1) The Brooklyn-based Cigarettes After Sex brings their cinematic, art-noir pop sound to Trees (2709 Elm, Dallas) on Thursday night. Don’t know what any of that means? Think Mazzy Star meets David Bowie’s “Cat People.” Doors to the all-ages show are at 7, and tickets are $16, available here. Doesn’t look like there’s an opening band, so treat that 8pm start time as a hard start time. This is the video for the band’s “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby”:
2) I’m gonna pack several big shows into this one for Friday night, all of which are both in Dallas and can be filed under “throwback.” The best of these is arguably Depeche Mode (with Warpaint, who, if you go, do not miss) at Starplex (3839 Fitzhugh), though lawn tickets will be over $60 by the time you get through the Ticketmaster surcharges. There’s also Reverend Horton Heat, Strung Out, and Fishbone at the Bomb Factory (2713 Canton), which sounds like a bill that would’ve been at the long-gone Galaxy Club or Deep Ellum Live 20 years ago; those tickets are a comparatively affordable $20, and the all-ages bill starts at 8 with a band called Los Kung Fu Monkeys. Oh shit, I guess I lied about that “all of which are in Dallas” claim, because the third one of these throwback shows is the Offspring and Sublime with Rome at the Pavilion at the Toyota Music Factory in Irving (316 West Las Colinas Blvd, Irving). I don’t know why you’d wanna go to that anyway, especially since lawn seats are $44.22 + whatever the Ticketmaster juice is. Yes, I know that “juice” means something else normally, but don’t you kinda feel like the surcharge on an already exorbitant ticket price to see some garbage bands is akin to the interest you’d pay to a loan shark? Anyway, here’s a Warpaint video, because of all of the bands mentioned, they are the one who I’d be the most excited to see:
3) Friday at MASS: Ronnie Heart, Deep Cuts, Plastic Picnic, and Saint Loretto. Deep Cuts is the name of a butcher shop in Dallas, but it is also the name of a dream pop band from Houston. Plastic Picnic are from Brooklyn by way of Seattle and list Built to Spill, Fleetwood Mac, and Beach Fossils as “artists we like,” so I assume they have good voices and reverb effects on their guitars. OKC’s Saint Loretto describes itself as New Wave, though I’m not sure what that means in 2017. Ronnie Heart is the headliner, and the combination of all these acts suggests to me that this will show will be similar to the scene at a 44 Bootlegger art show. Sadly, the event invite is scant on information. I bet $20 would be enough to get you in and buy you a couple drinks; if you get there at 8pm, that should be early enough to catch all the bands.
4) Division Brewing (506 Main, Arlingfun) has a show on Saturday entitled Heavy Mash, and you can probably guess what that means. For the sake of detail, the show features 10 stoner metal bands: Wo Fat, Maneaters of Tsavo, Stone Machine Electric, Cursus, Orcanaut, Boudain, FTW, The Dirty Seeds, Black on High, and Justinian. Justinian starts the festival off (in my book, 10 bands is a festival) at 2pm, and the show is all-ages. Over 21s get a free pint of Division Brewing beer with their $10 entry fee. Wo Fat played a thing in Berlin called Desertfest, which is sort of like a Fort Worth event called Oceanpalooza, but whatever – look how many people are packed into this show!
5) The Grotto’s Saturday night show is 21+ and only $5. It starts with Kites and Boomerangs at 10, who I think are like Vampire Weekend without the annoying parts, followed by Denton’s Soggy at 11. They describe themselves as mathy emo boys, so maybe they have a song called “Melodramatic Calculus.” The headliner, also from Denton, is an instrumental prog band called SeaFire. Since there’s two mentions of Denton in this post, here is a video of Kites and Boomerang playing up there at Harvest House:
FULL DISCLOSURE/WRITER BIO ALERT: per editorial suggestion, in addition to writing about music and other shit for the FW Weekly, I am an investor in a venue/bar called Main at Southside, colloquially known as MASS. I also bartend there, as well as the Boiled Owl Tavern, a bar that also hosts shows a few times a month. And, since we’re on the subject of warning you against what may be perceived as my own icky, unseemly self-promotion and/or conflicts of interest, I play bass in the following bands: Oil Boom, Son of Stan, Darth Vato. Sometimes I talk about one or more of those entities in this space, but I assure you that it has very little to do with my own vested interests; it just happens that the aforementioned venues and bands are part of the Fort Worth music scene, and this music scene is something I care very passionately about, as I have been part of it since 2002.
