ALIEN FASHION SHOW 11/20 & 21, LIQUID This aggressively generic California cocktail-rock outfit accents tired, shallow swank with tired, shallow alien imagery and makes a stab at cleverness with a Kiss cover–“Detroit Swing City”–that probably was a lot funnier in the pitch meeting.
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JOHN HAMMOND & DUKE ROBILLARD 11/20, BUDDY GUY’S LEGENDS Veteran acoustic bluesman John Hammond seems to have dropped the Jr. from his name for good–perhaps figuring that at this late juncture no one’s going to confuse him with his father, the A and R man best known for discovering little Bobby Dylan. Traces of his dad’s taste color Hammond’s work, but it’s Robert Johnson who most obviously inspires him onstage–he thumps and flails on his guitar and stomps as if those hellhounds on his trail were cockroaches he could squish under his boot heels. Here he’ll appear with Roomful of Blues founder, sometime Fabulous Thunderbird, and former Robert Gordon sideman Duke Robillard.
PRESCRIPTIONS 11/21, METRO This local quartet’s single “Disassembled” b/w “Give Me Anything But Surf Music” was one of last year’s small but surprisingly lasting pleasures: proof that there was life yet to be milked from the punky power-pop genre if a band was willing to go for excitement over precision and ride those hooks all the way down into the fish’s mouth. This year’s circulating cassette EP gilds the dandelion a little–the band bungles fewer notes in its three-minute rushes to glory–but manages to sustain energy convincingly over its four rather similar sounding tracks. A singles band to the death.
