Alright Dallas, your weekend is looking pretty flush. We've got twelve great live music picks for you this week, but unfortunately, seven of them take place between Friday and Saturday alone. Whereas last week brought us a bunch of weekday shows (see also: cubicle hangovers), you'll be able to catch up on all your favorite prime time TV and cook yourself a nice substantial dinner during your work week this time around. If you do plan to go see Ash or Superchunk early next week, you can always have your wife and kids on DVR duty.
Darkside Thursday, January 30, at Dada Dance outfits rarely move the mind as much as they do the hips. But Darkside do both, concocting lush, impressionistic cuts that owe as much to dub-techno as to Pink Floyd. The duo's swirling, hypnotic aesthetic is something you can just as easily trance out to as marvel at -- a product that's somehow both painterly and visceral. Smoky and drifting, psychedelic and over-saturated, Darkside's atypical dance music shares more with post-punk's mutant disco than almost anything being practiced today. It's quite amazing, actually, that songs this delightfully abstract can still function as club music. Heart-throbbing percussion, syrupy colors and webby structures made Darkside's 2013 album, Psychic, an uncommon success. These same components will make Darkside's date at Dada a phenomenal experience. Jonathan Patrick
Those Darlins Friday, January 30, at Dada Nashville's alt-country tilting garage rockers are currently touring with Diarrhea Planet in support of last fall's Blur The Line. This band has a pretty substantial Dallas fanbase, and is sure to give them what they want this weekend at Dada. Vanessa Quilantan
Heartless Bastards Friday, January 31, at Outpost Dallas Heartless Bastards are a throwback to a time when rock was smoother, simpler and more iconic. You'll get to hear the songs in their stripped-down form at this show, which features a solo set by frontwoman Erika Wennerstrom. Their latest album, Arrow, is filled with so much retro goodness that it's like listening to 52 minutes of the kind of classic rock hits that populated '70s-era AM radio. The crunchy guitar chords and thick drums on "Got to Have Rock and Roll" will have you air guitar-ing long before you even get to the solos and added riffs in the second half of the song. And while the laid-back rock track "Only For You" tones down the bombast significantly, the video for this song is a nod to the past as well, featuring two kids who represent the proverbial child stuck in each adult's body. Heartless Bastards -- and Arrow in particular -- are a present-day, ass-kicking blast back to the past. Brian Palmer
Skinny Puppy Friday, January 31, at Granada Theater Before the broad strokes of alternative rock painted most of the '90s vanilla, Skinny Puppy set the decade on fire, sounding very much like the radical future. This was a true alternative music. By marrying the sleekness of '80s new wave to the textured noise of early industrial music, Skinny Puppy built high/low art collages that made everything else sound downright archaic. Nearly 25 years on, they're still out there redefining the meaning of "industrial music." The group's newest record, the keyboard-heavy Weapon, is at once a reminder of how far ahead Skinny Puppy were in 1990 and how remarkably relevant they remain in 2014. The recurring theme of the group's aesthetic has always been dichotomy: cacophony and melody, repulsion and beauty, past and present. That's why Skinny Puppy's current tour is so fascinating. It represents a continuation on that theme. On Friday at the Granada, the past invades our present. Jonathan Patrick
Disclosure Saturday, February 1, at House of Blues A friend once told me that today's contemporary deejays hold Disclosure to a very high esteem. The influential English electronic duo collected a sizable amount of buzz in 2013 with the release of last summer's Settle. Expect a large and young crowd, this may be the crown jewel of Dallas EDM shows this year. VQ
J-Boog Saturday, February 1, at Trees The Long Beach born and Compton raised Samoan-American reggae and R&B singer, J Boog, will be at Trees this weekend. His beachy, feel-good records are sure to draw a sizeable crowd.VQ
Delorean Saturday, February 1, at Dada They're from Spain, they play dance music and they named their band after an '80s car most famous for its alleged time-travel capabilities. That's pretty much all you need to know. Kiernan Maletsky
Dam Funk Saturday, February 1, at The Crown & Harp Stones Throw Record's resident producer/dj/vocalist is making his way to The Crown & Harp this weekend. Bringing him across the Mason-Dixon line, is Too Fresh Productions, the subject of our cover story for this week's print edition. VQ Planned Parenthood Benefit Show Saturday, February 1, at The Crown & Harp Up the stairs from Dam Funk, some of Dallas' most interesting female musicians will come together to support Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas at The Crown & Harp this Saturday. Drink up, a portion of the bar proceeds will go straight to the cause. VQ
Futurebirds Sunday, February 2, at Dada There are things about Futurebirds that might scare away the more adventurous music listener, such as pedal steel and the fact that there's an animal right there in the band name. But fear not: Futurebirds continues a proud pedigree of Athens, Georgia bands and plays a surprisingly spectacular live show. KM
Ash Tuesday, February 4, at House of Blues Northern Irish indie stalwarts Ash swing through House of Blues' smaller room for the second time in a year or so this week, and if you want to re-live a youth spent humming "Girl From Mars," "Kung Fu," "Burn Baby Burn" and every other uber-catchy pop-rock ditty they've spent their careers crafting, you're unlikely to get to be able to do so in a more intimate venue.
Ash released their first big album when the members were 17. Seventeen. What were you doing when you were seventeen? You probably weren't writing "Lose Control." Go appreciate these long-running legends. Gavin Cleaver
Superchunk, Waxahatchee Wednesday, February 5, at Trees In 1989, two successful tobacco-land enterprises began small, only to grow -- both in power and legend -- over the course of the next two and a half decades. In the early 1990s, one knew that when they listened to a Superchunk album they were also listening to the Merge Records sound. The Chapel Hill-formed power-punk-pop group, led by Mac MacCaughan and bassist Laura Balance, started the tiny label as a means to get their own music into the hands of college students studying in the famed Research Triangle of the Tar Heel, Blue Devil and Wolfpack state. Now, with Merge rivaling indie giants Matador and 4AD thanks to releasing albums from luminaries such as Neutral Milk Hotel and Arcade Fire, the entities are distinguishable from one another. But you still can never separate them. After a recording hiatus of several years, Superchunk returned to store shelves with their catchy-as-hell songs intact. With 2010's urgent Majesty Shredding and last year's earworm-rich I Hate Music, the group delivered albums that don't require cherry-picking or skipping to a new batch of undergrads everywhere. Kelly Dearmore
See also: -The Top Ten All Time Best Replacement Lead Singers in Rock and Roll -Songs That Have Hidden Messages When Played in Reverse -The Ten Best Music Videos Banned by MTV