Mike Brooks

It is impossible to understand what Scott Hutchison is saying, but that's part of the charm. On Saturday night at Trees, the Frightened Rabbit front man bantered with the audience between songs, but unless you managed to squeeze your way to the front of the sold out room, his thick Scottish accent barely resembled English. He definitely said something about the Scotch he was swigging on stage and gave a shout out to the group's bus driver, but beyond that, everything was lost in translation.

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Mike Mezeul

Danny Brown's high-pitched flow is so distinct I hear it waft across Elm street into the back patio of Black Swan Saloon, so I know to run across the street. Sprinting into Trees during the opening bars of Witit, the crowd is already jumping along, even the kids I judgmentally assume are there for Baauer.

He goes right into "Molly Ringwald" and everyone seems pleased. Brown is a compelling live figure, one of those artists I would say you could enjoy live, even if you were not familiar with his catalog. His wit and strangeness are appealing and onstage he seems both unpredictable and surprisingly gentle. Danny Brown is just plain old cool.

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Maegan Puetz

It's nothing short of astonishing that an ambient Icelandic band who don't sing in English or write songs in a verse-chorus structure are filling arenas across the US. Some of the next acts to play this same arena are Shinedown, The Lumineers, Styx and the Killers. Sigur Ros are a band that exist only in shadows, walls of feedback and high-pitched, stretched-out vowel sounds. There has never been another Sigur Ros, and there will never be another Sigur Ros.

It's like they're not even playing the same instruments. They are playing the same instruments -- there's a classic structure of guitar, keys, bass, and piano -- but the noise they're making, the sheer forceful goddamn sound that pours out of that stage into every tiny nook of the venue is something entirely different. It's ethereal, it's barely even of this world, and it beguiles you to just stop whatever you're thinking and listen and blot out every single other part of your brain until all you can see is a bright white light and all you can hear is an avalanche over a pounding drumbeat.

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Barbara Anastacio

Five short years ago, Grizzly Bear played before a transfixed and adoring audience of perhaps 100 people on the cramped stage of Club Dada. Touring to support their break-through album Yellow House, the band brought to stage the unique and peculiar blend of soaring vocals, tight harmonies, literate lyrics and precisely fussy instrumentation heard on that album. Although ostensibly "led" by singer Ed Droste, it was clear that each member contributed to a fully realized musical vision. It was a powerful performance by what seemed to be genuinely personable guys. Last night, on a stage with far more room and with an inspired lighting production, the band once again delivered a mesmerizing performance, but this time to a nearly sold-out Palladium audience.

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Kerry Maletsky

Consider the damn state of things when a songwriter with a decade-plus experience, in front of an adoring sellout crowd at the Granada Theater, says the following halfway through his set: "Alright, we're gonna do a Harlem Shake video."

Bob Schnedier pulled on a Luchador mask after he said it and instructed everyone to just move around, basically ("It's preferable if you take off your clothes while you do it"). I don't know if that's an accurate guide to the Harlem Shake or not -- I do know that it doesn't matter. And he triggered the Baauer track and demanded the house lights and more than a thousand adults went generally apeshit. He let it go for a couple minutes then cut the track, pulling the mask over his head to reveal a wry smile. "Well done, motherfuckers."

And then he and his excellent band ripped into "The Californian," a rock and roll song as mean and big as the Wild West.

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On the main stage of Billy Bob's Texas, past the mechanical bulls and the neon lights and the line-dance floors throbbing to the "Cha-Cha Slide," Randy Travis, the reed-thin king of country, looked out onto the crowd of thousands he still drew in the twilight of his career.

Through the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s, he cut 20 studio albums and has sold more records than almost any country artist but Taylor Swift. And if you belong to her age demographic, and don't even like country music, odds are you've still heard "Forever and Ever, Amen." It's not only the sweetest paen to everlasting love I've ever heard, it's also an exemplar of Travis' prodigious songwriting gift. Nobody in the business can build a melody and a hook better.

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Christian McPhate

Last night, Eric Clapton and Dallas-born guitarist Doyle Bramhall II set fire to their Stratocasters' fretboards. Their fingers slid across the neck, bending strings until they bled the blues. Feeding off a musical energy straight from the Crossroads, the talented guitarists empowered some of Clapton's greatest hits with a musical vibe that felt as if it were kissed by a devil before leaving heaven.

Of course we're talking about Eric Clapton, a recipient of 17 Grammy Awards, the Brit Award and three-time Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame inductee, so anything less than magnificent would have been hell.

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Muse at American Airlines Center

The tech crew is rushing around to get things started. Some of them are on the floor, frantically trying to get the fog machines going, and others are hanging from the ceiling checking the ginormous speakers from above. The fog begins to fill the stadium and the lights begin to dim. The crowd goes wild as a beam of lights shoot from a pyramid shape on the stage, and the first guitar riffs from "Supremacy" kick off the show. The stage is set with psychedelic lights beaming out of a pyramid that flashed black and white videos of the individual members of the band. From the second the first song begins the entire crowd is on their feet and it remains that way throughout the entire show.

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Doug Davis

"Even though you think its cold, it's not cold", Efterklang's Casper Clausen admonished the full house at Dan's Silverleaf. Hailing from Denmark and having spent time above the Arctic Circle, he knows of what he speaks. The dapper Clausen and band mates Rasmus Stolberg on bass and Mads Bauer on electronics were joined by a woman with an operatic range, guitarist who doubled on keys, and a powerful drummer, each of who looked as if the were supplied from Nordic central casting. And between them they did a remarkable job adapting the songs from Piramida, the album resulting from that Arctic trip to the abandoned Soviet town of the same name in order to harvest sounds from the decaying infrastructure.

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Photo by Bill Ellison/The Granada

It was symbolic in more ways than one. The sweet and skunky smell of high quality weed that hit you upon entering the Granada last night provided a kind of bridge back to the '60s and early '70s. The music of that era has provided the DNA for the woozy psych rock that Kevin Parker has recorded as Tame Impala. And like the weed of today has been jacked into a super drug in comparison to what was smoked back then, so too has the music Parker and his mates delivered to the packed theater.

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