Houston's football, etc., who package the spidery and poignant guitar passages of '90s bands like Mineral and Rainer Maria into a super-crunchy outer shell, went to the UK this summer and released a three-song split with Square Business in July. Monday, see if you can talk the trio out of a T-shirt when they play at Mango's with San Antonio's Yes Inferno, New Jersey's Dads and H-town's Hoofprints, who share Mercy Harper with the headliners.
Of all the bands created in the backlash against brain-dead, technique-obsessed '70s arena-rock, which sired both punk and New Wave, Houston gets both the brainiest (Devo) and sexiest (Blondie) Wednesday at the Arena Theatre on their "Whip It to Shreds" tour. In our recent phone chat, Rocks Off discovered founding Blondie guitarist Chris Stein (who went to the same high school as Woody Allen), to be a pretty no-nonsense Brooklyn sort of guy, but he did get at least a little nostalgic about the camaraderie at CBGB: "Everybody was pretty close and friendly," he said. Look for a CBGB movie next year starring Malin Ackerman as Blondie siren Debbie Harry and Alan Rickman as the Bowery dive's owner Hilly Krystal.
Not sure we'd call the Reverend Peyton's Big Damn Band a "blues" band. To us, they're more like one of those hillbilly medicine-show troupes whose frenetic live shows resemble Pentacostal tent revivals (similar to Houston's own Sideshow Tramps), which would at least explain why the Indiana ensemble now records for punk-rock label SideOneDummy. But the BDB's brand-new album, last month's Between the Ditches, bowed at No. 1 on iTunes' Blues chart and hit No. 2 on Billboard's Top Blues Albums, so blues it is. Enjoy the above video for Ditches' "Devils Look Like Angels," starring the meanest-looking toddler we've seen in some time. Wednesday at House of Blues' Bronze Peacock Room.