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Photo credit: Carl Schultz
Nils Lofgren
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Johnny Marr
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The 1975
A busy week brings Cher, The 1975, Tacocat and Carrot Top to Milwaukee.
Thursday, May 9
Express Yourself Milwaukee: Kintsugi @ Miller High Life Theatre, 6:30 p.m.
Express Yourself Milwaukee, a program for at-risk youth, presents this free, family friendly performance featuring artists ages 7-21. Themed around kintsugi, the Japanese art of golden mending, the program will span music, dance and visual art and will feature drumming and spoken word. The evening will begin with a pre-show reception at 5:30 p.m. that is open to the public.
Friday, May 10
The 1975
The 1975 w/ Pale Waves and No Rome @ Eagles Ballroom, 7 p.m.
Of all the bands to win over the easily charmed British music press this decade, few have proven to be as genuinely radical as The 1975, a group that’s changed the perception of what a rock band can be at this moment in time. The group first built a fanbase with a series of four EPs, one of which included the buzzy single “Sex,” a shimmery slab of British post-punk crossed with hints of Fall Out Boy’s high-drama emo, but on recent albums they’ve split the difference between direct guitar pop and synth-heavy dance songs. Largely written during front man Matt Healy’s stay in rehab, last year’s A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships was the band’s biggest, most ambitious record yet. They plan to follow it up this summer with a new album, Notes on a Conditional Form.
Tacocat w/ Sammi Lanzetta and Heavy Looks @ Cactus Club, 9 p.m.
Few bands do more to dismiss the offensive stereotype of the “angry feminist” more than Seattle’s Tacocat. They’re proudly feminist, yes, but there’s nothing angry about them. Drawing from the chiming guitars of so many K Records releases and the peppy spirit of so many riot grrrl bands, they play songs about male gaze, gender inequality and their periods with peppy tempos and good humor. After three masterfully hooky albums, they signed to Sub Pop for their just-released latest record This Mess is a Place.
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Saturday, May 11
Fuzzysurf w/ Cashfire Sunset and Flat Teeth @ Linneman’s Riverwest Inn, 8 p.m.
On the Milwaukee guitar-pop group Fuzzysurf’s debut album Hometown Feeling, the band revisited the tunefully distorted alternative rock of front man Sean Lehner’s youth, looking to bands like Blue, The Posies and The Breeders. The group’s latest project, though, looks to a very different era. Colored with reverb-drenched guitars and surf licks, Fuzzy & The Surfs is a quick, 30-minute set that pays homage to the British Invasion and other ’60s rock styles. The group shares this LP release show with fellow Milwaukee acts Cashfire Sunset and Flat Teeth.
Photo credit: Carl Schultz
Nils Lofgren
Nils Lofgren Band @ Potawatomi Hotel & Casino, 8 p.m.
Nils Lofgren is best known as a member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, which he’s performed with since 1984, but his long career has also seen him release more than two dozen solo albums and perform as a member of Crazy Horse, which he just rejoined last year. Lofgren’s latest solo album is especially personal: Blue With Lou contains six songs that Lofgren wrote with Lou Reed, including five that were never released. The two artists co-wrote together in the late ’70s, with many of their songs ending up on Reed’s 1979 album The Bells, including “City Lights,” which Lofgren reprised for Blue With Lou.
A Flock of Siegers @ Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts, 7 p.m.
For decades, one family has been creating some of Milwaukee’s most notable art and music. “A Flock of Siegers” will spotlight the work of more than 20 members of the Sieger family, living and deceased. “The oldest thing in the show will be my great-grandpa’s sculpture that he made out of a hunk of marble and brass that he acquired at his job in the tombstone workshop,” writes Anja Notanja Sieger, the Milwaukee typewriter poet who co-curated the event with Linsey Sieger, owner of the Third Sector Creative. In addition to art and Anja’s shadow puppetry, the event will feature a performance from an all-Sieger band featuring members of Semi-Twang, Awkward Terrible, Contraptions, R&B Cadets and Scrimshaw.
Sunday, May 12
Cher @ Fiserv Forum, 8 p.m.
Few artists have been as consistently on the pulse of dance-music trends as Cher. Since she graduated from her folk duo Sonny and Cher—and their hit variety show—to embrace disco music, Cher has been a staple of the dance floor. She also notably helped popularize Auto-Tune with her 1998 single “Believe,” one of the biggest singles of all time. In 2013, Cher released her first album in 12 years, the dance-minded Closer To The Truth, which includes the Paul Oakenfold-produced single “Woman’s World.” She followed it up last year with Dancing Queen, an of ABBA covers released after Cher’s appearance in the ABBA-inspired musical Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again.
Museum Mile Day @ multiple locations, 11 a.m.
Milwaukee’s shoreline doesn’t just boast some of the city’s best views; it’s also home to many of its most unique museums. Eight years ago, five museums, all within a mile of each other—Jewish Museum Milwaukee, Charles Allis Art Museum, Museum of Wisconsin Art at St. John’s On The Lake, Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum and North Point Lighthouse at Lake Park—teamed up to brand themselves the “Milwaukee Museum Mile.” This Sunday, they celebrate the anniversary of that partnership by offering free or reduced admission from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., as well as free docent-led tours and children’s activities. A free shuttle bus will make it extra easy for patrons to hop from one museum to the next.
Tuesday, May 14
Johnny Marr
Johnny Marr @ The Pabst Theater, 8 p.m.
In an era when seemingly no band stays broken up forever, it’s remarkable that The Smiths have resisted the allure of a huge payday for reuniting. The group disbanded in 1987, and they seem content to stay that way. That’s left guitarist Johnny Marr plenty of time to enjoy other projects. In the decades since The Smiths’ final album Strangeways, Here We Come, Marr has been a member of The The, Modest Mouse, The Cribs and The Pretenders (albeit very briefly) while recording as an in-demand session musician. He’s also released several solo albums of solid guitar-pop, including his latest, 2018’s Call The Comet, an enjoyable throwback to the chiming college rock of the ’80s.
Wednesday, May 15
Walter Salas-Humara (The Silos) and Zach Pietrini @ Anodyne Coffee, 7 p.m.
Still wearing out guitars, with his 2018 album Walter Salas-Humara etched another chapter in a career that reaches back even farther than his 1985 debut with The Silos. That recent batch offered rocking and introspective songs; pliable gems with influences veering from Sturgeon Bay to the market stalls of Tangier. In the solo setting his songs come alive as fleshed out sketches that don’t need a backing band. Salas-Humara’s attention to detail and nuance are his strength. The sheer exuberance of “Here We Go” is worth the price of admission. Zach Pietrini opens the show.
Carrot Top @ Potawatomi Hotel & Casino, 8 p.m.
Carrot Top may be one of the most-hated comedians of his generation, but you’ve got to give him credit for this: He’s in on the joke. The red-headed prop comic’s shtick relies heavily on self-deprecating humor, and he hasn’t been shy about lampooning himself on TV (or taking other comedians’ insults with relative poise, as he’s done when he’s been eviscerated by his peers on Comedy Central’s celebrity roasts). At the heart of Carrot Top’s routine, though, is a suitcase full of crude, self-assembled props he uses to set himself up for one-line gags.
