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Celebrate Valentine's Day with a ripping guitar solo
BY CARLY CARIOLI
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Despite what some people on Beacon Hill would like to legislate, love does indeed come in all shapes and sizes, and it don’t change its name at the Vermont border. Thus our journey through the highways and byways of Valentine’s Day rock this week. It’s only appropriate that Cubby Berk, frontwoman for the Athens chamber-folk outfit Lovers, would be playing this time of year; the star-crossed lovers in her bittersweet dirges are often dead, but that’s just part of their charm. Previewing songs from the Lovers’ forthcoming album on Neutral Milk Hotel’s Orange Twin label, Berk is at AS220 (401-831-9327) in Providence tonight (February 12). Lovers of metal will want to make a beeline for Jarrod’s Place (508-222-8878) in Attleboro, where on Valentine’s Day hirsute, bull-roaring doom lords Mastodon will be road-testing tunes from their forthcoming Leviathan, which is due this summer on Relapse. Through the miracle of tape delay, they’ll also co-host MTV’s Headbangers’ Ball that same night. At the other end of the Ball spectrum, Springfield emo-grunge sad-sacks Staind get the lighter fluid flowing for a run through their Billboard-topping shoegazer new-metal ballads at Tsongas Arena (978-848-6900) in Lowell on Saturday. Campus heartthrob Howie Day stages a Valentine’s Day homecoming gig at the State Theater (207-780-8265) in Portland; in the midst of a tour behind last year’s string-laced Stop All the World Now (Epic), he’s also at the Webster Theater (860-246-8001) in Hartford on Friday the 13th. And the band on Dischord Records least likely to be associated with that label’s signature sound — El Guapo, distant cousins of the Rapture whose neo-electro dance grooves are as convincing as their accordion-and-piano Gypsy-folk dirges — are at the Bar (203-495-8924) in New Haven on Sunday and at the Harvard Advocate House (617-495-0737) in Cambridge on Monday with Measles Mumps Rubella. Mainstream-country goofball Toby Keith brings Nashville shock-and-awe populism — or at least a 10-gallon hatful of good-ol’-boy reactionary xenophobia, with a side order of Willie Nelson–approved equestrian drinking song — to the Mullins Center (413-545-3001) at UMass-Amherst on Friday and to the Cumberland County Civic Center (207-775-3458) in Portland next Sunday, February 22. One wonders what Hank Williams III’s grandaddy woulda made of Toby; then again, one wonders what Hank Sr. woulda made of Hank III. Hank the Younger is playing a solo date at Higher Ground (802-654-8888) in Winooski, Vermont, on Sunday, but that’s only because he’s gotten some time off from playing bass in former Pantera frontman Phil Anselmo’s stoner-metal band Superjoint Ritual. Elsewhere, another renegade descendant of an American roots master — Arlo Guthrie, Woody’s grandkid — plays two nights at the Iron Horse (413-584-0610) in Northampton, tonight and Friday. And Barenaked Ladies play a Valentine’s show at the Mullins Center plus an encore at the Cumberland County Civic Center on Tuesday.
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