Photos by Alyssa Dupree

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

UPDATE: Rocks Off incorrectly identified the former By the End of Tonight member now performng as LIMB as Jeff Wilson, not James Templeton. Our apologies to LIMB.

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.

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Photos by Abrahan Garza

Smashing Pumpkins
Bayou Music Center
May 15, 2013

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.

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Photos by Julian Bajsel

One More Time: A Tribute to Daft Punk
Stereo Live
May 11, 2013

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?

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Photos by Jim Bricker

Titus Andronicus

Titus Andronicus, The So So Glos, The Caldwell
Walters
May 10, 2013

Friday night featured a four-band showcase at the new Walters (not on Washington) headlined by New Jersey indie-punk group Titus Andronicus, bringing their Brooklyn friends The So So Glos along on what they are calling the "Bring Back the Dudes" tour. Locals Chemistry and The Caldwell rounded out the evening.

First band up The Caldwell featured a slew of familiar faces of the Houston music scene playing their first gig ever. Fronted by vocalist/guitarist James Essary, who can also be seen supporting recent scene-stealer Adam Bricks, the band gave forth a solid effort with a set of originals that couldn't help but remind me a whole bunch of the Walkmen.

I guess if you're going to emulate a band, that's surely a good one to choose. The rest of the evening's entertainers were a tad on the louder and heavier side, but The Caldwell brought the perfect amount of noise to ease everyone into the night.

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Photos by Torey Mundkowsky

The Killers, The Virgins
Bayou Music Center
May 8, 2013

On a less than steamy May evening, a packed house at Bayou Music Center waited patiently in a temperature more commonly associated with Bonnaroo or Dengue Fever. About 30 minutes later than expected burst another hot entity, Brandon Flowers, and the rest of The Killers. Suddenly the crowd did not care that they were on the verge of dehydration. This band came to please them, and pleased they would be.

Before Flowers and company started their set, New York-based openers The Virgins started right on time. They were less than impressive. Maybe they would sound better in a dingy Manhattan club, which would explain why greats like Sonic Youth, Lou Reed, and Iggy Pop have courted The Virgins as openers in the past.

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Photos by Jim Bricker

George Clinton & the P-Funk All-Stars
House of Blues
May 4, 2013

George Clinton has strong ties to the city of Houston, which has been evident with the bounty of shows he's thrown our way over the past several years. It was only a matter of time before he brought his circus back to House of Blues, and Saturday Clinton and his band -- Parliament, Funkadelic, P-Funk, the Parliaments or whatever they're called these days -- started early and played late, satiating any and every paying customer's fix for the funk.

One thing that P-Funk (which is what I'm going to call them for this article) always does is bring the funk until they either get kicked offstage by the venue or simply run out of material. One thing they absolutely never do is start their show on time. With what's been described as a "hazy" backstage at a P-Funk show, it's no wonder they always take forever to come onstage.

That wasn't the case Saturday night, though, with the 9 p.m. start time finding all umpteen members of Clinton's troupe slowly parading their way into their positions behind either an instrument or one of the bevy of mike stands that crowded the right side of the stage. I guess there's a first time for everything.

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Photos by Jim Bricker

Yo La Tengo
Fitzgerald's
May 2, 2013

It's such a treat to see a band like Yo La Tengo perform at a club the size of Fitzgerald's, and that was clear during their headlining set on Thursday night. Sure, they play to hundreds more people at most of their other gigs, but anyone in attendance - including the band - could tell you we were the lucky ones.

We all knew headed into the show, billed as "An Evening With Yo La Tengo," was going to be a full dose of the New Jersey-based genre-bending trio. What wasn't known was how much the crowd was going to eat it up. The mostly thirtysomething audience featured more sets of glasses than I've ever seen at a show. These were music nerds in the best way imaginable.

Ira Kaplan, his wife Georgia Hubley and longtime bassist/auxiliary drummer James McNew proved that no matter what they brought to the incredibly attentive Houston crowd, it would be accepted wholeheartedly by everyone in the room.

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Ed. Note: Slayer guitarist Jeff Hanneman, a founding member of the band, passed away Thursday in Southern California due to liver failure, according to Rolling Stone. Hanneman, 49, had contracted the flesh-eating disease necrotizing fasciitis, which doctors believed was the result of a spider bite, and stepped away from Slayer in early 2011. In late September 2010, he was part of the Jagermeister tour that stopped by Verizon Wireless Theater (now Bayou Music Center) with Megadeth and Anthrax. Former Rocks Off staffer Craig Hlavaty brought us this report.

Photos by Groovehouse

Slayer live is a force of sound, probably the closest you can get to true calamity without being outright noise. Like a freight train, there are no stops. If you get hit or run over, that's the breaks.

But, Good Lord, does it have a groove to it. We are probably only one of seven people in the world who think Slayer has a head-nodding, hip-shake to their music. A band stamping on human ear drums forever. And of course we had to be on the barricade.

The band began their set with "Hate Worldwide" and the title track from from last year's World Painted Blood. A man behind us screamed every single lyric in our ear, while a father and his 11-year-old son threw up metal horns and headbanged.

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Photos by Abrahan Garza

Peter Murphy
Numbers
April 25, 2013

Maybe Peter Murphy should get arrested more often.

That may be a horrible thing to say, but if you had seen him at Numbers, you'd understand. This tour had been previously announced, but whether his March arrest in California for DUI and alleged drug possession has left the undead Bauhaus front man in need of money (probably not) or just happy to get out on the road and have something to do (likelier), his performance Friday night was the work of if not a man possessed, definitely a man with something to prove.

It was inspired, at the very least. Murphy was courtly, sinister, sometimes atop the drum riser, and more a little peeved when the sound crapped out halfway through. He also stated in no uncertain terms that the three musicians onstage with him were "not some copycat band." Hell, the way he wielded his illuminated "wand" that resembled a Maglite, maybe he was a little possessed.

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Photos by Marco Torres

Los Skarnales' Felipe Galvan

With a perfect combination of sun, clouds, and breeze, It felt as if Houston was making love to me as I escaped the treacherous, life-sucking fluorescent lighting of my Westchase office and moon-walked my way towards a Friday night full of booze, buds, and Budweiser. (I'm more of a Saint Arnold's drinker myself, but alliteration, dammit!)

First stop on the agenda was Market Square Park downtown, the site that serves as the starting point for the notorious last-Friday-of-the-month rolling bicycle party called Critical Mass. After parking my gas-guzzler, I biked towards downtown, Instagramming the city along the way, with Snoop Lion's Reincarnated providing the soundtrack.

I'm still formulating my final verdict on this album, but the combination of Snoop's charisma and Major Lazer's production makes this an enjoyable offering from The Artist Formerly Known As the Dogg.

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