Yr. Weekend, Pt. 1: The Beans + David Ramirez + Odessa + Versklaven + Another Run + Come See My Dead Person + More

Alright, people — welcome to your weekend, starting right damn here, right now. There is a ton of excellent, excellent stuff happening this weekend, beginning tonight, Friday, January 17th, and while I’m not going to be able to hit all of it, I’ll hit as much as I can. Cool? Cool. Here we go:

The Beans/The Couch/The Docs @ Fitzgerald’s
Firstly & kinda-sorta foremostly, there’s this show up at Fitzgerald’s, which features cool-ass blues-rocker dudes {The Beans} as the headliners. After catching the band (finally!) at Yes Indeed! Fest a few months back and being very, very impressed, I’ve been listening more & more to these guys’ self-titled debut, and yeah, it’s pretty great. Keep a particular ear out for “Carnal Constant,” which brings to mind old-school (i.e., pre-fame) Kings of Leon in the best way possible. These guys are gritty and rough-edged, but simultaneously bluesy and smooth, and live, they perform like a band far, far bigger than they currently are.

David Ramirez @ Tad Akers Event Facility (League City)
Truthfully, this is far, far outside my normal “zone” of show-going, but were I not already committed to Daddy-and-Little-Dude night at the house tonight, I’d be sorely tempted to blaze down to League City for this. Austin-based (although he rarely seems to stop moving) troubadour David Ramirez is hands down one of the best songwriters I’ve run across in the past couple of years, and the one-two punch of 2012’s Apologies and 2013’s The Rooster has left me floored. The man chronicles crawling through life’s wreckage like few people credibly can, and he does it all with a smoke-scarred but still astoundingly tuneful voice, coming off like Steve Earle in his misspent youth.

Grab a free copy of “The Bad Days (in exchange for your email address); you won’t regret it:

Versklaven/Peasant/Odessa/Hel-Razor @ Mango’s (free!)
Venue-turned-restaurant-turned-venue Mango’s has a great-looking (and free) lineup of heavy, heavy, heavy metal tonight, with local noisemakers {Versklaven}, {Odessa}, and {Peasant} at the top of the pile. All three bands take hardcore and black metal and melt them down together in a squall of impenetrably dark noise, and the end result, while it isn’t generally my cup of tea, is pretty impressive. Odessa are especially cool, adding some seriously thunderous doom/stoner-metal sludge to the mix.

You can download the band’s 2012 cassette release for free right over here:

Another Run/Jesse Roach/AD/Lost Element/Positive Disturbance @ House of Blues (free!)
This one was a last-minute add; I honestly didn’t realize cool/soulful alt-rockers {Another Run} even had a show tonight ’til just this afternoon. That’s good, good news, by the way, because the band’s pretty damn impressive, at least from what I’ve heard so far — I’ve been leery of ’em in the past, I’ll admit, but I’m enjoying the hell out of their most recent album, 2011’s I’ll Be There. They’re loud and rocking, but nicely melodic and a little funky, with moments that make me think weirdly of 311 except without the requisite sucking of that band.

Check out the video for “What Happened?,” off the aforementioned album: