Playbill

Hearts-on-their-sleeves emocore slashers Further Seems Forever cycle through lead singers the way Spinal Tap goes through drummers, albeit not under circumstances involving death by spontaneous combustion. The Florida group's original mouthpiece, Chris Carrabba, departed after 1999's The Moon Is Down for sensitive-guy campfire angst under the guise of Dashboard Confessional. Its next heartfelt screamer, Jason Gleason, roughed up Carrabba's distinctively angst-ridden phrasing with scratchy melodicism, but he stuck around only for 2003's How to Start a Fire.

Although Gleason's departure reportedly almost caused the band to split, ex-Sense Field front man Joe Bunch -- himself out of a job when his group broke up in January -- swooped in and saved it from premature demise. The resulting album, Hide Nothing, shows the union to be a match made in post-hardcore heaven. Bunch's traditionally dulcet vocals rise to new levels of emo urgency on songs such as "Light Up Ahead" and "Someone You Know," melding the dramatic heights of his former band with Further Seems Forever's needling chords and post-rock explorations.

Sparta was hastily convened in 2001 before the corpse of its predecessor, El Paso's would-be punk messiah At the Drive-In, had even been hauled down off the cross. The whole thing smelled a little suspicious. But any charges of necrophilia or opportunism have been conclusively laid to rest with the release of Porcelain, Sparta's sophomore full-length. Where 2002's Wiretap Scars was a rushed, haphazard splat of underdone angst, Porcelain channels the group's sincerity and solid framework of post-hardcore stamina into a powerful and integrated whole, while also managing to creep out a bit from under At the Drive-In's formidable shadow. Rather than a mere rehash or cash-in, the disc showcases Sparta at both its bravest and its most vulnerable; singer-guitarist Jim Ward has shed some reluctance and stepped up to the mike, at last sounding confident in his newfound role as front man, while the whiplash guitar interplay between him and Paul Hinojos has evolved into a true and unique symbiosis. Throw in some piano, a string section and even a love song or two in the middle of Ward's minefield of social and political outrage, and you've got the recipe for a band that's finally coming to terms with its past, embracing a more direct, grounded and eloquently spoken grandeur. -- Annie Zaleski and Jason Heller

Friday, November 5, at Numbers, 300 Westheimer, 713-526-6551.

The Fever, with VHS or Beta and Modulator

While countless acts hawk Faint-ly familiar dance punk, check out the Hot Hot Heat emanating from the Fever. The quintet's rowdy, '80s-inspired garage rock has the power to move the most clenched denim-clad booty. Front man Geremy Jasper twitches and yelps like a reanimated Mick Jagger (wait, he's not dead?), while guitarist Chris Sanchez and bassist "Pony" Stapleton craft dirty grooves. Drummer Achilles ticks like Timex on "Cold Blooded," does his best Stewart Copeland on "Gray Ghost" and stomps like a Stooge on "Labor of Love." Finally, the 103-degree organ lines provided by J (just J, thank you) bring things to a -- um -- fever pitch. And right when you think these boys just wanna have fun, they lay down a magnificent ballad like "Diamond Days." The Fever repaves much-traveled roads with sincere sweat and spastic soul. Make no mistake: Retro is back. -- Eryc Eyl

Wednesday, November 10, at Mary Jane's Fat Cat, 4216 Washington Avenue, 713-869-JANE.

Rhonda Roberts, with the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players and Modulator

One Friday evening a few years ago, my family and I were lazing around on the grass outside Valhalla, Rice's grad student pub, when a friend of ours introduced us to her younger sister, Rhonda Roberts. With her pageboy hairdo and old-fashioned clothes, Roberts looked like a flapper girl who had slipped through a crack in time from some Jazz Age bathtub-gin party, and that impression only deepened when she reached into a cloth sack and produced, of all things, a ukulele, and began to sing in a deep, sultry voice. It was her own composition, and it was about DNA, and somehow it was simultaneously highly skilled and intelligent, very sexy and supergeeky -- it was as if a cross between Olive Oyl and Betty Boop was singing a They Might Be Giants song accompanied by only a ukulele. And that was only one original of several Roberts sang that night. It was unbelievable to me that she had only played a few shows in public then.