A bit of a slow week in live music, with a significant chunk of local bands and would-be touring acts making the annual trek down to Austin for SXSW. There are still a handful of great show options, however, with politically charged poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron at Yoshi's Tuesday and Wednesday, droney locals Common Eider King Eider at Amnesia Thursday and experimental act Xiu Xiu at Bottom of the Hill Saturday.
Our featured band this week is Seattle's Past Lives, who play a pre-SXSW show at the Elbo Room tonight. While prominently featuring four members of the sadly defunct spastic hardcore-leaning outfit The Blood Brothers, Past Lives take on post-punk has more in common with Gang of Four and Fugazi than it does with the admittedly noisy band from which the project first spawned. Yet while the sound here is a bit tamed, the raw power and abundant talent that made The Blood Brothers so memorable has hardly disappeared -- the quartet absolutely blew us away with their high energy Hemlock performance last March, and their debut LP Tapestry of Webs is one of our favorite albums to come out this year. It is an absolutely stacked bill with previously profiled Clipd Beaks, local krautrock revivalist Bronze and Portland's Get Hustle rounding out the night -- this one is not to be missed.
Monday, March 15th
Get Hustle, Past Lives, Clipd Beaks, Bronze @ Elbo Room $10
Efterklang, Tartufi, Vir @ Bottom of the Hill $12
Balkan Beat Box, Kid
