Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Obersts reunited for a few numbers at Oberst’s show at Teragram Ballroom in LA March 21.

By Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

Time to clean out ol’ in-box. Hold onto yer hats… Much of this you may already have seen on the socials; some you haven’t. Here we go…

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Once again, our hometown record label – Saddle Creek Records – has been nominated for a Libera Award — the annual awards handed out by the American Association of Independent Music. Saddle Creek was nominated in the Label of the Year category for labels with 6 to 14 employees. Also in their category: Captured Tracks, City Slang, Lex Records, Light in the Attic, Mack Avenue Music Group and Photo Finish Records. Seems like Saddle Creek is nominated every year. Could this be the year they take home the prize?

In addition, Saddle Creek Records artist Indigo De Souza was nominated in the Breakthrough Artist, Best Singer-Songwriter Records, and Music Video of the Year categories. The 13th annual Libera Awards ceremony will take place June 10 at Gotham Hall in New York City. More coverage at Variety.

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The indie music world was thrown in a tizzy last week when Phoebe Bridges joined Conor Oberst on his “Conor Oberst and Friends” residency show at Los Angeles’ Teragram Ballroom – a series that heads east to Bowery Ballroom in NYC next month. The best coverage of the incident appeared in Them, an online publication that purports to be the “best of what’s queer.” 

Them’s James Factora reported that Bridgers walked on stage during the show’s encore and together with Conor performed Bright Eyes classic “Lua,” Oberst’s “Double Life” from 2014’s Upside Down Mountain and Better Oblivion Community Center tune “My City.” The occasion marked the first time the two have performed together since October 2020. Factora wonders whether, with the announced hiatus of Boygenuis (Bridgers’ project with Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus), if this unannounced reunion could be a sign of future BOCC things to come… 

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I already mentioned that legendary ‘90s-‘00s Omaha punk band Ritual Device is among the performers at this year’s Lincoln Calling May 3 and 4 (the festival schedule has yet to be released). Now comes word that RD will be playing back-to-back nights at Reverb Lounge in Omaha May 2-3 leading up to the LC weekend gig. The shows feature the band’s original lineup of Jerry Hug, Mike Saklar, Eric Ebers and Tim Moss. 

It’s been a decade since the band has taken the stage stage, and I’m sure there’s a good reason for this reunion. More to come…

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Speaking of artists from Omaha’s first golden age of indie music, Patrick Buchanan, the frontman of another ’90s-’00s legendary punk band, Mousetrap, yesterday released a new 5-song EP from his project House of Transgressor called Ain Soph Aur, which, along with the eerie album cover artwork, seems a wee bit satanic. Check it out on Spotify (I don’t see a Bandcamp or YouTube link), and here’s the first song on YouTube: 

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Finally, word from on high is that the fine folks who putting together the Outlandia Festival will announce the line-up for the August 9-10 festival sometime Thursday evening. No doubt you’ll see it blasted all over the socials that night, but I’ll be writing about it the following morning in Lazy-i. 

Who do you think will be this year’s headliner? After last year’s Lord Huron / Modest Mouse headliners (a festival that also included The Faint, Cat Power, Criteria, The Good Life and Horsegirl, among others), I can’t even imagine what they have up their sleeves — prior to this festival, I had never heard of Lord Huron.

With the Maha Music Festival taking the year off due to financial issues (according to their press release), Outlandia controls the board as the only indie music festival in the Omaha area this year. As it enters year 3, will it maintain its indie focus? We’ll find out Thursday night…

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2024 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

Once upon a time in Omaha in the early ‘90s there was a band called Mousetrap that played a unique kind of acidic post-punk fronted by a sinister-looking dude named Patrick Buchanan. The trio put out a handful of albums on local imprint One-Hour Records (R.I.P. Dave Sink) and on nationally distributed indie-punk label Grass Records. National tours followed. Their music would end up influencing a bunch of kids who would eventually make up the first wave of Saddle Creek Records acts, bands like Bright Eyes, Cursive and The Faint.

After a few years, Mousetrap did as most bands do — they went their separate ways, reuniting on special occasions (but it’s been awhile since that happened).

