San Pedro Square Market and hosts an all-ages show for SVSX with Careless Hearts, Doctor Nurse, and Dirty Pillows.

Careless Hearts
9pm San Pedro Square Market
Careless Hearts began as pure San Jose alt-country. After building up a following in the South Bay and elsewhere since 2005, their career took an unexpected left turn in 2009 when they found themselves backing Iggy & the Stooges guitarist James Williamson at the Blank Club, Williamson’s first performance in 35 years and a warm-up for his return to touring with Iggy Pop. (The Blank Club performance was released as the 2010 album James Williamson and the Careless Hearts.) The event was a turning point in the Careless Hearts’ career; afterward, they released a three-song EP that found their finely crafted roots thunderstruck with Iggy’s (and Williamson’s) fiery “rawk” influence. It remains to be seen what direction the Careless Hearts take next, but with the band’s proven talent and new adventurousness, their next record is sure to be a welcome surprise no matter what.

Doctor Nurse
8pm San Pedro Square Market
Doctor Nurse’s approach to songwriting is similar to that of indie-rock legends Guided by Voices. Both groups pluck the best elements of psychedelic rock, prog-rock, lo-fi indie and power-pop and blend them into an amalgam of gorgeous, offbeat, well written rock & roll.

The similarities stop there; while Guided by Voices churns out partially complete lo-fi gems as quickly as the ideas pop in their heads, Doctor Nurse works slowly and methodically. The band, for instance, spent years working on Calm Seas, Phantom Lights. The album is not only full of intelligent, grandiose psychedelic indie-folk, clearly written by educated music lovers, its production is masterfully nuanced with glistening layers of keyboards, guitars, percussion and vocal harmonies. It is the kind of album worth listening to on headphones to pick out every subtle detail with each listen—or live in concert, where the waves of sound and vibrations overtake you.

Dirty Pillows
7pm, San Pedro Square Market
Formed in 2008 by guitarist/vocalist Alejandro Villanueva (who goes by his nickname “Millhows”) and drummer Jeff Evans, Dirty Pillows plays music that celebrates the pair’s shared influences—Modern Lovers, the Damned, Talking Heads—but also captures the raw, rushing sound of the earliest days of punk.

The South Bay duo’s visibility has been patchy at times, but they’re making a big push right now. Their recent song “Love Happening” sounds like something the Brian Jonestown Massacre might have released. As Evans describes it, “That song is the one that everybody has their own interpretation for.”

Evans and Millhows manage to create psychedelic, pop and garage tones with only two band members. Jeff is not afraid to hit his drum kit, and somehow Millhows makes sense of the army of loop machines and effects in front of him. “I sort of seem to channel this very post-punk, choppy, very angular guitar spirit,” Millhows says of his guitar playing.

Lambchop frontman Kurt Wagner has a voice like that of a lesser god, demoted because he couldn’t go through the trouble of administering to a needy world. However plaintive the backdrop – alt-country, indie, soul – Lambchop songs all seem like minor pastoral tragedies, strung together with ellipses that transition nicely from place to place. Their newest album “Mr. M” reflects a devotion to the familiar world of the wink and the woebegone.

Wagner, who started playing music in his thirties, understands that Lambchop is a “hard band to like,” but “an easy band to love.” In theory the idea might warrant a sneer, but hold fast. “Mr. M” is warm and narcotic, slipping into that province between pure knowledge and the fleeting memory of a dream, those few minutes of primordial cognition – for nearly an hour. In comes the half-toasted Wagner with a bit of salvation: “Don’t know what the fuck they talk about,” he says once the idyllic strings, piano, and light snare subside on opening track “If Not I’ll Just Die”, an appropriate point of entry for the uninitiated.

The temptation to label this album ‘sparse’ is there, but also wrong. A recording that contains this much instrumentation has to be expansive to let the sum of its parts breathe. This is thanks mostly to engineer Mark Nevers, whose work with Will Oldham and the Silver Jews finds the intimate in wide open spaces. Ponder the rich and shimmering string section, the wistful piano, a muffled voicemail, Wagner’s ambling murmur that alternates between advice and mockery – it swirls.

Lambchop is maybe a band, but more likely the right vehicle for Wagner, a painter who went to art school with the writer Richard Brautigan, to transmute the ordinary into the elegant. I sense he would be this way no matter what the craft, like he could change a tire and make you feel a little weird and lush while doing it.

Country music is the one realm where this can happen freely, extending to its players a poetic license they would have us believe is restrained in their ‘real’ lives. What defines Lambchop are Wagner’s ambiguities. He’s intuitive, feeling more than he lets on, and he lets on much already. It could be another way of embracing the emotional burden, but then also not knowing what to do with it. Lines like “friends make you sensitive” or “knowledge is difficult” save you the trouble of getting into an unpleasant conversation.

That Wagner dumps this much into each song and then distractedly wanders away is fine. “I don’t want to wake up when I’m stoned,” he admits. Who does?

Lambchop performs at the Great American Music Hall on May 4th. Tickets available here.

The San Jose Civic hosts Wilco Saturday, January 28, for the first of the band’s three sold-out Bay Area Shows.

A lot of rock stars want to be outlaws, but their heroes tend to be tragic cowboys. Gram Parsons and Townes Van Zandt are just two of the ill-fated Americana icons to get their own cults when dissatisfied alt-rockers started covering their songs.

Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy was almost one of those brilliant country-rock train wrecks. As part of Uncle Tupelo in the late ’80s, he was on his way to being the classic better-to-burn-out-than-fade-away story.

Even as they defined a new alt-country sound, Uncle Tupelo had the worst luck imaginable, with label disputes, band infighting and Tweedy’s alcohol problems just a few of the problems that piled up over the course of four studio albums. The band’s breakup was infamously brutal, with a paper trail of lawsuits and tales of bandmates behaving badly. Jay Farrar left to start Son Volt, while Tweedy kept the rest of the group together as Wilco.

Looking back now, it’s amazing that almost 20 years after the breakup, Tweedy seems to have just now found some drama-free happiness in his career. After Wilco’s 1995 debut A.M., he gained a new level of success with the near-perfect alt-country record Being There in 1996, and 1999’s Summerteeth, an equally masterful record that explored a new pop sound. In between, he got another boost from Mermaid Avenue, the album of Woody Guthrie sounds that Wilco recorded with Billy Bragg.

What Tweedy and Wilco had done in a larger sense was make country music cool for the indie-rock set, ushering in an era of rootsy chic that would see singer-songwriters like Bright Eyes, Iron & Wine and Andrew Bird thrive.

But the revolving band line-up hadn’t changed, and neither did the label troubles. In 2001, the music world was stunned when Reprise Records refused to release Wilco’s feverishly anticipated album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, claiming it wasn’t commercial enough, and dropping the band immediately. To this day, it’s considered one of the record industry’s all-time stupidest moves. When the album finally came out, it was another game-changer for Wilco, quickly becoming their best-selling record and finding its way onto critics’ best-of lists for 2002.

Ten years later, Tweedy finally has stability, keeping together the same Wilco lineup for an unheard-of three albums now. And their latest, last year’s The Whole Love, is possibly the best Wilco album since Being There. Part alt-country, part rock and roll, part experimentation, it captures all the qualities that have made Wilco great in equal quantities. It also captures Tweedy sounding like he’s finally having fun, and considering this guy’s history, that’s maybe the most remarkable thing of all.

Wilco plays the San Jose Civic on Saturday, January 28 at 8pm; tickets are $45.

Click here to view the embedded video.