Heavy Dates

If you're a fan of a cappella music (and who isn't?), head to the Above Club this Friday night for Boston's Ball in the House. Though their disc features what you think is bass, percussion, and scratching, it's not till you see them live that you realize it's done totally, 100 percent, no exception, with their voices. It's pretty impressive stuff. Oh, and they harmonize like crazy, too. Over at the Lucky Dog it's tribute night with AC/DC wannabe's Thunderstruck. But we say get there early for a special treat courtesy of England's awesome punk foursome, Sanity Assassins. They're newest offering, Resistance Is Useless (Retch), is distributed Stateside by Cargo and is quite excellent. High energy, melodic, and tough as nails. Meanwhile Commercial Street answers the punk bell with a rescheduled gig from skatedrunks Murphy's Law. Villain, still on their quest for complete and total public loathing, also rip off a fast, loud, and ugly set. Catch a little piece of Americana history when folk legend Ramblin' Jack Elliott plays the Bull Run Restaurant. Elliott, who got his start playing gigs with Woody Guthrie, was the first American folk artist to play Europe, and he's spent the past 50 years wandering the world and playing songs. On Saturday, Cafe Fantastique offers two sets from longtime folk faves Chuck and Mud, who bring along their Hole-in-the-Dam Band for support. The always-suave Reggie Walley leads his Bluesicians at Gilrein's, and the Space has a benefit show for WBPV featuring local heavyweights God Stands Still, Split, and Sticker. The Goonies and Blind Trip also appear. Finally, Wednesday is the BIG Day, as in the Worcester Phoenix Best Music Poll Awards Party! Who'll win? Why, we're all winners, kids. Just some more than others. Come on down to the Tammany Club and rub elbows with Wormtown's cream-of-the-crop musicians, local deejays, scenesters, and various other Big Shots, both real and perceived. There'll be sets by Clutch Grabwell and Night Train. But if Phoenix tradition holds true, there should be a couple of surprises, too.

-- John O'Neill

BOSTON/PROVIDENCE

Every new regime needs to establish its own lineage, its own history. When Metallica ruled the metal world, they used 1986's Garage Days Re-revisited to declare themselves the heirs to obscure Brit-metal (Budgie, Diamondhead) and American punk (Misfits). When Korn's Family Values posse, as befits their status as loud rock's pre-eminent tastemakers and standard-bearers, staked out their own territory, it seemed much less obvious than one would expect. If Metallica were the product of punk and metal, Korn surely seem the product of metal and hip-hop; and though hip-hop has been well-represented in the Korn camp (Ice Cube; Limp Bizkit covering House of Pain), they've seemed inexplicably more fond of new wave than metal. Best example: Family initiates Orgy updating New Order's "Blue Monday." If Marilyn Manson made it difficult for mainstream folks to distinguish between the metal militia and goth's monk-ish hermitage -- by the way, if anyone claims to have found a "goth mafia," I've got a Loch Ness Monster to sell 'em -- then Orgy seem emblematic of Korn's new metallic order, which places more emphasis on the singer (and the listener) as mortally wounded victim than the singer as a hell-bent reactionary monster who's not gonna take it any more. So be gentle to the beasts when Orgy show up at Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel, (401) 272-5876), in Providence, on Monday, May 17.

You want world music? How 'bout Canadian Celt-pop -- which could, if we're not mistaken, be the absolute whitest lineage on the planet. The Rankins -- formerly the Rankin Family -- are the purveyors of said Celt-pop, and they'll bring it to Pearl Street, (413) 584-0610, in Northampton, on May 14 and the Berklee Performance Center, (617) 931-2000, in Boston, on May 15.

Weirdly enough, even SPIN picked up on NYC post-metal standouts Candiria, who have both the mathematical precision and implied jazziness of early Helmet, plus an MC. Not nearly as rote as that description would suggest, they've got some concrete twists and turns that suggest a Branca student in there somewhere, and the kind of innovative inner mechanics that tend to reinvigorate dead genres. They're at the Met Cafe on Thursday, May 13. Other odds and ends: aging NYC hardcore "legends" Murphy's Law play Commercial Street, (508) 797-4550, in Worcester, on May 14, then join up with that old punk Lee Ving and Fear for a gig on Sunday, May 16 at Lupo's. And June of '44 spinoff the Shipping News join Victory at Sea on Tuesday at the Met Cafe and on Wednesday at the Middle East, (617) 864-3278, in Cambridge.

-- Carly Carioli