10 Best Concerts of the Week: Danzig, Lionel Richie, Swans and More

Have you ever heard of kawaii metal? What about Pacific norteño music? Satanic Swedish progressive pop metal? Well, here is your chance to learn a little bit about how the rest of the world makes music, when acts from Europe, Asia and Central America make their way to North Texas stages this week. A couple of punk legends will celebrate anniversaries this week. Black Flag marks the start of post-hardcore in the Design District, and Misfits singer Glenn Danzig celebrates 35 years as a solo act. In the country realm, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band kicks off the concert week in a historic country venue in Dallas, and two generations of Gilmores bring in the weekend in Oak Cliff. If you’re looking to participate in this week’s concerts, Lionel Richie and Earth, Wind & Fire host an all-night singalong at the AAC Friday night, and if you’re looking for a musical experience, check out Swans Saturday night on Lower Greenville. If none of that sounds good, maybe try Asking Alexandria.

Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
6:30 p.m., Thursday, Aug. 31, Longhorn Ballroom, 216 Corinth St. $20+ at prekindle.com

Formed in 1965, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band has gone through a lot of changes over nearly six decades. The two constants in the legendary country band’s existence have been singer and multi-instrumentalist Jeff Hanna, who helped form the band, and percussionist Jimmie Fadden, who joined the band in 1966 and has played on every Nitty Gritty Dirt Band release since 1967. Two dozen other musicians have passed through the ranks of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band – including a very young Jackson Browne and Bernie Leadon, who would go on to help found the Eagles. The band has put out 24 albums; its most recent is last year’s collection of Bob Dylan covers, Dirt Does Dylan. The band comes to Dallas’ historic Longhorn Ballroom with opening support from Nashville singer-songwriter Mae Estes, whose new EP, Before the Record, was released earlier this year.

BABYMETAL
7 p.m., Thursday, Aug. 31, South Side Ballroom, 1135 Botham Jean Blvd. $150 at ticketmaster.com

Inventor of the kawaii metal genre, BABYMETAL is currently on tour with Dethklok from the Adult Swim-animated television series Metalocalypse and with guitarist Jason Richardson from All That Remains, who will open with a solo, instrumental performance. So, what on earth is kawaii metal? To put it simply, it’s a mix of J-pop and heavy metal. To make it more complicated, kawaii metal is what happens when you take all the melodies, aesthetics and cute lyrics of J-pop and put it in front of a wall of heavy metal instrumentation and energy. If it sounds strange, that’s because it is, and plenty of metal purists have balked at the notion of combining the two genres. What those purists fail to realize is that BABYMETAL is theater, a bit of theater that uses metal as its musical medium – something that you could just as easily say of GWAR or Alice Cooper.

Black Flag
7 p.m., Thursday, Aug. 31, The Echo Lounge & Music Hall, 1323 N. Stemmons Fwy. $25+ livenation.com

This Thursday night, you are invited to An Evening with Black Flag. The hardcore legends and post-hardcore pioneers will  perform in the Design District without an opening band. The band will start with a set that covers all of their second album and one of, if not the, first post-hardcore albums, My War. The 1984 album, inspired as much by early metal as it was by early punk, broke the mold of hardcore with its long songs and abrupt tempo changes. In the concert’s second set, Black Flag will play selections and fan favorites from across its entire, nearly 50-year catalog. The band is still composed of original guitarist Greg Ginn and singer Mike Vallely, the former skater who has fronted the band for nearly a decade. Newcomers Harley Duggan and Charles Wiley will be on bass and drums, respectively.

Asking Alexandria
6:30 p.m., Friday, Sept. 1, The Factory in Deep Ellum, 2713 Canton St. $49.75 at axs.com

English metalcore band Asking Alexandria, which has been going strong for nearly two decades, will come to town Friday hot off the release of its eighth studio album. Where Do We Go from Here?, which came out Aug. 25, has been greeted by positive reviews. It’s rare for a metalcore band, especially one that has been around this long, but Asking Alexandria has maintained the same group of members for all of its releases – with the exception of 2016’s The Black, when singer Denis Stoff of Ukrainian metalcore band Make Me Famous replaced original lead vocalist Danny Worsnop, who pursued a short-lived gig with LA hard rock band We Are Harlot. As the band members have aged, the band’s sound is beginning to evolve toward hard rock while maintaining some of its metalcore roots. Opening will be Mongolian metal band The Hu and Philadelphia rapper Zero 9:36.