Now Mousetrap frontman Patrick Buchanan is back, performing under the name House of Transgressor, with a new album called Love Is the Law, Love Under Will. The self-released album, a bluesy collection of keyboard-driven gothic tracks that haunt like a stroll down a dark, rain-soaked New Orleans alley in a weird ‘80s horror movie.

Based on the Bandcamp notes, the album was written, recorded, performed and produced entirely by Buchanan. Mousetrap fans or anyone with a taste for dark-ambient / darkwave music would be wise to check it out.

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Tonight at The Waiting Room it’s the return of Built to Spill.

Based on the setlist for their recent show in Kalamazoo, they’ll be playing a mix of oldies and newies, including faves “Carry the Zero” “The Plan,” “Conventional Wisdom,” “Big Dipper,” as well as some covers. No doubt they’ll be playing songs from their forthcoming album, When the Wind Forgets Your Name, due out on Sub Pop Sept. 9. Opening is Portland band Sunbathe and Boise’s Distant Family. 8 p.m., $25.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2022 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

It’s all about who you know.

I got my advanced copy of the new Mousetrap 4-song 12-inch 45 rpm EP, Attica, yesterday in all its blood-red vinyl glory. The story again — the four songs by this ’90s-era seminal Omaha indie punk band were recorded sometime in 1997 and have sat locked in a vault (or stashed in a cardboard box under bass player Craig Crawford’s bed) all these years only to be remaster by Bob Weston of Shellac in 2020 and released for this limited run of 500 copies. It is scorching, classic Mousetrap at its most angry and acidic. Check out the lead track below and pre-order the vinyl before the Dec. 16 release via the Mousetrap Bandcamp page.

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The last time we saw indie band Lodgings they were opening for Criteria at The Waiting Room last Dec. 28 for the annual holiday show. Alas, with COVID, there won’t be any holiday shows this year.

Well earlier this week, the band released the first video from its 2019 Albini-engineered LP Water Works for the song “Emu,” directed by Amélie Raoul. Check it out below and go to their Bandcamp page to buy the album!

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I’ve been meaning to mention this for awhile but it keeps slipping off my screen: Back at the end of November Pitchfork reviewed David Nance’s latest album, Staunch Honey (2020, Trouble in Mind), and gave it a very respectable 7.7 rating, saying “The Nebraska guitarist and songwriter strips his music to its raw, noisy core, revealing how his favorite records might have sounded when still being hammered out in rehearsal.”

It’s mostly a rave wherein critic Sam Sodomsky seems to revel in the idea of underproduction, pointing out numerous times the stripped down, recorded-from-scratch nature of this album. He concludes with: “While the songs on Staunch Honey feel like breakthroughs, it’s living proof that their real journey is just beginning.” Not sure what that’s supposed to mean…

At any rate, it’s great to see Pitchfork review Nance (or any Nebraska artist, for that matter). Twas a time when a Pitchfork review was a “big deal.” It’s hard to gauge a Pitchfork effect these days when no one is touring, but even when they were, the Pitchfork effect was very limited as far as its impact on the local show draw — I can’t count the number of times I went to see a band with an 8.0+ Pitchfork review at O’Leaver’s or The Waiting Room expecting an SRO crowd only to be met with 20 or so people.

That said, Pitchfork remains a go-to website for indie reviews (though there has to be something else out there)…

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily (if there’s news) at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2020 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

Last week seminal Omaha Golden Age post-punk band Mousetrap released all of its classic singles and an oddity or two via Bandcamp. Adding to that news is that all the tracks have been remastered by Chicago mastering engineer Bob Weston.

Listening to the remastered tracks is like hearing them again for the first time. No doubt if you went to their shows at The Capitol or Howard Street Tavern in the mid-‘90s you probably already own these tracks as 7-inches, which were readily available at The Antiquarium (in fact, proprietor Dave Sink released some of this music on his One Hour Records label).

You can read a brief retelling of the Mousetrap history in this piece I wrote back in 2013 upon the event of their reunion.

