Friday 16
SPINTO BAND, LOVELY FEATHERS Delaware sextet the SPINTO BAND streamlines the cluttered, expansive grooves of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (with whom they share an assured geekiness) into concise and perky guitar jingles. They sing better too. The lyrics on last year’s Nice and Nicely Done (Bar/None) address matters of love and like among the young and attention-deficient with a good-heartedness that suggests the songs’ protagonists may well be worth dating a few years down the road. For now they tend to interrupt conversations (“I gotta get back to the house / My show is on”), make dorky demands (“Come on, we can do it while I’m playing Atari”), and ask the important questions a little too late (“Did I tell you I don’t think this would work out?”). –Keith Harris
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Sunday 18
RADIOHEAD Their sets on this tour will include a handful of songs slated for their next record, but Radiohead won’t head back to the studio to finish it till the fall. Rumor has it that the new one will return to the straightforward guitar rock of The Bends–but that same rumor has preceded every one of the band’s releases since OK Computer. In any case, at press time front man Thom Yorke had reportedly ticked the obligatory crisis of confidence off his to-do list (and completed his forthcoming solo debut, The Eraser), so the next Radiohead disc, presently known by the working title “LP7,” shouldn’t be more than, say, a year off. Due to a conflict with the Grant Park Orchestra’s rehearsal schedule the band won’t be playing in the great outdoors of Millennium Park, but the Auditorium Theatre is none too shabby a stand-in. If only you could somehow fit the moon inside. The Black Keys open both nights; see also Tuesday. 7 PM, Auditorium Theatre, Roosevelt University, 50 E. Congress, 312-922-2110, sold out. All ages. –Brian Nemtusak
LAMB OF GOD, meanwhile, have apparently been extra secretive lately, canceling interviews and generally making the studio an outsider-free zone while completing their next album, Sacrament (due in August). Metal players can be a ritualistic lot, though, and if keeping to themselves helps these guys stay as focused as they sound on 2004’s muscular, mean Ashes of the Wake, well, bless their dark little hearts. Children of Bodom, Mastodon, and Thine Eyes Bleed round out this frighteningly good lineup. 4:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 1106 W. Lawrence, 312-666-6667 or 312-559-1212, $39. All ages. –Monica Kendrick
DON CABALLERO This isn’t your older brother’s Don Caballero. In 2001 guitarist Ian Williams and bassist Eric Emm checked out, leaving drummer Damon Che, the sole constant in a decade of personnel changes, to start over from scratch. He did it by acquiring three-quarters of the Pittsburgh band Creta Bourzia–Jeff Ellsworth and Gene Doyle on guitars, Jason Jouver on bass–and the new lineup has developed a sound that’s metallic in the most literal sense: the ten pounding, percussive, cyclical instrumental tracks on World Class Listening Problem (Relapse), the first Don Cab album in more than five years, sound like they weren’t so much written as assembled out of massive steel girders and tiny clockwork gears. The Timeout Drawer, Bring Back the Guns, and Black September open. This show is part of MOBfest; see page 41 for today’s schedule. 9 PM, the Note, 1565 N. Milwaukee, 773-489-0011, $10. –Monica Kendrick
