Gary Lucas
Royal Theatre, 608 College St.
tonight, 6:30
New York-based guitarist Lucas is an outer-limits virtuoso, a veteran of Captain Beefheart's Magic Band who has since worked with everyone from Jeff Buckley to John Zorn to Toronto's own Mary Margaret O'Hara. For the past several years, he has been performing a searing solo score to the moody 1920s German Expressionist cinema classic Der Golem, and this marks the event's Toronto debut. C.W.
Krista Muir
Gladstone Ballroom, 1214 Queen St. W., tonight, 8:45.
No more yellow braids and leather shorts. Muir, a talented Montreal-based songwriter, has retired her Lederhosen Lucil persona, which was fun but also led some to think of her as a novelty act. Expect to hear plenty from her strong recent solo disc. R.E.-G.
Jenn Grant
Rivoli, 334 Queen St. W.
tonight and Saturday, 10 p.m.
She's from Prince Edward Island by way of Halifax, though Jenn Grant's magical art implies some kind of serio-comic mythological origin. Imagine Venus getting steamed up by the sound of Pan's flute, translate the encounter into a rootsy pop idiom, and you're halfway there. R.E.-G.
Corb Lund
Phoenix Concert Theatre, 410 Sherbourne St., tonight, 10.
Lund studied history while honing his skills with the Smalls in Edmonton, so it was no shock to discover a strong historical angle in Horse Rider! Horse Rider!, his album-length meditation on the horse as icon, partner and animal of combat. Lund's a country-music warrior who never disappoints in concert. R.E.-G.
Kyrie Kristmanson
Savannah Room, 294 College St.
tonight, 11.
With an owlish lyrical concentration that recalls early Leonard Cohen and recent Joanna Newsom, and only in her teens, singer-guitarist and trumpeter Kyrie Kristmanson certainly has something of the prodigy in her style, but a childhood of growing up all over Canada and beyond appears to have given her enough of an independent spirit that she seems to be trying to impress herself, not anyone else. She takes obvious delight in seeing what her voice, fingers and mind can do, and rightly so, as the results are melodic and affecting - but most of all they make one eager to hear what she'll be making five years from now, when experience lends her sensibility a little ripeness. C.W.
The Burning Hell
Silver Dollar, 486 Spadina Ave.
tomorrow, 11 p.m.
The Burning Hell is ruled by Mathias Kom, a Peterborough musician who, by his own logic, must be Satan. The witty, fantastical songs on the Hell's latest album may be just the thing to warm up a cold winter night. R.E.-G.
Slim Twig
Drake Hotel Underground, 1150 Queen St. W.
tomorrow, 11:15 p.m.
The Slim Twig recipe mixes equal parts rockabilly punks the Cramps, the acoustic blues of Skip James and New York new-wave synthesizer nihilists Suicide, a combination that makes for noir drama and high camp. But what makes this emerging Toronto performer's self-described "dissonant folk" compelling is his compulsive soliloquist's flair, a direct but static-filled line into a collective cinematic unconscious. C.W.
Hot Springs
Sneaky Dee's, 431 College St.
tomorrow, midnight
Montreal's Hot Springs last visited Toronto during Nuit Blanche, when half the town was capering about in search of art that wasn't there. Too bad: Giselle Claudia Webber is a smoking-hot rock diva, with a batch of good new songs to go crazy on. R.E.-G.
Dengue Fever
Sneaky Dee's, 431 College St.
Saturday, midnight
Los Angeles-based brothers Zac and Ethan Holtzman came back from a trip to Cambodia seven years ago with a passion for the country's brief flowering of psychedelic pop-rock, preserved on tinny cassette recordings from the 1960s but literally wiped out by the murderous Khmer Rouge regime. A search for a Khmer-speaking singer led them to Ch'hom Nimol, whose extraordinary voice elevates Dengue Fever out of garage rock and into a realm where any fussiness over questions of cross-cultural appropriation dissolves in a mist of undeniable beauty and feeling. C.W.
The Weather Station
Cameron House, 408 Queen St. W.
Saturday, 1 a.m.
Blending old-time folk and bluegrass music with chamber music and electro-acoustic noise sounds like a random exercise, but in the hands of the Weather Station, it's all in the service of ambience and emotional impact. Songwriter and singer Tamara Lindeman has a haunting voice that recalls a young Cat Power and a willful sense of story and setting that is hard to resist, making this relatively new Toronto band one from whom you can expect to hear much more. C.W.
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