That said, there are a few tracks here I’ve never heard before, including “Assholes and Elbows,” a 1995 recording used on the soundtrack to Roger Corman’s Caged Heat 3000; “Scratched and Stabbed,” a ’94 track originally included on Linoma, a compilation released on -ism Records; and “Flame On,” a ’95 release included as part of a 4-band 7-inch compilation released by a French label.

The entire discography of singles is available to download for just $5.85 or you can pay $1 per track.

In addition, in 1997 Mousetrap recorded four tracks at Attica Studios in Chicago with Mike Hogan on drums that were never released. Crawford said he transferred those tracks from the masters to digital (along with masters for Cerebral Revolver and Lover). The Attica sessions were also remastered by Weston and will be released later this year as a 12-inch 45 rpm EP. No release date yet. I’ll let you know when I know. Until then, check out a couple of the singles below and go to bandcamp and downloadn them all.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily (if there’s news) at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2020 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

Well I’m back from the Florida coast, tanned, rested and ready to go.

Out of the blue while I was in Florida I received an email from Patrick Buchanan, the frontman of Omaha golden age punk band Mousetrap. Now living in Los Angeles, Buchanan has been working on a new musical project called Vicious Lovers, and dropped the first tracks via Bandcamp.

“I recorded literally everything myself,” Buchanan said. “I wrote all the songs, played all the instruments, did the production/mix. Nobody else besides me touched this project in any way, from start to finish, which is the first time that’s ever happened for me.”

The tracks have a snakey, strutting swing that sort of reminds me of Buchanan’s last non-Moustrap outing, 2004’s After Dark — i.e., this is something completely different than the rough punk you remember from Mousetrap. Check out the tracks below and download them from his Bandcamp page (and on Spotify, Amazon & iTunes). Now if only Buchanan could get a crew together to perform these songs live (and then come back to Omaha).

Tonight at fabulous O’Leaveri’s it’s Brooklyn-based female fronted punkers Ex-Girlfriends. They just got back from playing SXSW where they’re supporting the release of a 4-song cassette called You’re Next, out now on Little Dickman Records. Check it. Opening is Houma and Hussies. $5, 9 p.m.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2018 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

 

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

Nice turnout for the Sidney Buchanan art show at The Little Gallery Friday night. You can check out the show anytime this week before 5 p.m., just swing by the gallery. It’s located right across the street from The Sydney in Benson. Sidney’s work is amazing, and affordable. Maybe too affordable.

I spent Friday night hanging out with Sidney’s son, Patrick, who you may remember from the classic ’90s punk band Mousetrap. Patrick lives in Miami these days. We talked about music, what’s been going on in Omaha over the past few years and how Benson and the rest of the city’s changed.

As the art show came to a close at 9, I mentioned that I was headed to The Sydney later that night to see Gordon, a band I thought he’d like, and to my surprise, Patrick said he’d meet there at midnight. After I left the art show I began to feel anxious about Gordon. Did I oversell the band? Just that sort of thing has happened to me in the past — I talk too highly of a band or compare them to another band and inevitably, the person I’m talking to sees them and they either 1) suck, or 2) sound nothing like what I compared them to.

I got to The Sydney just before midnight, as A Ferocious Jungle Cat was still doing their set. Patrick had already arrived. It’s safe to say The Sydney has the worst PA I’ve heard since, well,  I saw bands play at the old Down Under last November. The Sydney’s PA is on par with what you’d find at a typical house show. Overblown, flat, noisy. Pretty awful, and much worse than I remembered the last time I saw a band play there. My anxiety grew.

Friday night’s event at The Sydney was a fundraiser for Benson First Friday, which recently attained a 501(c)3 non-profit status. A pair of super-tall drag queens strolled around in wigs and high heels, having performed earlier in the evening.  After Jungle Cat finished a table was set up for the Finals of the evening-long arm wrestling content. Fun. After that, the hosts announced a number of raffle ticket winners of lovely gift baskets.

And then Gordon came on. I’ve seen the four-piece a few times, most recently playing outside behind The Sweatshop Gallery as part of Sweatfest this past summer. Despite the PA, Gordon did not disappoint, though their set did start off rather tenuous, sounding different than I remembered them, with two guitars playing laid-back indie stuff.

