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Photo credit: Shane McCauley
Wolf Parade w/ Charly Bliss @ Turner Hall Ballroom, Thursday, Oct. 26 at 8 p.m.
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KMFDM w/ OhGr @ The Rave, Saturday, Oct. 28 at 8 p.m.
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Photo credit: ColinBrennan
Black Violin @ Marcus Center, Saturday, Oct. 28 at 7:30 p.m.
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Nick Lowe’s Quality Rock ’n’ Roll Revue featuring Los Straitjackets @ Turner Hall Ballroom, Sunday, Oct. 29 at 8 p.m.
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Sparky and Rhonda Rucker @ Beulah Brinton House, Sunday, Oct. 29 at 4 p.m.
Halloween comes to Center Street, while local bands play dress up and a reunited indie-rock favorite returns.
Thursday, Oct. 26
Food Fright! @ Lakefront Brewery, 7 p.m.
The Shepherd Express is proud to co-sponsor Lakefront Brewery’s Food Fright!, a fundraiser for Local First Milwaukee. Come hungry: 13 Milwaukee restaurants and chefs will be sharing locally sourced small plates, while the Lakefront Brewery staff will offer “haunted” brewery tours, and 5 Card Studs and DJ Cat Reince provide the music. There will also be a costume contest with a $100 cash prize. Tickets are available at shepherdtickets.com.
Wolf Parade w/ Charly Bliss @ Turner Hall Ballroom, 8 p.m.
Few indie-rock bands of the 2000s delivered more thrills per minute than Wolf Parade, the jittery Canadian ensemble whose 2005 debut, Apologies to the Queen Mary, remains one of the most exciting, unpredictable records of the era. Side projects kept the band apart for years at a time, while Spencer Krug played in groups like Sunset Rubdown, Frog Eyes, Swan Lake and Moonface, and Dan Boeckner recorded with Handsome Furs and started Divine Fits, a side project with Brit Daniel of Spoon. Thankfully, last year the group reunited, and now they have a new album to show for it: Cry Cry Cry, released this month on Sub Pop. The band’s dour humor and dynamic choruses remain as impactful as ever. Charly Bliss, a lovable New York power-pop band whose debut album, Guppy, is sure to appear on quite a few critics’ year end lists, opens.
Friday, Oct. 27
Halloween Cover Show @ Cactus Club, 9 p.m.
It’s one of Halloween’s silliest but most entertaining traditions: Each year, members of the local music scene get in the holiday spirit by dressing up as some of their favorite artists and paying tribute to them with covers sets. This show at Cactus Club features some fun selections. Members of The Sleepwalkers and Bad Wig will do a Superdrag tribute set; Brat Sounds will pay homage to the Misfits and The Ramones; some players from Madison will do a Go Gos’ set; and members of Calliope and Airo Kwil will perform as a group called Madonnavanna. If you don’t get your fill at this show, an unrelated bill at Linneman’s Riverwest Inn on Saturday, Oct. 28 will feature tributes to Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, The Undertones, The Damned and The Knack.
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Saturday, Oct. 28
Nightmare on Center Street III @ multiple venues, 8 p.m.
Here’s a perfect Halloween night out for music fans who have trouble staying in one place. The label VoodooHoney has organized another installment of its Nightmare on Center Street concert crawl, a lineup of shows at venues along one of Riverwest’s busier main streets, including Company Brewing, the Jazz Gallery, Quarters Rock ’n’ Roll Palace and High Dive. The lineup includes artists from Milwaukee and beyond, including Minneapolis’ Nelson Devereaux (from Bon Iver), Chicago’s Lili K and Milwaukeeans like Foreign Goods, Rio Turbo, Genesis Renji, Raj Raiden, Sex Scenes, Lorde Fredd33, Klassik, Vincent VanGREAT and Zed Kenzo, among many, many others. Cover is $10 for any given show, or $15 for a wristband that lets you show hop all night.
KMFDM w/ OhGr @ The Rave, 8 p.m.
