RECOMMENDED

Combine punk and country? Dude, can’t be done! Those are just two diametrically opposed genres—it’s like mixing oil and water, right? Well, Memphis sextet Lucero set off to prove me wrong back in 2001, and the results were pretty solid—a seamless blend of alt-country’s riffs with punk-rock’s sloppy guitar and scratchy vocals. Nowadays, Lucero has cleaned up and refined its sound, as the band’s newest, “1372 Overton Park,” reflects an act that has evolved over six albums and is now a suspicious duplicate of The Hold Steady (if Craig Finn had a pretty rough cold). But there are worse things to emulate than a band that emulates Bruce Springsteen, and Lucero should still appeal to anyone who gets off on loud, rambunctious horns section and a lot of tattoos. Plus, I think we’re all suckers for songs drenched in organs, trombones and whiskey anyway. (Andy Seifert)

October 24 at Bottom Lounge, 1375 W. Lake, (312)929-2022, at 8pm. $16.

RECOMMENDED

Like a fifth-grade boy who’s confused about what to do about girls, a good portion of the indie community seems conflicted about what to think of girls who make slow, folksy jazz music (remember Norah Jones, how equally alluring and dreary her funereal blues was?). It’s certainly difficult to admit to yourself that you honestly enjoy the music that your mother listens to while quilting. Enter Jolie Holland, a Texas gal who’s taken that “jazz/blues club” template and made it sonically palatable to someone under 35. Holland’s last record, “The Living and the Dead,” was artful, downright gorgeous in sections, and even included a wave of distortion in one tune. Holland’s voice remains the glue that holds her arrangements together—it’s playful when the song calls for it, crooning at times, but never insufferably so, occasionally slipping into her native Texas drawl for the country-influenced tunes. Is it easy listening? Sure, but even easy listening is allowed to be a little challenging sometimes. (Andy Seifert)

October 14 at Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, (773)525-2508, at 9pm. $15.

RECOMMENDED

Despite being another one of these groups with an awkwardly-stumbles-off-the-tongue band name (note to prospective musicians: keep it to five syllables), Canadian trio The Rural Alberta Advantage does a pretty bang-up job of blending folksy melancholia and urban synths—no simple task. The trio’s Saddle Creek debut, “Hometowns,” is a love letter to small-town Canadian living, one that lovingly focuses on the region’s foibles (mostly boiling down to “I’m freezing my ass off”) and historical tragedies (“Frank, AB” recalls the 1903 landslide that killed seventy people, which is bit of a downer). A particularly loud bass drum—not unlike The Dodos’ signature percussive sound—anchors every song, rumbling and pounding and effectively turning what ought to be labeled “folk” into undeniable rock. Lead singer Nils Edenloff’s nasally intones fall somewhere in between David Gray and Jeff Mangum (the first and last time those two musicians will ever be compared to one another), but he particularly works on the band’s raucous moments, when melodies seamlessly shift from wailing and boundless to tight and catchy. (Andy Seifert)

September 26 at Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, (773)525-2508, at 10pm. $12.

RECOMMENDED

Bloodshot Records. Hideout. Bands. Beer. Food. Why aren’t you there already? Bloodshot takes over Hideout for the famed Block Party to celebrate its fifteenth anniversary and, let’s face it, this is pretty much a guaranteed good time and you got nothing better to do this weekend anyway. There’s a kids area, some races or something and a drunk spelling bee. Plus…The Waco Brothers, Alejandro Escovedo, Deadstring Brothers, Scott H. Biram, Scotland Yard Gospel Choir, Moonshine Willy, Bobby Bare Jr., The Blacks, Jon Langford & Sally Timms and Sanctified Grumblers. The Hideout September bash has been my personal “say goodbye to summer” event for the last few years now, and I can’t think of a better way to prepare for the wrath of fall and winter. (Tom Lynch)

September 12 at Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, (773)227-4433, Noon. $10.

Seven years ago Shaun Paul Jones moved to Chicago from his home by the ocean in North Carolina with the intention of making people laugh through improv comedy at Second City. Having previously played in bands in North Carolina, Jones found musicians in Chicago as well. He began playing in bands and even though the comedy didn’t pan out, the music always stuck with him. But even those bands ended and then Jones found himself back at the beginning.

“In the bands that I’d been in previous to Chaperone, I’d never been the primary songwriter, I was just a secondary guitar player,” says Jones. “I was kind of looking for something to do and realized that the only way that was going to happen was if I wrote my own songs, so I pulled out an acoustic guitar and started listening to Gram Parsons.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

While this incarnation of “The Pretenders” should really be called “Chrissie Hynde and a few musicians who stand behind Chrissie Hynde,” there’s still ample reason to check out what remains of one of the 1980’s more important new-wave acts. Back in the day, The Pretenders put out a couple of tight, playfully snarky records, and Hynde help craft the prototypical punk-rock frontwoman, inspiring millions of women to grab the nearest Fender Telecaster and write songs about how awesome they are. The band’s newest album, “Break Up the Concrete,” is Hynde’s latest foray into adapting her leathery persona to alt-country blues, and while it’s no artistic breakthrough, it’s a nice, agreeable record, the kind a 57-year-old should be fairly pleased with making. One last piece of evidence of The Pretenders’ influence: you could probably trace the opening acts—Cat Power and Juliette Lewis—right back to Hynde’s frontwoman authority, even if they seem less like tourmates and more like two girls at a party who fight over what to play on the stereo. (Andy Seifert)

August 18 at Vic Theatre, 3145 N. Sheffield, (773)618-8439, 7:30pm. $42.25.

RECOMMENDED

Can any band match the eclectic resume of Jon Langford, Tom Greenhalgh and the rest of British post-punk vets The Mekons? They’ve mastered the role of cheeky punks, delved into country and folk (and have even received a few “godfathers of alt-country” votes for 1985’s “Fear and Whiskey”) and cleverly wielded humor and politics into a thirty-year catalogue, all after contributing to the late-seventies new-wave Brit-punk movement. Since 1977, The Mekons have released seventeen albums (most of them ridiculously titled, like “Pussy, King of the Pirates” or “The Mekons Honky Tonkin’”), but “Fear and Whiskey” has rightfully been considered the cream of a pretty damn good crop. These anarchists effectively claimed back a piece of country music for the (extreme) left, wrestling away what had become a right-wing dominated genre while reforming their sound by blending punk impudence with fiddles and slide guitar. The Mekons may not be as self-destructive as The Pistols or possess the rebellious reputation of The Clash, but, unlike those two bands, these guys have been together (and stayed alive) for thirty years. (Andy Seifert)

July 30 at Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, (773)525-2508, at 8pm. $20.

RECOMMENDED

Providence country-rockers Deer Tick have only been a band for a few years, but it’s already pretty obvious they’re going to do things the ugly way—from lead singer Joseph McCauley’s scratchy, nasally voice to the member’s haven’t-bathed-in-three-days general appearance, to the fact the band named itself after a pesky Lyme Disease-carrying parasite. Deer Tick’s probably the last indie-rock act you’d expect to go metrosexual. The group’s latest record, “Born on Flag Day,” exemplifies that mindset, consisting of several grimy country-blues tracks. Sure, the songwriting is fairly derivative of the treble- and twang-heavy bar-rockers that came before them, but “Flag Day” is still worth a spin or two, if only to indulge in the unsophisticated, simple rock aesthetic that Deer Tick unabashedly believes in: tinny guitars, steady drums, songs about Texas, etc. Your clothes could accumulate dust just listening to these songs. (Andy Seifert)

July 15 at Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, (773)276-3600.

RECOMMENDED

It seems that anything Chicagoan crooner Janet Bean touches turns to gold. Her contributions to Eleventh Dream Day always elevate that band’s material from impressive to illustrious, and her collaboration with Catherine Irwin in Freakwater is consistently stunning. The Horse’s Ha is Bean’s new project, a partnership with Zincs leader James Elkington that fuses jazz, country and folk in grand, often surprising ways. (Local musicians Fred Lonberg-Holm, Charles Rumback and Nick Marci each have their hands in the project as well.) The record, titled “Of the Cathmawr Yards,” celebrates its release this Friday at Schubas, and it’s as stark and penetrating as anything Bean has previously done. Not to discount Elkington’s work either—his momentous, breezy acoustic-guitar-playing gives the record its backbone, his voice a nice match for his female counterpart. The Horse’s Ha produces a dreamy folk ready for long summer nights. You’ll miss them once they’re gone. (Tom Lynch)

July 3 at Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, (773)525-2508.

RECOMMENDED

In the early seventies, 18-year-old Steve Earle met singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt, and the ensuing friendship between the two self-destructive singer-songwriters became a lifelong journey of booze, extensive jail time, hardcore drug habits and country-folk. To Earle, Van Zandt was a mentor, an idol, an inspiration, the measuring stick for every record he would produce. After Van Zandt’s death in 1997, a tribute album was both inevitable and overdue, finally coming to fruition with this year’s “Townes,” a record that succeeds because it avoids any “heartfelt” sentimentalities that tribute albums are usually bathed in. Instead, “Townes” sounds like a couple of dudes sittin’ on the porch playing the old standards, stripping away the overproduction that plagued much of Van Zandt’s catalogue. With few exceptions (most notably “Lungs,” featuring the unwelcome, masturbatory guitar work of Tom Morello), Earle allows the strength of Van Zandt’s songwriting—and the full breadth of his gloomy take on existentialism—to carry the album. This isn’t a record to say something dumb like “somewhere, Townes is smiling down on us,” but rather, “damn, that cowboy could sure write a tune.” (Andy Seifert)

June 25 at Vic Theatre, 3145 N. Sheffield, (773)472-0366, 7:30 pm. $34.