Shake Your Metal-maker

And the winner in the Pretty Sweet Band Name category .... Bottled Friends! Come one, come all (-ages) Sunday to the Launchpad for their CD release and churn out some rock and metal with the likes of Michael Lee Ostrander, Evolocity, Dim the Darkness and Dyings Destiny. It’s $7 and starts at 7 p.m. (MD)

Sam Holden Photography

The Twilight Singers’ Greg Dulli ain’t about to do the lazy rockstar thing

Greg Dulli doesn’t take too well to the easy life.

At least, this would seem to be the case, if Dulli’s songs bear even the slightest resemblance to his own past. The 41-year-old vocalist who first gained notoriety as the cigarette-stained voice of the Afghan Whigs, and later as the Twilight Singers’ main man, slathers his latest album (the Twilight Singers’ Powder Burns) in the kind of self-effacing rhetoric fans have come to expect. Sleaziness, sexiness, copious drug use and a nod or two to ’60s R&B (and, curiously, arena-ready cock rock) frequently decorate--or some would say, mar--his albums, making you wonder whether this guy is for real, or whether it’s all a big satire.

I Can Lick Any Sonofabitch in The House is rarin' to crack Albuquerque a good one

It's 4 p.m. in Portland. That's a bit early for Mike D.

He played four shows yesterday, three acoustic solo performances and one raucous bar gig with the band he fronts, I Can Lick Any Sonofabitch in The House. "It wears your voice out," he says, and the strain is audible.

I Can Lick Any SOB hits the tour trail pretty hard. Five months a year, the guys are on the road. Twice a year, they cross over to the East Coast. Four or five times a year, they travel up and down the other. "The van is getting tiresome," Mike D says. He hates being away from his wife and child. But he's facing 13 shows in 14 days (one of which is at our own Atomic Cantina) with some kind of determination. I Can Lick Any SOB "hasn't really cracked" Albuquerque—yet.

Ben Chrisman

Beirut and fellow New Mexicans A Hawk and a Hacksaw hit the Mother Road

Broken down outside of Gallup along Route 66 with nothing to do but sit around, stack up some beer bottles and knock ’em down again to the tune of a finely played accordion. It's almost too romantic a tale to be true, but there they were, just two bands on the road back to Albuquerque.