Things really got rolling when frontman Aaron Parker put down his guitar and walked off the front of the Sydney’s small platform stage with microphone in hand and did his best Ian Curtis impression on songs that sounded clearly influenced by Joy Division. Buchanan asked me if I thought Gordon knew who they were, and I said I didn’t know, but that the music’s resemblance couldn’t have been a coincidence.  But then again, another of their songs reminded me of a Mousetrap tune, a band that likely played its first show before Parker was born.

Leaning over, yelling into the mic while patrons strolled past to and from the bathroom, Parker pushed as hard as he could, making the most out of that crappy PA, looking up and following people with a bug-eyed stare as they walked back to their tables while has band continued to shred from the stage. I glanced over at Buchanan and could tell he liked what he heard. These guys were making Nebraska proud, having no clue that they were performing in front of one of the city’s Golden Age legends.

Buchanan gave the ultimate compliment after the set: “I’d definitely see them again.” No band can ask for anything more.

Your next chance to see Gordon is this Sunday when they open for Cheap Girls at Slowdown Jr.  along with Eric in Outspace and The Lupines. Do not miss it.

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Speaking of things not to miss, there’s a no-miss show at The Brothers Lounge this very night. Chicago punk bands The Funs headline. Formed in 2009, the duo released their first LP, S/T, in 2013, and have opened West Coast dates for The Breeders. Opening is Nathan Ma & The Rosettes and Dumb Beach. $5, 10 p.m.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2015 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

Rough crowd at the Punk Rock Reunion show Saturday night at The Waiting Room. An example of just how rough:

While standing at the bar waiting to buy my usual Rolling Rock, a big fat biker-looking dude about my age tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Thanks a lot for cutting in line.” I looked over at him and his two big fat biker buddies and said, “Sorry, didn’t see you guys standing there,” at which point he gave me a “What the fuck?” look, and then said, “Don’t worry man. What’s your name?” I said it was Tim, and he said (while shaking my hand), “My name’s Jack, as in Jack Miyoff — haw haw haw.” His fat pals rolled at that one.  I just rolled my eyes and moved along, feeling like Luke Skywalker during the Cantina scene of Star Wars, hoping Obi Wan would show up and cut the fat biker’s arm off.

Strange crowd. Lots of bumping and jostling. Lots of angry old people. Lots of drunks. But I guess it’s what you’d expect from a punk rock reunion. The only thing worse than angry young punks is bitter old ones. But at least they have good taste in music.

As evidence, I give you RAF. The band put out a few cassettes back in the ’80s, including one that spent a lot of time in the tape deck of my Ford Fiesta. The band consisted of guitarist Paul Moerke, drummer Tim Cox, bass player Dereck Higgins and frontman Matt Miller, who formed the band. For Saturday night’s reunion gig, Kelly Callier, formerly of Jimmy Skaffa, took over the frontman role and did a yeoman’s job pushing the crowd to match the energy on stage. The break-neck performance was matched by a break-neck mosh pit, just like the old days.

Mousetrap followed. Their set felt more realized and steady than the last time they played at The Waiting Room about a year ago. There’s always been something disturbing about the band’s music. When they were just kids, you chocked-up the music’s pain and violence to energy and youth. Now that they’re older, the songs take on a more sinister quality. Or maybe it seems more dangerous because it seems real, like these guys could actually do whatever it is frontman Patrick Buchanan is singing about. Scary.

In case you’re wondering, local hero Matt Bowen pulled it off behind the drum kit, supplying the necessary bombast to keep the action rolling.

Cordial Spew provided a hardcore ending to what turned out to be a hardcore night. They played a set that was much more together and professional than the band I saw play at Our Lady of Guadalupe Social Hall in the ’80s. The show back then was a brutal mess, while Saturday’s show was simply brutal, and a reminder (along with the night’s earlier sets) that some things do get better with age, just ask Mr. Miyoff.

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Breaking with the usual Tuesday release-day schedule, today is the official drop day for Conor Oberst’s new solo album, Upside Down Mountain (Nonesuch, 2014), and the reviews are coming in fast and furious. They are arguably the best reviews he’s had for one of his LPs in years.

Not the least of which is the all-important Pitchfork review, which gave the album a slightly better than mediocre 6.5 rating. The review’s conclusion: “It’s gorgeous to the point of near gaudiness, a ‘return to form’ after a strange decade evolving from wildly prolific, heartbreak soundtracking, Winona Ryder-dating enfant terrible into a domesticated Americana bard no longer interested in why to be young is to be sad. Hopefully, Oberst will find a way to make ‘older and wiser’ just as revelatory.”

Rolling Stone was more laudatory with its 4-Star review. None other than David Fricke weighed in with: “But like Neil Young’s Harvest and Jackson Browne’s Late for the Sky, this is dreaming stalked by despair, then charged with rebound. ‘There are hundreds of ways,’ Oberst sings in that song, ‘to get through the day. . . . Now you just find one.’ Here’s a good place to start.”

All Music gave the record 4 Stars. Stephen Thomas Erlewine’s review concluded with: “Oberst remains an eccentric — he’s not one for obvious hooks, or even insistent melodies — but of all his albums, Upside Down Mountain feels open-hearted, measured, and bright, the kind of record that opens up a new chapter in a career and possibly wins over new listeners.”

The Guardian also gave the record 4 stars, concluding “…melodies emerge strongly from these simple musical settings and there’s little to distract from his lyrics, which explore solitude and regret – those hoary old staples of US road music – in rich and inventive ways.”

Drowned in Sound gave the record 8 out of 10, saying “...the new album is bathed in a Laurel Canyon glow, but it’s by no means a throwback. It comes on with a rootsy, sure-footed poise far removed from the dense electronics of Bright Eyes’ 2011 release The People’s Key, though the bigger difference here is the nature of the lyrics found within.”

Consequence of Sound gave the album a grade of B, concluding with “...Oberst at least has his first good album in years, and the songwriter’s narrative has a ways to go before we can judge whether he fulfilled all those expectations put on him 20 years ago when he was still a child.”

To counter all the raves, Pretty Much Amazing gave the record a grade of C-, stating: “…the very distance between the album’s mellow, casually lovely sonic maturity and Oberst’s thematic arrested development results in an eerie, unintended detachment.”

As for what Lazy-i thinks, I’ve only had the album for a couple days so I’ve yet to come to a conclusion other than to say it’s the most overly produced Oberst album I’ve ever heard, and that it seems to be an obvious reach for a larger audience.

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Tonight I’m off to Lincoln for the Morrissey concert at Rococo Theater. We have general admission balcony seats, which means we may or may not be able to actually see the performance. This one’s been sold out for a long time.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2014 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

Well, the election results are in and it looks like Nebraska lost again.

In other news…

Mousetrap bassist Craig Crawford tells me that due to a scheduling conflict drummer Colby Starck is unable to make the trip to Omaha for the Punk Rock Reunion show Saturday night at The Waiting Room. Filling in is none other than Matt Bowen. Recognizable as one of your favorite bartenders at The Waiting Room, Bowen’s legend is long and includes stints in The Faint, Commander Venus, Lullaby for the Working Class, Race for Titles, not to mention Magic Kiss (the precursor to Tilly and the Wall (It’s a long story)) and most recently The Third Men. Bowen is rehearsing with Crawford and Mousetrap frontman Patrick Buchanan as we speak.

By the way, it’s been confirmed that Fischer no longer is on the bill for Saturday night’s show. The line-up as of now is Bullet Proof Hearts, Mousetrap, Cordial Spew, RAF, The Broke Loose and Drop a Grand. Tix are $10 adv/$12 DOS.

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Good ol’ Matt Pond PA returns to Omaha, this time to The Waiting Room tonight. Joining him is The Lighthouse and The Whaler. $12, 8:30 p.m. start time.

Also, tonight’s Record Club at the Shop @ Saddle Creek features Guided By Voices’ seminal 1992 release Propeller. Record Club is a chance for folks to get together and listen to an album in its entirety, then discuss it afterward. Fun! The needle drops at 7 p.m. More info here.

Also tonight, Zach Short plays at Slowdown Jr. with Blue Bird and Matt Whipkey. $7, 9 p.m.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2014 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

Coverage/review of Saturday’s Maha Music Festival will appear in my column in the upcoming issue of The Reader. For the record, it was a heckuva show. Check out the action photos below the Mousetrap review.

Mousetrap was a blast Friday night at The Waiting Room. As was the case last time they played here, the band sounds tighter than back in its ’90s hey-day. No doubt there are some obvious differences that come with 20-odd years of life experiences.

Their sound, while as bracing as ever, at times was cast in more subdued tones. The trio played a couple dark-throb numbers that ebbed and flowed like a tide coming in at midnight carrying a body floating face-down in the bay. Black and grisly and a bit creepy. But then again, there always has been something disturbing about frontman Patrick Buchanan. On stage he comes off like a punk version of a Brett Easton Ellis psychopath. Don’t look directly into his eyes.

Bassist Craig Crawford acts as sort of a buffer/cipher that keeps Buchanan from spinning out of control, though you know if things ever got heavy Craig would say, “Sorry, pal, you’re on your own.”

You can tell they’ve only just begun with drummer Colby Starck. A seasoned veteran, he still needs push it a couple notches to match former drummer Mike Mazolla’s ferocity. That’ll come with time.

My only gripe about Friday night was the set’s length — little more than 20 minutes with a three-song encore (that included a cover of Dead Boys’ “All This and More”). Buchanan promised more new material when Mousetrap returns, probably sometime during the holidays. There’s nothing quite like Christmas with Mousetrap…

Ron Wax was up before Mousetrap and judging by the comments made outside the venue you’d have thought it was the end world. I’ve known Ron Albertson for years both as the drummer of Mercy Rule and as a fine artist (I proudly have three Ron screenprints-on-canvas hanging on my walls). I caught the last two brutal songs of their set. It was loud, raucous, noisy, ham-fisted caterwaul rock, more than a little bit weird. Gritty and unbridled, but what did you expect? My reply to the guy who said he was going to gut-punch me if I called it genius: It ain’t genius, and it ain’t supposed to be.

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Now onto some pictures from the Maha Music Festival this past Saturday…

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More on Maha Wednesday, I promise.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2013 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

 

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

The top priorities on your music-watching list this weekend should be Mousetrap tonight at The Waiting Room and the Maha Music Festival tomorrow at Stinson Park/Aksarben Village.

You read about Mousetrap yesterday. Opening tonight’s show is Ron Wax (Ron Albertson of Mercy Rule) and Noah’s Ark Was a Spaceship. $8, 9 p.m. See you there.

Also going on tonight…

Gypsy punks Gogol Bordello plays at The Slowdown with Omaha’s own gypsy punk, Solid Goldberg. This one’s SOLD OUT. Starts at 8.

Team Love hip-hop artist Rig 1 (a.k.a. Desaparecidos’ Ian McElroy) is doing his thing at Benson’s Sweatshop Gallery tonight at 10. Opening is the debut of Routine Escorts, featuring Jon Tvrdik (ex-Back When). $5.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/80978758″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /].

Tomorrow, of course, is the Maha Music Festival. Save $10 by purchasing your $45 ticket today at mahamusicfestival.com. The DOS price is $55 (kids under 10 are in fer free).

Here’s the Maha schedule:

Noon   Gates Open
12:05  Centris Stage     Purveyors of the Conscious Sound
12:40  Weitz Stage        Millions of Boys
1:20  Centris Stage        HERS w/ Omaha Girls Rock!
1:55  Weitz Stage           Sons of Fathers
2:45  Centris Stage       Rock Paper Dynamite
3:20  Weitz Stage         Thao and the Get Down Stay Down
4:25  Centris Stage       The Millions
5:00  Weitz Stage        The Thermals
6:05  Centris Stage     Criteria
6:45  Weitz Stage        Bob Mould
7:55  Centris Stage     Digital Leather
8:55  Weitz Stage        Matt & Kim
10:15  Weitz Stage     The Flaming Lips
Midnight  Show Over

More details at mahamusicfestival.com. Weather looks grand. This should be a good one.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2013 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.