1) Go to Division Brewing (506 E Main, Arlingfun) on Friday to get your earholes stretched by high volume, high anxiety, post-punk trio BULLS, who are headlining a bill rounded out by a San Antonio-based noise rock band called Understudied, and instrumental rock band 100s, from Denton. The show starts at 7, and the cover is a mysterious amount of money.
2) Big Party Alert! Local hip-hop artist Todd Faroe opens Friday night’s show at MASS (1002 S Main), where the main events are DJ Christy Ray and rapper Sam Lao. If you aren’t busy and don’t go to MASS on Friday, I hope it’s only because you’re going to see BULLS in Arlington. Otherwise, you’ll totally miss out on what is easily the Team to Beat Show of the Week. Sam Lao is enough to get me stoked about this one, but do yourself a favor and listen to this Todd Faroe jam. Pretty interesting production, rad flow.
3) The Grackle Art Gallery (4621 El Campo) has a show on Saturday night, and lemme tell you, it’s basically a firestorm of musical precision and prog of the brainiest variety. Arlington-based Herd of Instinct will be cramming their busy, boisterous time signature shifts, keyboard hyperspace journeys, and guitar pyrotechnics into a living room-sized gallery space. If you’ve never seen a Warr guitar or Chapman stick in action, this band boasts both of them. The all-ages show starts at 8pm, and the cover is donation-based. Man, playing a Warr guitar is a lot of dedication. Forget all those strings – it looks heavy af:
4) You can read more about the Phuss’s reunion show at Lola’s in this week’s Hearsay, but the all-ages show starts at 9pm (doors are at 8) with NU-95, followed by It Hurts to Be Dead at 10, From Parts Unknown at 11, and Phuss laying it all on stage at midnight. Cover is $15. Here’s the Phuss’s official video for “I Don’t Feel Good,” which debuted right before they said “fuck you, I quit” or whatever in 2014:
5) I think it’s hard to pigeonhole Henry the Archer’s sound – for some reason, they remind me of Alt-J, if Alt-J had a song that made you think someone in the band was once in a ska-punk band. Anyway, HTA anchors the Saturday night show at Tin Panther (937 Woodward), along with Chicago garage rock duo North by North in the middle spot and local rock ’n rollers Mean Motor Scooter blasting the night off at 10pm. I’m glad the touring band is sandwiched in between the locals. North by North is also pretty badass and the cover is $5, so this’ll be a good time for cheap. As seen in this video, a Chicago band like North by North has to play frigid places like Wyandotte, MI, so maybe you can give them a warm welcome with a cold beer:
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 at 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.
