Carrboro
Hot Tuna Electric
Cat’s CradleLike a wardrobe, if you make any music for long enough, it’ll come back in style. So all you kids addicted to roots, put down your Fleet Foxes and avail yourself of blues-folk legends Hot Tuna, who’ve spent more time playing this music than many of us have breathing. Initially formed as an offshoot of Jefferson Airplane, core members guitarist Jorma Kaukonen and bassist Jack Casady turn acoustics and electrics into music that spans dusty sun-dappled folk and grimy blues-psych. Don’t miss opener Patrick Sweany, who’s played with fellow Akron, Ohio, resident Dan Auerbach (The Black Keys) and Jimmy Thackeray in building his own deep-seated blues groove. The $25-$28 show begins at 8:30 p.m. Visit www.catscradle.com. Chris Parker
Raleigh
Between the Buried and Me
Lincoln TheatreSome segregate their music intake like a TV dinner, confining everything to its own region. Between the Buried and Me prefer a meatloaf-mashedpotatoes-greenbeans-roll mash, divided genres colliding in a highway pileup heap of twisted metal. The Raleigh quintet segues from steely death metal breakdown and growling howls to racing prog-inflected guitar arpeggios and crooned vocals, yielding to jazz, folk, electronics and pop during the journey. The changes are at times abrupt, but in general there’s a certain hyperventilating logic, as though the band is channel-hopping to a preset tempo.
Over the past nine years, BTBAM has tamed its abundant proficiencies and flights of technical fancy into better-designed structures and grooves. See, for instance, 2007’s Colors, which churns harder and lacks anything as left field as the straight bossa nova of Alaska‘s “Laser Speed.” Losing that oddball charm to greater menace and consistency forsakes something, but it may give them a bit more popular appeal in the wake of Mastodon’s prog-metal improvement. With an October release scheduled for the follow-up, The Great Misdirect, this show offers a hint of what’s to come. Pay $13-$15 at 6:30 p.m. Visit www.lincolntheatre.com. Chris Parker