SAT 3/31: Night Cheapness

It's only a couple bucks more than the CTB ceiling, but there's also an excellent show downstairs at the Middle East with one of our best local rock bands Kingsley Flood with Thick as Thieves, Spirit Kid, and Tallahassee.

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SAT 3/31

5pm
Blastfest 5
at YMCA Theater, 820 Mass Ave, Cambridge (Central Sq)
$10 / All Ages

Feat: The Needy Visions, Streight Angular, Gracious Calamity, Hunnie Bunnies, Manners, Shira E, Nickel & Dime Band, Casey Rocheteau, Brian S. Ellis, Peace Loving, many more

No way am I going to list the whole schedule (on Facebook) and find links for all of the bands. About 30 performers are going one after the other in approximately 10 minutes bursts over 5 hours or so.

I predict a day of cool, positive, mega-fun as the Whitehaus folks take their JP house-party blueprint and make their annual trek across the Charles with a cornucopia of folk, rock, spoken-word, experimental music, and some stuff that seeps around these descriptors.

Check out some photos from a couple years ago, and you get the idea of good vibes radiating in the room.

SAT 3/31 (and SUN 4/1, WED 4/4 thru 4/7)

7:30pm
"Beckett Shorts"
at Zero Church Street, below First Parish Church, 0 Church St, Cambridge
FREE w/ Registration

Feat: "Come and Go", "Play", "Not I", "Footfalls", "Rough for Radio II", "Quad", "Act Without Words II"

Maybe Samuel Beckett isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I dig his existentialist dark humor. Some of these short plays have been described as "humorous", "neurotic" and "dystopian".

Even when it's too avant-garde to feel like one can even understand, that's when our interpretation is completely valid.

I think it's cool that he would drive a young (but still large) Andre the Giant to school.

Note: Tickets are complimentary, however an advanced ticket reservation is required.

SAT 3/31

Coyote Kolb (Midnight), Ten Foot Polecats (11pm), Rollover Baby (10pm), Boo City (9pm)
at O'Brien's, 3 Harvard St, Allston
$8 / 21+

This joint will be jumping! It's pretty darn hard not to like Coyote Kolb's fuzzed-out, twangy, alt-country blues jam. And they have a new CD.

Dig Ten Foot Polecats' sweaty, greasy deep-Mississippi blues mess and the sweet R&B/soul-meets-anything-that-rocks-or-swings of Rhode Island's Boo City who should come to Boston more often. Rollover Baby is probably blues in some way, but I've decided I'm not listening to bands that only have a MySpace page anymore.

SAT 3/31

9:30pm
New Highway Hymnal, Mount Peru, Great Elk, Chris North Dream Quartet
at Middle East - Upstairs, 472 Mass Ave, Cambridge (Central Sq)
$10 / 18+


Even when I'm not expecting to hear Mount Peru, their rootsy-poppy goodness catches my attention like when I was listening to a Boston music sampler on Bandcamp (free download). I forgot they were the last song, and I had to switch windows in one of those "Who is that?!" moment.

It's going to be a darn good night with a lot of indie-folk and psych-rock. I saw that New Highway Hymnal played on Wednesday, and it seems like they're out playing a lot; even NHH's latest recorded stuff is way better than the first songs I heard.

In case you haven't clicked the link, let the song bloom: