Nick Cave’s headlining set at the Music Center at Strathmore last night might’ve been the loudest gig the striking venue, best suited to delicate music like that proffered by opener Sharon Van Etten, has ever hosted.

The Canadian new wave band Metric cycles perpetually between intimacy and distance, and it did so often during a 105-minute-long set at the Music Center on Strathmore on Friday.

“Mankind is in the house!” declared Bono at the Corporate Name Stadium Where the Baltimore Ravens Play last night. Look, you can’t stop him talking like that. Larry Mullen, Jr., U2’s ever-scowling drummer, has tried. And mankind was, empirically speaking, present in large part, to the tune of roughly 80,000 people.

“Mankind is in the house!” declared Bono at the Corporate Name Stadium Where the Baltimore Ravens Play last night. Look, you can’t stop him talking like that. Larry Mullen, Jr., U2’s ever-scowling drummer, has tried. And mankind was, empirically speaking, present in large part, to the tune of roughly 80,000 people.

O, Colin Meloy! How your cherubic visage and reedy vox rather astoundingly do not stoke within me a zealous ardor to curl the fingers of mine hand into a mightie ball and hurl it with an urgencie most awesome and terrible straight at the furry vortex from whence issues your sugar-dusted melodies and capricious rhymes!

The organizers of Saturday’s Virgin Mobile Free Festival saved the best for last. LCD Soundsystem — manifested onstage by brains-and-vox-of the outfit James Murphy-plus-six — closed down the sprawling 11-hour, three-stage, one-ferris wheel, no-T.I. music bazaar with an 85-minute blast of sweaty 21st-century dance-rock that felt taut and commanding after a long, discursive day. All dance tunes necessarily have a pulse, but Murphy’s have a heart, and they’re also wickedly funny. (Murphy was 22 when he turned down a job writing for Seinfeld. True!)

The organizers of Saturday’s Virgin Mobile Free Festival saved the best for last. LCD Soundsystem — manifested onstage by brains-and-vox-of the outfit James Murphy-plus-six — closed down the sprawling 11-hour, three-stage, one-ferris wheel, no-T.I. music bazaar with an 85-minute blast of sweaty 21st-century dance-rock that felt taut and commanding after a long, discursive day. All dance tunes necessarily have a pulse, but Murphy’s have a heart, and they’re also wickedly funny. (Murphy was 22 when he turned down a job writing for Seinfeld. True!)

A brilliant, pioneering jurist; an ingenious futurist; a beloved Cuban crooner. Biopics are usually fodder for the colder months at the cinema, but DC theaters are greeting swimsuit season with a raft of shows dramatizing the lives of historical figures, along with new plays from Ireland, (more) speechless Shakespeare, some guerilla Brecht, and lots else. From the top: The Kennedy Center brings us Laurence Fishburne as Thurgood Marshall, first African-American justice to serve on…

Elvis Costello has written a lot of great songs since 1977, but one of his very best ingeniously likens a disloyal lover to a spy unfaithful to any nation — “Man Out of Time.” He skipped that one at the Warner Theatre last night, but more than ever, it feels like his unofficial theme song as an artist unfaithful to any genre or era. While continuing to record in a variety of idioms and…

Mike Cooley, Patterson Hood, and Jason Isbell in The Secret to a Happy Ending, Barr Weissman’s “love letter to rock and roll,” starring the Drive-By Truckers. It’s been nearly a decade since Southern Rock Opera — a perceptive, engrossing, and very loud meditation on Lynyrd Skynrd, race relations, and growing up and getting out — brought the Pitchfork crowd into the ever-broadening tent of Athens, GA’s Drive-By Truckers. Maryland-based documentarian Barr Weisman’s new DBT…