Our weekly look ahead tonight reveals another slow week for new releases (it's next week when things start to get busy), but there is one big fish. The Magnetic Fields' first album in four years, Distortion, drops on Tuesday, and features a sort of revamping of their sound-- a distortion, if you will. Frontman Stephin Merritt, nearly a decade removed from his 69 Love Songs magnum opus, points to the Jesus & Mary Chain as a major inspiration for the newfound sound-- specifically their deliciously noisy 1985 debut Psychocandy. It's a risky change given the devout fanbase the band has won over the years, but it's a change that works (and seemed necessary given the corner in which they seemed to have worked themselves on 2004's i). The Magnetic Fields will be touring later in the year, playing two Seattle dates, but none in Portland.

Also, plenty of live action to look to in the week ahead, including an appearance from quirky veteran folksinger Michael Hurley (who also plays a Doug Fir show January 23rd with Musee Mecanique and Mbilly). Hurley's most recent release came just last year with Ancestral Swamp. He plays the Laurel Thirst on Wednesday night. Elsewhere this week, it's the first of a series of shows featuring Langhorne Slim. He begins his run as the January installment of the Great Northwest Music Tour, presented by McMenamin's and opbmusic.org, at the Olympic Club in Centralia, WA on Thursday night before moving on to the Hotel Oregon in McMinnville on Saturday, and several more dates in the area the following week. Slim and his trio bring a manic energy to their music, as we found out during their OPB in-studio visit last summer. Oh, and did we mention these shows will be FREE? Yeah, you're so there.

Elsewhere this week, it's busy, too: Castanets and Whip play the Someday Lounge (Wednesday); A Cautionary Tale, Quaker Gun, and the Nathaniel Talbot Trio are at the White Eagle (Wednesday); Sir Richard Bishop, Om, Lichens at Berbati's Pan (Thursday); Jeremy Enigk at Dante's (Thursday); The Bees at Kelly's Olympian (Thursday); The Shaky Hands with Swan Island at Holocene (Thursday); and Boy Eats Drum Machine with The Antecedents at Holocene (Friday), among others.

The early week thread is open for business, use as needed...

Posted by jpetersen on Sunday, January 13 at 10:18pm