-trade is arch white-boy funk–the kind that boosted a thousand launch parties in the dot-com ’90s–the second act of your career is bound to be a little clumsy and full of odd moves. Hey, you started out odd. So when Mike Doughty, former Soul Coughing frontman and Suicide Girls photog, played the 9:30 Club on Saturday night, he closed up the main set with a cover of Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler,” a tune he included on a 2005 EP. Why might he do such a thing?

1. Mike Doughty Was Being Amusingly Ironic The first single from his new album, Golden Delicious, is called “27 Jennifers,” and his MySpace page has 27 Jennifers, Jennys, etc, in his top friends list. And toward the end of 9:30 Club set, he warned the crowd that he and his band would dispense with the usual encore rigmarole and instead just stand with their backs turned for a few seconds. So, playing a ditty about a guy who gets conned out of whiskey and cigarettes in exchange for some useless poker advice before cranking out the fan favorites? Total irony move.

2. Mike Doughty Is Not Being Ironic at All and Instead Admires the Impressive Structural Integrity of “The Gambler,” Which, to the Best of My Knowledge, Is the Only Pop Song to Inspire a Made for TV Movie “It really, REALLY wasn’t intended to be ironic,” Doughty told Austinist last October. “It’s a great song! I think a lot of things that are considered hipster-irony-statements are in fact sincere–the artifacts that get re-framed as “irony” are usually really beautiful things.”

3. Doughty Sincerely Loves the Songcraft of “The Gambler” but Cannot Effectively Argue That Point to His Target Audience Without Contriving Complex Framing Devices With Which to Swaddle His Cover of It Doughty isn’t good about putting words in a straight line–if he were alive three generations ago he’d be writing Dadaist sound poems. The whole point of Soul Coughing’s lyrics were words that sounded fun and rubbery bouncing off the beats, and now that he’s kinda-sorta a singer-songwriter he’s having a tough time making a simple point. “Busting Up a Starbucks” isn’t about that, really, and no song with the word “decathecting” in it is going to get into the Nashville Songwriters Foundation Hall of Fame. Incapable of being so articulate himself and desperately needing to, he reaches for the simplest tune he can think of. And when he finds one, he’s gonna hang onto it for a while. Mike Doughty knows when to hold ‘em.

Poet Saul Williams will be performing tonight, Monday, April 7th with his band at the 930 Club. Tickets are $15 - more info at 930.com.

D.C. has consistently been on Saul’s cosmic orbit, and he captured the feel of the district in the 1998 film Slam. A visionary artist, his most recent album, Niggy Tardust, was released online a la Radiohead last Novemeber.

Nike has licensed his new song “List of Demands” for use in a new ad campaign. Not everyone thinks its such a good idea. Some fans are even questioning if he has sold out. A student asked him about it and he breaks down his vision in this video. What do you think? When he says “we need to upgrade our idea of revolution and how it occurs,” is he right? Discuss.

Also worth checking: this interview with KRS-One on corporate cultural cash connections.

The D.C. area grindcore trio Pig Destroyer doesn’t play here–or anywhere–all that often. But, when it does, it plays on some pretty amazing bills.

The band’s label, Relapse, just announced a new four-date world tour which includes the band’s first-ever stop at the Black Cat:

PIG DESTROYER will first perform a local Washington, DC show on April 11th at the Black Cat along with label-mates MISERY INDEX as well as MAGRUDERGRIND and THE WAYWARD.

PIG DESTROYER will then head to Japan in early May for ‘Extreme The Dojo 20’ as headlined by the re-united AT THE GATES. Also on the tour are PIG DESTROYER labelmates THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN. A listing of PIG DESTROYER live dates can be found below with more tour plans to be announced shortly.

PIG DESTROYER Tour Dates:

April 11 Washington, DC Black Cat (w/ MISERY INDEX, MAGRUDERGRIND, THE WAYWARD)

***‘Extreme The Dojo 20’ Japanese Tour with AT THE GATES, THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN, MAYHEM, INTO ETERNITY***

May 8 Osaka, Japan Hatch

May 9 Nagoya, Japan Club Quattro

May 11 Tokyo, Japan Studio Coast

Here’s the band’s extreme MySpace page. And here’s an extreme article about Pig Destroyer from 2001 and an extreme review of the band’s latest, Phantom Limb.

I can’t really disagree with Anne Midgette, who reviewed the Washington National Opera’s new production of “The Flying Dutchman” in the Washington Post. It’s a mixed bag (Senta, who was played by Lori Phillips last night, was excellent). But I will say this: the most Wagnerian elements of the opera—the creepy ghosts, the enormous bass riffs, the lines about doomsday and eternal damnation—were enough to ward off the after-work sleepiness that I was feeling at the beginning of the overture. For a metal and horror fan such as myself, it’s a great story, and the abstract expressionist staging was well suited to the telling. Playing through April 10th.