From their beginnings as a performance-art project in the early ’80s, German noise fetishists KMFDM emerged as one of the earliest, most-pioneering and, eventually, longest-running industrial acts. The band has experienced a good deal of turnover over the decades, leaving frontman Sascha Konietzko the band’s only original member, but their recent output has remained true to the harsh spirit of the group’s earliest recordings—their intense 12th and latest album, Hell Yeah, is yet another brutal opus. By now, Konietzko should be very familiar with The Rave: His band has played there seven times before, their first being a show with Korn back in October 1995.
Tim Reynolds and TR3 w/ Sam Llanas @ Shank Hall, 8 p.m.
To most fans, Tim Reynolds is best known for his work with the Dave Matthews Band. In fact, in many fan circles, the guitarist is considered as integral to that band as Dave Matthews himself. Reynolds is also a band leader in his own right, though. In the mid-’80s, he formed the power trio TR3, a group that spiked their electric rock with shades of funk and jazz. After a long hiatus in the ’00s, the group reconvened in 2007 and has recorded several albums since as Reynolds has done double duty, recording with both Matthews and his own band.
Black Violin @ Marcus Center, 7:30 p.m.
Proving that talented string players are always in demand, the Florida classical/hip-hop duo Black Violin have performed and recorded with artists as diverse as Kanye West, Lupe Fiasco, Aerosmith, Alicia Keyes and the late Tom Petty. Violinist Kev Marcus and viola player Wil B. have saved some of their best work, however, for their own recordings, which pair the compositional dexterity of classical music with the rhythmic thrust of rap. This concert is co-presented by Black Arts MKE and the Marcus Center.
Sunday, Oct. 29
Nick Lowe’s Quality Rock ’n’ Roll Revue featuring Los Straitjackets @ Turner Hall Ballroom, 8 p.m.
Elvis Costello’s cover of Nick Lowe’s “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding” turned the song into a hit, but it was Curtis Stigers’ less-celebrated cover of that song from the massive-selling soundtrack to The Bodyguard that earned Lowe a fortune in royalties. Perhaps because of that wealth, Lowe now works at the leisurely pace of a retiree, recording a new album every five years or so and touring when he feels like it. Those low stakes have yielded some great results over the years—his newer albums tend to be leisurely, country-shaded affairs—but after all these years, the stately songwriter still has some surprises in him. At this show, Lowe shares billing with the Nashville cult surf band Los Straitjackets; they’ll perform separately and together. The Cut Worms open.
Sparky and Rhonda Rucker @ Beulah Brinton House, 4 p.m.
From time to time, Bay View’s historic Beulah Brinton House (2590 S. Superior St.) hosts intimate concerts, but this show may be its most high profile yet. For decades, folk songwriter Sparky Rucker and his wife, Rhonda Rucker, have toured the country behind some of the earliest forms of American music, performing old spirituals, work songs, railroad songs, slave songs, Appalachian obscurities, old-time blues and music from the Civil War, while sharing the stories behind those songs. They’ve appeared on NPR’s “Prairie Home Companion” and on the Grammy-nominated folk anthology Singing Through the Hard Times. Admission for this performance is a suggested donation of $15.
Tuesday, Oct. 31
Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie @ The Riverside Theater, 7 p.m.
For years you could count on one holdout from any Fleetwood Mac tour: singer-keyboardist Christine McVie, who retired from touring in 1998 and sat out the band’s last official full-length album, 2003’s Say You Will. Fans were thrilled, then, when McVie rejoined the group in 2014, and even more thrilled by talk of a new album. But since this is Fleetwood Mac, one of those most legendarily dramatic groups of all time, that new album wasn’t meant to be (singer Stevie Nicks essentially vetoed it). Absent Nicks’ participation, guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and McVie went ahead and recorded some of the music they’d been working on for an album they released this summer simply titled Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie. Fleetwood Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie perform on the album, making it the closest thing to an “official” Fleetwood Mac album fans can probably expect for quite a while.
