It's Monday, so it's as good a time as any for you to peruse this quick grab-bag of local music news hastily cobbled together with no agenda or real thought. Do you have a few minutes to care about your local music scene? Good, because it just so happens that underneath this stretched-to-the-limit intro paragraph there's some information about stuff happening in it.
In incredible concert poster news, Fort Worth's rapidly rising retro garage-rockers The Birds of Night have totally eschewed the concept of well-designed art for gig promotion and instead decided to use only the favored tool of time-strapped artists everywhere, MS Paint. The results are so magnificent they make me want to go back to college to take up art. How do any of us know the artists we could have been if only we'd had the right training? Whichever member of the band is responsible for the following masterworks has some serious latent ability. Particularly noteworthy is the effortless cursive above what I assume to be a shark, or perhaps a furious pyramid of some sort.
Sundown at Granada is running a series of free gigs every single night of the week featuring some seriously notable local acts, including Slobberbone, People on Vacation, The Breakfast Machine, Josh Weather and The King Bucks. If ever you were going to go and support a local music initiative, it should probably be this one. For a start, it's free, second there's alcohol, and third if you don't want to see Slobberbone for free then, well, no point three or indeed four is going to be able to help you now. You should probably give up and move to Oklahoma or something. Dates are on the Granada's website.
New venues are popping up all over DFW recently like an extraordinarily pleasant rash. As well as Queen City in Fort Worth, which we recently wrote about (and it turns out is part-owned by Vinnie Paul, fact fans), there's 3 Links in the old La Grange space, the imminent opening of The Hive in Denton, the Abbey Underground putting on some stellar shows up there too, and now the brand new Deep Ellum venue Twilite Lounge is quietly rolling out concerts, including Madison King recently. Music venues in Deep Ellum are nowhere near critical mass yet though, and we're hoping to see yet more pop up over the next few months. Can we have more gigs at Sandbar Cantina? Please? Pretty please? Sand + cocktails + palm trees + imminent fatal volleyball injuries = awesome.
See also: Queen City Music Hall Fills Fort Worth's Need for a Large, Non-Arena Venue
Talking of concert series, we're putting on a few shows at the House of Blues over the next month or so featuring the best local cover bands. We've got The Gorehounds, a Cramps tribute band that are so rock and roll that you might need surgery after seeing them, Arm Tha Homeless, a RATM cover band that I saw once and was convinced Tom Morello had actually joined as a post-RATM career, and Money For Nothing, a Dire Straits cover band guaranteed to please your father. Did you forget Father's Day again? Been hiding ever since? Well, here's the answer. It's a bit late now, but how can a knock-off Knopfler (try saying that after 10 beers) fail to please someone? Look on our Facebook events for dates.
