Apocalyptica is famous for rocking Metallica songs on four celloes. Is it celloes or celli?

Anyway, the band loves 52 Shows. Perhaps we can get them to throw together a thrash cello theme song for us. For now we’ll make do with the Euro-shout-out.

We like to keep things fresh at 52 Shows. Concert reviews normally go up within a week of the show. But it’s taken my brain a few weeks to process the events that I witnessed at a stop of Cake’s Unlimited Sunshine Tour music festival in New Jersey last month.

The night involved:

• a high school auditorium
• a tuba fueled sexy asshole
• a little person dancing hand-in-hand on stage with an elderly man
• the droning of bland ragtime-carnie-surf-muzak
• a heated trivia contest over a Stone Pine sapling
• and lots and lots and lots of vibraslap

After a series of intense counseling sessions, I’m finally ready to talk about it.

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Tucked away in the back streets of London’s Marylebone area is a little hidden gem that’s home toome of the most interesting new singer-songwriters the city has to offer. The Perseverance Pub is a pretty unsuspecting place. Your standard English pub; grubby carpets and brown wall paper all included in the free entry.

Tonight (late November) the downstairs area is reserved for an old folks Xmas party and they seem to be enjoying all the free sherry & cucumber sandwiches they can. The upstairs’ venue would feel ram-packed with all of about 15 people in it. I’m one of about half that number tonight but it feels homely & inviting. Noise from the old folks downstairs aside, I’m ready for some introverted singer-songwriters to strut!

Cellar Door goes on stage, quite unassumingly; scratching away at guitar leads and whispering to each other which songs they should do first. When she’s asked how she’d best describe her music, by a slightly out of place looking compare, singer Aimee Grinter hushes “we like to let the music do the talking”. Tell it like it is.

It’s difficult to get sucked into acoustic music at times because it’s a hard listen and it requires all of your attention. Cellar Door don’t have that problem at all. Not for me at least. Beautiful vocal melodies and clever witty lyrics.

I’m happy to say this isn’t the usual “oh it hurts so bad” singer-songwriter rhetoric, the lyrics themselves are not what you might expect to hear over the technical guitar playing of Mike Brown. They’re very matter of fact, very English in all the best ways. Scenes about drinking in a car park with your friends when you’re too young to get into the pub are crossed with a sticking “you don’t need me like I need you.”

And it’s this crossing of styles that happens throughout their set that makes this duo work so well. Vocally, I’m reminded a little of Joni Mitchell & maybe also Gillian Welch. The guitar playing goes from ambient to a harsh blues in a stroke so I’m a little lost for comparisons in that sense. Anyway, don’t get stuck on these feeble comparisons. Go and listen to this group for yourself. They deserve your attention immediately.

I can’t help but wonder how outstanding this would sound with a band & some strings behind them. Although if they did that at the Perseverance Pub there wouldn’t be much space left in the pace for the audience!

Cellar Door - Comets

I went into The Black Angels show Thursday night with pretty much every reason to hate it. Already, I had used a non-affiliate ATM machine to get cash (I loathe those charges) and had left an out-of-town friend at a bar to cover this event. That was Strike One.

Strike Two came when I waited in line and the venue, The Middle East in Cambridge, informed me my name wasn’t on the show list. Second time it’s happened in one week writing for this site. Now when people ask me at shows who I’m writing for, I say The Boston Globe.

Bitterness aside, luckily, I chatted up the guy in front of me in line, who was on the list plus one and who let me be his plus-one. A humble gesture. I thanked him and walked in ashamed and disgusted.

Over the next hour, I was subjected to a powerful concert experience. Watching The Black Angels live is like slowly descending into an LSD trip. The electronica psychedelic rock group covered most of their discography during the 60-minute set (The Angels only have one album out as of now), but they introduced new songs (Titles? Hell if I know.) likely set for their next release.

The Black Angels sounded like a modern-day Verve/Velvet Underground (the band’s name derives from a Velvet song). In concert, they’re like A Storm in Heaven cranked up 100 decibels. Lead singer Alex Maas looked like a homeless Vietnam veteran on stage, bushy beard and hair obscuring his face. Many Angels songs, too, deal with the current war and dying soldiers.

Live, even more so on disc, the Austin-based band borrows elements from psychedelic music of the late 70s, and Maas complemented his band like a drowned out Richard Ashcroft crooning over a drone machine.

The Angels achieve a unique overpowering sound, and the band’s stated goal is to flip current rock music on its ass. I didn’t take a ton of notes during the concert. I just slipped into the hypnotic sound The Black Angels produce. And considering they were dealing with someone cold sober and angry, it wasn’t an altogether bad trip.

I’ve been preparing for the impending robot apocalypse for a long, long time. But I never expected the robots first move would be to take over music. That was until I saw this video of Jeremy Boyle’s duet, a self-playing guitar and drum set.

Boyle, Joan of Arc techno-rawker and experimental artist, rigged up pneumatic controls to a regular electric guitar and drum kit. The instruments are programmed to play along with each other without the presence of musicians mucking up the process. All the tubes make the guitar look like some kind of evil robot brain on extended life support. The sound is a little sparse in the demonstration videos. The fancy robot apparently hasn’t learned anything like Hot For Teacher yet but the concept is still impressive.

Jeremy Boyle is scheduled to play the chapel room of the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia on Friday August 31st. It’s not clear from the site if the robot band will be on hand for the show. And I’m not quite sure if I want it to be. Something like this is either going to blow my mind live… or it will just plain blow.