Also this issue:

Fairies Wear Boots
Who will fight Philly’s most huggable band?
-Patrick Rapa

A Mighty Wind
Le Vent du Nord explores the regional color of the Great White North.
-Mary Armstrong

Joey Sweeney
of The Trouble With Sweeney
-Interview by Patrick Rapa

Karl Hendricks Trio
-Paul Burress

Roy Hargrove's RH Factor
-Kyle Parker

Josh Wink
-Sean O’Neal

Gillian Welch
-Sam Adams

Drive-By Truckers
-Sam Adams

June 19-25, 2003

musicpicks

Calla

Anyone who's faced the fallacy of love can sympathize with Aurelio Valle. No matter the album, the Calla guitarist/vocalist sounds consumed by sorrow, unable to erase "her" from memory. "This day is dead," he whispers over the shuffle of a maraca and a restrained rhythm on Televise (Arena Rock). It's hard to imagine who could make a person's disposition this dire. But like a dog that's been shocked by an electric fence one too many times, Valle is as defeated and as frail as beings come. The slow-building soundtrack of his discontent makes the band's melancholia all the more believable. Electronic textures float over steady drum beats, violent bursts of Jesus and Mary Chain guitar sputter over hazy poetics and basslines pulsate like a freshly torn heart. It's hardly uplifting, but at least when you're all alone again and the drugs don't work, this won't make you worse.

Fri., June 20, 9 p.m., $8, with Ty Cobb, Can/Am Connection and Surround, The Khyber, 56 S. Second St., 215-238-5888.

—Andrew Parks