5:00 Iron & Wine
I confess I sometimes think of Sam Beam as “that brilliantly creepy songwriter guy,” so I suppose I’m probably part of the reason he’s going for a fuller sound and a lighter feel on his next LP, The Shepherd’s Dog, due in September on Sub Pop. The disc includes one track in collaboration with Calexico—a sort of follow-up to In the Reins, the EP they did together in 2005—and the first single, “Boy With a Coin” (which includes two songs not on the album), came out July 10. MK Aluminum Stage

5:15 Professor Murder
Professor Murder caught the last dance-punk train out of Brooklyn, before everyone started doing beardo wolf jams instead. A four-piece with a couple part-time percussionists and a full-time drummer, they’re a fun, shambly party band at heart, specializing in konky minimalist fonk with hella cowbell—plus, they’re not scared of dub. They play a second show tonight at the Hideout with Oxford Collapse. JH Balance Stage

6:00 Mastodon
Every Mastodon album since 2002’s Remission has been a landmark of sorts, a mysterious metal monolith dropped onto the landscape with a crunch that registers on the Richter scale. The music is almost flawlessly crafted, with the kind of obsessive attention to detail you usually see from guys building ships in bottles or sculpting Devils Tower out of mashed potatoes. On Mastodon's major-label debut, last year’s Blood Mountain, their usual combination of furious precision, crushing density, and melodic grace is entirely intact, and if anything the songs are stranger and less straightforward—it doesn’t look like the band had to promise to tone down to make the leap to the big leagues. And of course you know you’ve arrived when you score a cameo as a bunch of animated concession­-stand snacks in the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie. MK Connector Stage

6:15 Oxford Collapse
With their big, catchy hooks, epic thrift-store guitar jamminess, and just-a- bunch-of- scruffy-guys -rocking-out ’tude, Oxford Collapse would’ve been indie huge ten years ago. But in the here and now, last year’s Remember the Night Parties (their third LP and first for Sub Pop) has been tragically underappreciated—despite providing a refreshing reminder of how good plain old gimmick-free indie rock can be. They play a second show tonight at the Hideout with Professor Murder. MR Balance Stage

7:00 Clipse
There isn’t much to Clipse’s recent Hell Hath No Fury (Re-Up Gang/Star Trak) besides drums, cocaine talk, and jokey wordplay, but that’s not a complaint—brothers Malice and Pusha T (and of course beatsmith Pharrell Williams of the Neptunes) are masters of minimalism. Without straying from their single-minded focus on the coke-slinging game, they deliver songs that range in feel from futuristic hedonism to claustrophobic paranoia—and that add up to one of the tightest, most nuanced rap records in years. MR Aluminum Stage

7:15 Dan Deacon
Dan Deacon’s sweaty-computer-nerd dance tracks combine razzle-dazzle melodies and ADD beats, and on mike he alternates between barking silly-goose lyrics and spinning prismatic, existential tall tales; his latest full-length is Spiderman of the Rings (Carpark). LA Balance Stage

8:00 Cat Power
Chan Marshall doesn’t seem afraid to dismantle the troubled-indie-genius mythology that’s grown up around her. On You Are Free (2003) she ditched the strum-and-sigh fragility that’d earned her a slavish fan base, and on last year’s The Greatest she made a ballsy tribute to classic southern soul. She’s more or less sober these days, and the things that used to turn so many of her live shows into slow-motion emotional car wrecks—withdrawn mumbling, paralyzing self-criticism, unfinished songs—all fell away when she cleaned up. Marshall kicks ass onstage now, and for this set she’s fronting a kick-ass band, Dirty Delta Blues, that includes members of the Dirty Three, the Delta 72, and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. MR Connector Stage

8:30 Girl Talk
Pitchfork threw its star-making power behind laptop DJ Gregg Gillis, aka Girl Talk, and voila, in a matter of months he went from hopeful mashup kid to the first and last name in turning the party out. Mixing good pop music with “bad” pop music for the ironic-appreciation set, Gillis puts his software into overdrive to create a real MP3 mosh pit. JH Balance Stage

9:00 Yoko Ono
For decades her name was a punch line, shorthand for “unlistenable freak” and “difficult woman” (badges of honor, really), but for the past 15 years Yoko Ono’s reputation has undergone a steady and consistent rehabilitation—younger musicians finally understand that her fiercely feminist oddity is a feature, not a bug, and that the spiritual simplicity of her art and activism isn’t just the by-product of naivete (surely she can’t have much left at 74). For this spring’s Yes, I’m a Witch (Astralwerks), Ono enlisted artists as diverse as the Flaming Lips, Porcupine Tree, and Le Tigre (to name just a few) to overhaul recordings from her back catalog, creating an album of challenging remixes. Though she’s fiercely protective of John Lennon’s legacy, she recently donated the rights to his songs and their publishing royalties to Amnesty International, a gift that’s resulted in a two-CD collection of Lennon covers, Instant Karma, that benefits the agency’s campaign for Darfur and features the likes of U2, R.E.M., Green Day, and the Black-Eyed Peas. And a few years back she rewrote “Every Man Has a Woman Who Loves Him,” one of her tunes from Double Fantasy, so that its lyrics support marriage equality for gays and lesbians. MK Aluminum Stage