Photos by Marco Torres

Bob Schneider is better than Paul McCartney.

Okay fine, perhaps the Austin-based singer/songwriter was exaggerating a tad when he favorably compared his ukulele skills to the ex-Beatle (whom he had seen perform the previous night in Austin). The guy may be the Hardest Working Man In Texas Music, but at least he keeps things in perspective.

Last night at the Duck, Schneider was -- by turns -- raunchy, self-deprecating, acerbic, and gloomy; often in the course of the same song. And he has a lot of songs: funky-ish treatments harking back to his Ugly Americans days, mournful odes to love lost, and sillier efforts co-written/inspired by his son.

It's this stubborn refusal to be pigeonholed and perception of aloofness that's contributed to both Schneider's widespread popularity and his tendency to rub people the wrong way.

Photos by Jason Wolter

Robert Earl Keen (left) and Lyle Lovett

If I wanted to make a dopey analogy, which I'm going to do anyway, I'd say Texas' coastal waters and our wry but soulful singer-songwriters are two of this state's most precious natural resources. Lucky for us, both seem to be renewable too -- up to a point.

Dwight Yoakam, Robert Earl Keen, Hayes Carll and Ray Wylie Hubbard are all busy guys who hardly ever stop touring. They certainly didn't have to waive whatever fee each one commands to help out the Coastal Conservation Association's fight to preserve Texas' coastal ecosystem, particularly on a Saturday night, but there they were at Saturday's second annual Texas Concert for Conservation, none of them visibly phoning it in as performers at such charitable hootenannys are often wont to do.

It was a beyond-pleasant evening even before Lyle Lovett -- who can't live more than 20 miles from Sam Houston Race Park, as the crow flies -- showed up to sing "hey hey" a few times on his old Texas A&M buddy Robert Earl Keen's "That Buckin Song."

Photos by Nicholas Zalud

When I spotted a poster advertising Saturday's King's X gig at Scout Bar a few weeks back, it was kind of a relief. The news coming out of the celebrated Houston band's camp hasn't been the greatest recently. Last year, drummer Jerry Gaskill suffered a major heart attack that stopped the group in its tracks. That led to the cancellation of their homecoming show at Warehouse Live last March.

Gaskill recovered, only to take another big punch to the gut when he lost his New Jersey home in Superstorm Sandy. Then just last month, it was announced that fans and friends were setting up a crowdfunding account to pay for front man dUg Pinnick's badly needed hernia surgery.

Longtime fans showed up at Scout Bar over the weekend to hear some beloved tunes, sure, but also to simply check in and see if the proto-grunge power trio was OK.

Photos by Sonya Harvey

Fans of Scott H. Biram's brand of rusty yelpin' need not worry, because the Dirty Old One Man Band still sheltering us in a hefty dose of antiquated down-home blues.

With slightly less audacity than past shows and sipping Guinness tallboys all night, a tamer Biram cranked up the phaser rich pedal board and reached into his arsenal of Gibsons, pulling out his trusty scratched-up hollowbody, to instigate a night of blues covers with Lightnin' Hopkins, Howlin' Wolf and, by our count, at least three Mance Lipscomb songs in tow.

Leading off with Lead Belly's "Midnight Special," Biram commenced to double-timing tense harmonica riffs and slightly bent choruses to a cozy crowd of about 70, who answered back with fist-pumping rebel yells.

Photos by Francisco Montes

"It's the humidity that makes the funk more glorious," mused a certain Mr. Dave Matthews in his amused, half-mumbled manner as he opened Friday night's show in The Woodlands, the first stop on the band's annual summer tour.

Oh, and what glorious funk it was. That statement set the tone for the night's sweltering concert, during which the Dave Matthews Band spent two hours improvising and extended each song into a jam-band version of its former self.

That's pretty much Dave Matthews Band concert protocol, though. Dave Matthews concerts generally aren't built for the casual fan, and rarely will you hear more than a smattering of radio hits played during their sets. With 20 years of material to draw from, and a penchant for jam-banding the shit out of each song, it takes a devout member of the church of DMB to recognize most of the songs on their ever-evolving set list.

Photos by Alyssa Dupree

Tera Melos, with "The Hot Dog Man" (center)

Tera Melos, TTNG, LIMB
Fitzgerald's
May 16, 2013

It's unusual to walk into a show where majority of the crowd is under legal drinking age, and Thursday's Tera Melos show happened to be one of those times. But despite the fact that most of the people at Fitzgerald's weren't drinking, the crowd was as fun and rambunctious as any.

Fitz's downstairs room was packed, with an attendance that hovered just over 75 percent of their capacity on Houston's first humid evening of the year.

The show kicked off around 9 p.m. with Houston's own LIMB, the solo project of Jeff Wilson James Templeton. Templeton and Jeff Wilson were once part of By the End of Tonight, a Houston-area experimental post-rock group who released a split EP with Tera Melos in 2007.

Photos by Nathan Smith

Kylesa

Ever notice how some weeks just never seem to end? There's nothing worse. On those occasions when each and every workday feels scientifically engineered to kick your ass, Thursdays can be the longest days of all: the weekend is just far enough away to sadistically taunt you to your face without fear that you'll reach out and strangle it to death.

On Thursdays like that, when all you want to do is fast-forward to Friday, some heavy music and a few brews beats an evening at home watching sitcom finales ten times out of ten. Maybe 11. Luckily, Kylesa -- one of Georgia's top purveyors of experimental sludge -- trudged into Walters last night to stomp some mud off their boots, and brought a stacked bill along with them that was willing and able to sacrifice another workweek to Satan a full day ahead of schedule.

Photos by Marco Torres

According to the World Black Belt Bureau, the term "Dim Mak", also called the "Touch of Death," is defined as "the ancient martial art of striking vital points of an opponent's body... engineered to cause a knockout, death, or delayed reaction in the opponent." It is rumored that Dim Mak was the real cause of death for a certain actor/martial artist by the name of Bruce Lee. Back in 1996, a skinny Japanese-American kid named Steve Aoki started his own record label, and named it Dim Mak as a tribute to Lee.

He's been killing the EDM game ever since.

Thursday night, the crowd at Stereo Live was electric, or as the great American poet Roscoe Dash would say, everyone was "all the way turnt up." Tickets for the show were sold out weeks in advance, and the procrastinators were vigorously attempting to purchase last-minute tickets on Facebook.

Photos by Abrahan Garza

This is not a Smashing Pumpkins review.

Sure, the title of this post hints otherwise, but I assure you -- the Smashing Pumpkins broke up in Chicago, on December 2, 2000. I was there.

Props to front man Billy Corgan for trying like hell to keep his dream alive, but after a while, we have to come clean and call this band what it really is: Billy Corgan and some hired guns mostly playing songs they mostly didn't write.

Harsh it may sound, but that's coming from an admitted (mostly) former Pumpkins fanatic. I need to utilize all my fingers and most of my toes to count the number of times I've seen The Pumpkins live since 1994 (at the age of 11). I have just about every Pumpkins T-shirt ever designed -- I've worn each one into the ground, and I've even got the awkward school pictures to prove it.

Photos by Julian Bajsel

It's safe to say that Daft Punk fever is at an all time high. Fifteen-second clips of new music were enough to nearly break the internet and no major gathering of musicians can happen without rumors of a Daft Punk appearance spreading.

Enter One More Time to try and help the masses with their Daft Punk mania. The more cynical among you may see it as an opportunistic money-grab, but this isn't the case at all. They've been doing the Daft Punk tribute thing for years, even winning the award for "Best Electronica Tribute Act" (under their old name Daft Punk'd) from our friends at the Phoenix New Times back in 2011.

That said, like many of you, we here at Rocks Off had questions about whether or not an electronica tribute act could work. What, we wondered, would the show be like?