What we have here is the sedate majesty of pop-soul king Brook Benton, teamed up with a bevy of apparently benzedrine-addled go-go girls, that long-bearded guy from Monty Python who used to croak "It's" at the beginning of the show, several farm animals (stuffed), and one big-ass world on a string. Or two. Enough o' my yakking and happy Friday. View the goodness after the jump, and remember, if Mother Nature don't getcha, Father Time will.

Petty scholars well remember Torpedoes as the album that proved to MCA Records he was a worthwhile investment. Everyone else remembers it for "Here Comes My Girl," "Even the Losers," "Don't Do Me Like That" and a not-so-minor flash of genius he decided to call "Refugee."

“Go Back One Day” roars from start to finish with the same cymbal-crashing moxie as Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, building and thrashing on top of a late-night bar shuffle that makes very clear that we’re not dealing with the same band who released Exit Smiling two long years ago. That record was a fine debut, no doubt, but Born Liars have grown into a much nastier force since then. Exit Smiling had flashes of power-pop creeping through its pores and, while well-executed, misrepresented a band that has cultivated a downright filthy sound, one that currently stands as the stiffest middle finger in Houston rock.

“Meet Me Downstairs” is kicked-off with a swirling riff that soon finds itself lodged in Shane Lauder’s Detroit percussion thunder. Were Jimmy Sanchez to affect any more of a sneer, his vocals would simply become unintelligible. As is, he just sounds like the snottiest rock singer to burst from any local clouds in a good long while, lending an emotional credibility that would’ve gone AWOL under care of another vocalist, while cymbal crashes and Bill Greer’s bass punch the whole thing in the ass.

Better Than: The Social Distortion episode of MTV Unplugged that never happened, thank God.

Download: Jimmie Rodgers's "In the Jailhouse Now," one of the few prison-related songs Ness didn't sing

Photo by Chris Henderson

Mike Ness

Performers, especially those who mine their material from the proverbial other side of the tracks, walk a precarious line between the deeds they recount in their songs and the situations they sometimes stumble into offstage. Mike Ness is hardly a stranger to life's unfortunate twists and turns; both with Social Distortion and solo, his songs are replete with addicts and ex-cons trying, and often failing, to walk the straight and narrow.

But Ness' hard-luck characters took an unplanned back seat Tuesday to-the-all too real predicament of opener Jesse Dayton. En route from Dallas, Dayton's tour bus was pulled over in Magnolia County for the stereotypical broken taillight; the subsequent search turned up a certain illegal substance in the singer's backpack that, he said later, had been there "since I don't know when." The bus was impounded, and Dayton rewarded with a side trip to the county lockup, but due to some nifty maneuvering by his lawyer - who had him out of jail and on the road in four hours - he made the gig in time to provide some extra oomph to a set-closing medley of "Folsom Prison Blues," "Rebel Rouser" and "White Freight Liner Blues."

Ironically, the management at this most oontz-oontzy, dance-friendly of supermarkets was not amused.

Check out the video after the jump.

UPDATE: Flyer after the jump...

The pun is difficult to resist: The Slip is the second Nine Inch Nails album to arrive with free download availability, and the slip is what Trent Reznor has given to corporate parties who stand to profit from his music or the legal regulation of it.

“This one’s on me,” writes Reznor on the NIN Web site under the download link. The record’s release was cryptically alluded to in a post to the band’s Web site on April 21 and in the metadata of two mp3 singles, “Discipline” and “Echoplex,” released on April 22 and May 2, respectively.

Unlike the recent Ghosts I-IV, The Slip features lyrics on seven of its ten tracks. Veteran NIN members Josh Freese, Robin Finck and Alessandro Cortini return the band to a harder electro-industrial sound akin to Year Zero (2007) and With Teeth (2005).

Better than: Getting an extra nickel in your dimebag

Download: Dark Side of the…wait, surely you already have this, right???

As only one of four U.S. dates and the last stop on the tour (perhaps to make up for the rained-out Rice Stadium gig years ago?), the Houston classic rock audience responded by rewarding the former Pink Floyd singer/bassist with a sold out show. I’d never seen the lawn so packed before, proving that sometimes a band’s catalogue of material is so strong that it can overcome any hesitancies about who is actually playing it.

For the show’s first half, Waters and his extensive, polished-to-a-sheen ensemble (including late-model Thin Lizzy guitarist Snowy White) offered up a heaping helping of Floyd warhorses (“Have a Cigar,” “Shine on You Crazy Diamond,” “Mother,” “Wish You Were Here”), rarities (“The Fletcher Memorial Home”) and solo material (“Perfect Sense-Pt. 1” from Amused to Death).

But the best moments came at unexpected times. The heavily trippy early Floyd track “Set Controls for the Heart of the Sun” was a mindbending blowout, complete with projected footage of the then-young band frolicking on a beach (ah, Syd, so young and vibrant…).

Doyle Bramhall
May 3, 2008
McGonigel’s Mucky Duck

Better Than: Every tired-ass blues jam or interminable harmonica throwdown on the planet.

Download: This scorching version of “Big” with C.C. Adcock and Nick Curran on guitars.

With producer/guitarist C.C. Adcock on emergency leave due to the suicide of his former producer Tarka Cordell, Austin blues veteran Doyle Bramhall scrambled personnel for Saturday’s show at McGonigel’s Mucky Duck and came up with another winning lineup. Working his way through the tracks on his latest Grammy-nominated Yep Roc album Is It News as well as fresh versions of several songs written with Stevie Ray Vaughn, Bramhall opted for a minimalist three piece lineup that included regular guitarist Nick Curran augmented with Austin legend Casper Rawls (Leroi Brothers, Toni Price). Rawls, who it seems has played on or produced half the records made in the Western Hemisphere the past 25 years, anchored the rhythm end while Curran was given most of the nasty licks assignments. Both men proved up to the task.

One "Robert of the Radish" defines "weirdness" as "behavior that the majority of the population finds foreign, unnatural or strange." You don't say! He continues: