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Thursday15
Lou BarlowJemina PearlKurt RosenwinkelTune-Yards
Friday16
Rhett MillerMeshell NdgeocelloKurt Rosenwinkel
Saturday17
Dethklok, ConvergeFaustKurt RosenwinkelShaky Hands
Sunday18
Kurt RosenwinkelBrad ShepikWilco
Monday19
SatyriconWilco
Tuesday20
Faust
Wednesday21
Sonic Chicken 4
JEMINA PEARL With her menacing look and her infinite cred—her debut album, Break It Up, just came out on Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace label—Jemina Pearl is as punk as teen pop gets. As front woman of Nashville’s Be Your Own Pet she was quickly hailed as an ex post facto riot-girl baddie of sorts, but now she’s 22 and a new Brooklynite, and according to her blog she just suffered through her first fashion week. Break It Up is all exuberance and pep, Pearl’s big bright voice clean and canny against the shredded new-wave songs—if it weren’t for the occasional glimmer of Danzig in her phrasing and lyrics (on “So Sick!” in particular), she could be a contender for, say, the corrupting dorm-diva role in High School Musical 4: Freshman Hazing. She’d be the girl who introduces Zac Efron to the joy of whippits and then humiliates him in the quad. Islands headline; Jemina Pearl and Toro y Moi open. 7 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, 773-278-6600 or 866-468-3401, $15. —Jessica Hopper
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KURT ROSENWINKEL The dominant jazz guitarist of his generation, Kurt Rosenwinkel has a distinctive harmonic sensibility that’s intextricably bound to both his quiet virtuosity and his dense, multidirectional compositions—it’s hard to imagine anybody else playing his material from last year’s The Remedy: Live at the Village Vanguard (ArtistShare) without radically altering the architectural lyricism at its heart. With the forthcoming Standards Trio: Reflections (Word of Mouth Music), though, Rosenwinkel proves that he can imbue standards with that same essence. On ballads he shapes his solos like a sculptor, using plenty of chords to give his improvisations a three-dimensional feel, and on the enigmatic “Fall” (a tune Wayne Shorter brought to the Miles Davis Quintet) he executes a deft one-man simulation of a quintet performance, flipping continually between resonant single-note phrases and the kind of elaborations on the melody that the rest of the front line might play behind the soloist. The guitarist’s holistic approach is best demonstrated by his performance on “East Coast Love Affair” (the lone original piece, it’s a Rosenwinkel standard, appearing on his debut album in 1996 and regularly in his sets thereafter). He seems to bridge every statement and gesture with spindly clusters, but nothing ever sounds superfluous or perfunctory—every note is either making a point or connecting two others. He’s joined by bassist Ben Street and drummer Rodney Green for this four-night stand; see also Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. 8 and 10 PM, Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth, 312-360-0234, $20. —Peter Margasak
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The word “metalcore” still makes me cringe, but some of the music is amazing—and it was CONVERGE who first proved that to me. With their precisely engineered salvos of cathartic nihilism—no wasted gestures, no lazy repetition—they’ve earned a reputation so formidable it’d give a lesser band performance anxiety. In 2001 this Boston-based four-piece released one of the masterpieces of the genre, Jane Doe, and since then they’ve had the unenviable task of living up to it. The brand-new Axe to Fall (Epitaph) rises to the task, though, with chillingly deliberate, face-ripping fury. Right from the opening cut, “Dark Horse,” front man Jacob Bannon takes the music by the throat with his indecipherably ragged vocals, tearing at Ben Koller’s frenetic drums and Kurt Ballou’s intricate, incendiary guitar with heart-attack intensity—a vein-popping tug-of-war between raw energy and rigorous structure that inevitably rips the songs wide open, releasing a triumphant shitstorm of sonic shrapnel. Ballou is easily the highlight of Axe to Fall, augmenting his roaring machine-gun chords with razor-sharp licks that push him further into the foreground than ever, and he doesn’t lose a step when the band downshifts from its usual two-minute shotgun blasts into a sprawling, sludgy epic like “Cruel Bloom” (which features Steve Von Till of Neurosis on vocals). Now nearly 20 years along and almost a decade past the album that easily could’ve overshadowed the rest of their career, Converge are still the best at what they do. —Kevin Warwick
KURT ROSENWINKEL See Thursday. 8 and 10 PM, Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth, 312-360-0234, $20.
