by JACK OATMON

This just in: I’m going to go out way too much this weekend. The buffer zone provided between the end of the university semester and holiday obligations, combined with this weekend’s lovely booking schedule, spell certain doom for Your Humble Narrator.

Tonight, Thursday, Dec. 14, is a good chance to get your fill of quality local jams before the outta-town-heavy weekend sets in. Starting at Café Campus, gritty locals Creature will deliver some raw, toe-tapping madness à la Madness that’s kinda like the Doors on acid in the Caribbean, stuck on a boat with members of Parliament (as in the P-Funk, not the cocks in the caucus, that is). They’ll be opening for this week’s Mirror cover kids les Breastfeeders, who’ve managed to be modern without forsaking some good, old-fashioned, thrashing power chords, hell yeah.

Later on tonight might be a good chance to see how the other half live and check out Club Opera to the familiar sounds of Tiga, Mini and Thomas Von Party along with Call Me Poupée. Also tonight, you might want to pop down to Metropolis for Champion et ses G-Strings.

Friday night, at the second installment of Peer Pressure’s new SAT monthlies, Chicago’s Flosstradamus brings some synthetic rhythm ’n’ beats with plenty of attitude and an affinity for vocoders. That’s a part of their tour with Kid Sister and locals Hatchmatik and A-Rock. Kid Sister lays down laid-back lyrics over hilariously well put-together glitch tracks and low-end bangers. She’s got exactly the right amount of ironic references and well-aimed trash-talking to keep disillusioned hip hop fanatics like myself optimistic for the next generation of club rap albums. That is to say, anyone else sick of formulaic “gangster” garbage that hasn’t been clever since Eazy-E? Here’s your solution.

Nothin’ makes me happier than (arguably) politically-charged rock/distorto-clash/dance-punk/whatever-the-heck-it-is bands that pay ample attention to the production details without sounding like they were recorded by computer geeks in a boot camp. Unpretentious and unforgivingly badass, L.A.’s Guns ’n’ Bombs (including an ImaRobot and Junior Senior member) single-handedly put the United States outside New York back on my techno map, blow current German electro standards out of the water and give Paris’s New French Touch a run for its money. They play Saturday night at Voyeur X, also at the SAT. It’s the music that should have been playing in the movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day during the scene where the T1000 is in a transfer truck, chasing Arnold Schwarzenegger down that viaduct. Bliss and Jordan Dare bring you there.

And finally, don’t forget that Atach Tatuq and Omnikrom hit Club Soda Saturday night as well. Damn, if there isn’t something in there for every last party hound in town, spill some wine on my forehead and call me Mikhail Gorbachev. So meet me at the club and we’ll get foolish. Chances are I’ll know of a few good after parties by the time we get there.

IT’S THE NEW STYLE… jack.oatmon@gmail.com

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