The show starts at 9 PM and the Laureates, Very Truly Yours, and Beauty and the Feast open. The Fake Fictions' entire recorded output is still available to download for free here.

Wino from Shrinebuilder, shown mid-shred in a pic by Flickr user Silverfuture.

• MV + EE

When Matt Valentine (vocals, guitar, harmonica) and Erika Elder (vocals, mandolin, lap steel), aka MV + EE, tour with a band, they call it the Golden Road. But if you drove a car the way their recent releases veer between styles and sounds, you'd get pulled over. There are no songs on last year's LP Ragas of the Culvert (Three Lobed), just woozy instrumentals that sound like a class of sitar students detuning their instruments. But they've followed it up with Drone Trailer (DiCristina) and Barn Nova (Ecstatic Peace!), two albums that situate their spacey explorations within songs that sound like good old-fashioned classic rock. That is, if your idea of classic rock begins with Neil Young's Zuma and ends with the side of Young's American Stars 'n Bars that has "Will to Love" on it, with a detour down John Bonham's Boulevard of Heavy Beats. This Monday at the Empty Bottle they'll play as a duo, so I'm betting things will be pretty loose. Locals A Tundra open and the show is free.

(Via the Daily Swarm)

Update: The story continues to unfold, and become more confusing, at Brooklyn Vegan and the Riverfront Times.

Devitt is the owner of the Beauty Bar chain of nightclubs, which began as a single bar in New York City in 1995 and has since expanded to include outposts in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Brooklyn, Las Vegas, and Austin. Dugan doesn't go so far as to say that Sonotheque's going to become a Beauty Bar itself, but a source at the Empty Bottle tells me that it will. If that's true, the club will most likely have its retro-futuristic interior design replaced by the kitschy retro-beauty-parlor aesthetic that the other Beauty Bars share.

"There's something about walking into Encore, in a space where the titles are almost falling down because the stacks are so high," [U. of M. assistant professor of musicology Mark] Clague says. "And you get a visceral sense, a physical sense, a psychic sense of the kind of legacy and amount of art that's been created that there is to grasp . . . If you just started at one end and tried to listen your way through the store, you'd die before you made it 10 feet past the front entrance."

If you're enough of a record geek that a four-and-a-half-hour drive seems like a fair trade for some serious crate digging, you owe it to yourself to make a pilgrimage there.

(via the Daily Swarm)

From the Reader's music Flickr pool, which is of course open to your photos as well.

Not to be annoyingly pedantic—I try to keep it in check, I really do—but perhaps a lesson in some of the major methods of electronic voice alteration used in music might be in order. After the jump, some examples.

So it was as much of a blessing as it was a curse when I discovered the blog Stuff You Will Hate, a tribute to the one-way love-hate relationship between a self-described "old" hardcore and metal fan calling himself Sergeant D and, well, scene kids in general. Though he occasionally engages in a bit of Carles-ian faux-naive irony—like in the current entry, "Life's Big Questions: Are Hollister/Abercrombie Scene??"—he claims that anything he says he likes he actually likes, and he tends to stick up for the kids.

But man is that ever an appropriate name for a blog.

Video after the jump:

I'm not upset that Rammstein have released a new album called Liebe Ist für Alle Da, which is German for Lube Is for Your Ass, which is of course English for Ugh. (Check to be sure your sense of humor is working before you correct my translation, please.) I'm not upset even that the superdeluxe edition includes actual lube, along with, y'know, six translucent pink dildos allegedly based on the band members' members. Some people think being transgressive is an end unto itself, and some people—among them tedious industrial-metal bands whose brains never left the 90s—still think that plastic wangs and handcuffs count as "transgressive." No, what upsets me is that, among the people who are coughing up more than $400 for the TMI version of the album, at least one must be planning to use the dildos for their intended purpose, and will in the process be fulfilling a decade-old fantasy about Rammstein running a train on them. You know it's true.

Is it visually arresting? Check!

Is it jam-packed with impenetrable symbolism that offers tantalizing hints at its underlying meaning? Check!

Does it leave me deeply unsettled in a hard-to-define way that I find weirdly pleasurable? Double check!

Video after the jump.

Most of the results rate a 5.8 or so. At this point the Internet has already made most of the jokes at Pitchfork's expense that can possibly be made, and to get any more meat off that picked-over carcass it's gonna take a stroke of genius. Music journalist Daphne Carr looks to be the zingiest of the bunch with this succinct ball-busting slogan: "We know your taste and serve it to you lukewarm.”

Ouch.