Even a completist could be forgiven for not keeping up with all of Scott McCaughey’s projects. The main force behind quirky, power pop veterans the Minus 5 and the Young Fresh Fellows is also a member of Robyn Hitchcock’s band, the Venus 3, and tours with R.E.M. Oh, and he loves baseball.

MONDAY
Fleet Foxes’ singer J. Tillman‘s most recent release didn’t quite match the thrilling peaks of his band’s first full-length, but it was a typically solid “solo” album, filled with introspective, often beautiful folk tunes. Phosphorescent rounds out a terrific double bill to start the week at the Black Cat. $13/15, 8 p.m.

Tinariwen played Friday night at the 9:30 Club. Photo from artist website. The Tinariwen backstory is the stuff of legends. Tuareg refugees from Mali living across the border in the desert of Libya, they were recruited to serve in Muammar Ghaddafi’s army of the Sahara. They met during military training, and began working out a blend of North and West African music through jams of traditional songs and tunes about the plight of the…

Singer-songwriter Dan Bern. (Photo by Todd Adamson.) As Dan Bern explains it, when someone has a story to tell in Nashville, they write a nice little song that manages to tie everything together in two and a half minutes with a melody to boot. But in L.A., where Bern hangs his hat these days, when someone has a story, they write a movie. Movies cost a lot of dough, though — something most singer-songwriters…

The New Pornographers Even with a good range of music venues of all sizes, including a few decent outdoor sheds and a world-class rock club in the 9:30, D.C. typically plays second fiddle to places like Chicago, Seattle, Boston, even Minneapolis on the list of top rock cities. But no more! Ace power pop tunesmith and leader of indie supergroup The New Pornographers, A.C. “Carl” Newman has declared our beloved Washington, D.C. as his…

Caribou plays a sold-out show at the Rock and Roll Hotel tonight. MONDAY Not a whole lot of big, buzz-worthy shows this week, but Caribou kicks things off with a sold-out set at the Rock and Roll Hotel. Dan Snaith’s latest, Swim, seems to have already upped the ante from its spectacular predecessor, Andorra: its sitting at a cool #97 on Billboard’s Top 200. I’m calling it now: album of the summer, 2010. Toro…

Japandroids headline tonight at the Rock and Roll Hotel. Joining them on the bill are Love is All and local rockers Tennis System. Photo from band myspace page, by Leigh Righton. MONDAY >>No matter what era of rock history, there’s always a kick-ass two piece purveying some degree of “back to the roots” guitar-based and song-centric revivalism. Does it matter that, for Japandroids, those roots are in the early to mid-90s? I would argue…

Surfer Blood played Wednesday night at DC9 with Turbo Fruits and Grooms. Photo courtesy Surfer Blood. It would be hard to find accurate statistics on the number of guitar bands currently gigging in any one region, let alone across the country. Not the kind of stuff you find on the census. I’m not even sure I could hazard a guess, though, like most of the crowd at DC9 Wednesday night, I imagine myself as…

After twenty minutes of standing in line in the snow listening to buzzed twenty-something Duke and Georgetown alums try their best to talk trash without ever actually mentioning the game — or even the sport — about to be played, I don’t think anyone could have excused the neutral fan from sitting this one out. You’d be hard-pressed to find two fan bases that express more entitlement than these two. After all, one Final Four…

After twenty minutes of standing in line in the snow listening to buzzed twenty-something Duke and Georgetown alums try their best to talk trash without ever actually mentioning the game — or even the sport — about to be played, I don’t think anyone could have excused the neutral fan from sitting this one out. You’d be hard-pressed to find two fan bases that express more entitlement than these two. After all, one Final Four…