Danzig
7 p.m. Friday, Sept. 1, The Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory, 300 W. Las Colinas Blvd., Irving. $35+ at livenation.com

Last Halloween, singer Glenn Danzig’s first band, Misfits, gave a historic performance at Dos Equis Pavilion. This year, Danzig is taking his namesake out on the road for a 35th anniversary celebration. Danzig is the third band to be fronted by the singer. After Misfits disbanded in 1983, he led the band Samhain, which saw so many lineup changes in its short existence that by 1988, it had formed a new entity – Danzig. The band spent its first five years as a heavy metal band, but veered into industrial metal in its next five years before returning to pure metal. While the band has maintained a solid cult following for these 35 years, Danzig’s only charted single was the lead single off its debut album in 1988, “Mother.” Opening will be extreme metal band Behemoth, Satanic doo-wop band Twin Temple and black metal band Midnight.

Lionel Richie
7:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 1, American Airlines Center, 2500 Victory Ave. $73+ at ticketmaster.com

In 1982, Lionel Richie broke away from the Commodores to pursue a solo career. Richie had written the Commodores’ biggest singles, “Easy,” “Sail On” and “Three Times a Lady,” and in 1981, he recorded his biggest single, “Endless Love,” a duet with Diana Ross. Richie’s songwriting prowess extended immediately into his solo career, which saw his 1982 self-titled debut go platinum four times. His next album, Can’t Slow Down, in 1983, stayed true to its title, selling over 20 million copies. All of this success created a collection of songs that have since become part of the great American songbook, which is why Richie is calling his current tour the Sing a Song All Night Long tour. To help the audience warm up its vocal chords, Richie has invited progressive soul band Earth, Wind & Fire to open up the show with hit songs like “Shining Star”and “September.”

Los Tigres del Norte
8 p.m. Friday, Sept 1, Texas Trust CU Theatre, 1001 Texas Trust Way, Grand Prairie. $49+ at axs.com

Founded in Rosa Morada in Mocorito, Sinaloa, Mexico, in 1965, Los Tigres del Norte are a norteño band now residing in San Jose, California. Música norteña is a genre of regional fast-paced Mexican music with socially relevant lyrics about narcotics and illegal immigration, accompanied by the accordion and the bajo sexto guitar. The sound developed in the late 19th century, when Mexican music began to merge with the folk music brought over by immigrants of Czech descent. Los Tigres del Norte plays Pacific norteño music, which is known to have a rougher sound due to the influence of banda music from Sinaloa and its brass and percussion. Over time, the band has grown to incorporate the sounds of bolero, cumbia and rock genres. As the band is known for performing long concerts (one 2009 concert in Mexico lasted 12 hours), there will be no need for an opening act.

Jimmie Dale Gilmore
7 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 2, The Kessler, 1230 W. Davis St. $24+ at prekindle.com

Born in Amarillo, raised in Lubbock and currently living in Austin, Jimmie Dale Gilmore is about as Texan as a country musician can come. After founding the original Flatlanders with Joe Ely and Butch Hancock and going absolutely nowhere with it, Gilmore spent a little bit of time at Texas Tech before dropping out and moving into an ashram in Denver to study metaphysics with teenaged Indian guru Prem Rawat, also known as Maharaji. It was there that Gilmore would spend most of the 1970s. After leaving the ashram, Gilmore moved to Austin, and after coming up in that city’s music scene, he released his first solo album, Fair and Square, in 1988 at the age of 43. Gilmore’s son, Colin, is a member of the West Texas Exiles, who will open this Saturday night in Oak Cliff.

Swans
7 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 2, Granada Theater, 3524 Greenville Ave. $28 at prekindle.com

Formed in 1982 by singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Michael Gira, experimental rock band Swans has spent over 40 years playing through every conceivable iteration of rock music, noise rock, post-punk, industrial, post-rock and neo-folk. Since its start, Swans has been a music collective with dozens of members passing through its ranks – including Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, Prong’s Ted Parsons, Larry Mullins from The Stooges and Norman Westberg, who will serve as the band’s opening act this weekend at the Granada. Earlier this summer, Swans released its 16th album, The Beggar, the band’s experiment with drone-based music. Critics agree that this is one of the weirder directions Swans has taken, but it is also one of the band’s most fully realized artistic efforts.

Ghost
7:30 p.m., Tuesday, Sept. 5, The Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory, 300 W. Las Colinas Blvd., Irving. $35+ at livenation.com

Ghost is a Swedish heavy metal band known for Satanic songs and its inversion of Catholic imagery. Led by singer Tobias Forge (aka Papa Emeritus), the band is composed of a saxophone player dubbed Papa Nihil and several anonymous members calling themselves, “A Group of Nameless Ghouls,” each of whom represents one of the five elements. While this kind of overt Satanism has been met with plenty of antagonism from religious groups, Ghost gets even more internet hate from metal music’s loudest and most annoying gatekeepers. To them we say, everyone gets to learn about metal somewhere, and people are allowed to like what they like regardless of what some judgmental dude in a black T-shirt with an illegible band name on it thinks. Ghost’s Re-Imperatour U.S.A. tour comes to Irving on Tuesday with opening support from Swedish melodic death metal band Amon Amarth.