Sat. Oct. 15

Gavin Rossdale has not been dormant over the past decade. Nor has he been a recluse. The once-and-again frontman for Bush recorded with a group called Institute, released a solo album, played a demon opposite Keanu Reeves in “Constantine,” married Gwen Stefani and had two sons.
     But he wasn’t in the kind of spotlight he was in during Bush’s mid-late ‘90s heyday. 
    “People had an uncanny way of consistently telling me how I’d let them down,” said Rossdale, on the phone from Michigan. “If I went to get coffee, if I went to get gas, if I bought paint at a paint store, it’d be like, ‘Dude, where’s the band? Dude, what’s happening?’ It was a consistent reminder, daily, almost comical. I was getting some of these girls saying, ‘You’re our favorite band, but we’ve never seen you play.’”
    Now, they can. Last month, Bush co-founders, singer-songwriter-guitarist Rossdale and drummer Robin Goodridge, joined with new guitarist Chris Traynor and bassist Corey Britz and released the band’s fifth CD, “The Sea of Memories.” And they are on an extensive club tour that stops for a soldout show at House of Blues Saturday. (Which means you’ll have to visit some ticket “re-seller” or a friendly fella out on Lansdowne Street before the show and pay just a bit more than face.)
    “I was trying to move mountains and I found a way,” Rossdale said of re-forming Bush, fleshing out the band, and recording with producer Bob Rock.
   Playing clubs might seem a big step down from the post-grunge band’s arena-rock peak, but Rossdale, 45, won’t have any of that thinking.
    “It’s far more authentic and correct for this time,” Rossdale said. “It would be wrong for us to attempt to try and play arenas. It’s about re-launching the band and connecting with the fans, and I don’t know how you do that in a cavernous place.

Sat. Oct. 15

Fri. Oct. 14

Wisely, former Boston-based singer-guitarist Mary Timony (ex-Helim) and the three other gals in  Wild Flag (singer-guitarist Carrie Brownstein, Sleater-Kinney, "Portlandia"), drummer Janet Weiss (Sleater-Kinney) and keyboardist Rebecca Cole (Minders), are eschewing the "indy supergroup" tag early adopters have hung around their necks. There were people doing this before the band had an album - maybe before they'd heard a note - just based on pedigree. And, while the pedigree's damn good, let's just say these women click. Cole told Portlandlife: "I think 'super group' must mean something different now than I thought it did. That’s just how I’ve come to think about it. To me, 'super group' means the Highwaymen – icons like Johnny Cash. To me, that’s a 'super group.' I think now it means if you were in another band and you start a new band with some other people who were in a band."
   Opines my peer Greg Kot, in the Chicao Tribune, on their debut disc: "That sense of teetering on the ledge of chaos, of mayhem fighting melody for control, makes “Wild Flag” a debut for the ages." Nicely put. There's frenzy and heaviness, a certain jagged quality that recalls some of the best '80s post punk groups. Ragged glory, a glorious racket. If you want to think about female comparisons, consider Au Paris and Raincoats. If you want to consider the gals previous bands, you might put 'em together in a spin cycle and not be shocked this comes out. It's not way out in left field, just left of center, psychedelic and sometimes sprawling, sometimes terse and biting.
   Wild Flag, which plays the Paradise Fri. Oct. 14 (following a soldout gig at Brighton Music Hall this summer) came together in 2009 to do the socre for Lynn Hershman Lesson's doc "!Women Art Revolution," and decided to keep it going.
    Sings Wild Flag in "Glass Tambourine," "Listen to the music, to the music/Before it passes you by/If you don't lose it, you're gonna use it/The black lullabye."
   
Tickets: $15. Starts at 9 with Eleanor Friedberger and DJ Brian L.

967 Commonwealth Ave., 617-562-8800 www.thedise.com

Thurs. Sept. 29 & Fri Sept. 30

Remember Jack Henry Abbott? The convicted Killer, thought to be a literary light and championed for release by Norman Mailer? Abbot killed again upon release. It wasn’t the first time this kind of thing happened, and it’s the case of Austrian sociopathic serial killer Jack Unterweger which is at the crux of John Malkovich’s one-man play. Its called “The Infernal Comedy: Confessions of a Serial Killer,” and plays at the Cutler Majestic Theatre two nights, Thursday Sept. 29 and Friday Sept. 30. The play was first done in California in 2008, then Vienna in 2099 and in London earlier this year. Now, Malkovich brings it back home. (He is after all a Cantabridgian.) The actor calls his character “a bad, bad guy.”
   Ya think Malkovich can play bad? Oh yeah. Let’s see: “Dangerous Liasons,” “In the Line of Fire,” “Shadow of the Vampire,” to name but three. I’m am anxiously awaiting how Malkovich assumes this character.
  This is a one-man play, but Malkovich is not only guy you’ll see and hear. Musica Angelica Baroque Orchestra Los Angeles and soparanos Sophei Ku and Claire Meghnagi break up the monologues, with music from Vivaldi, Haydn, Mozart and others. This has being called “darkly comic” and “other times bleak and brutal.”

Thurs. Sept. 29

True story. First time I saw Michael Gira's Swans I was at the Rat, fascinated, apalled, pinned against the back wall of the club by this intense, slow, grinding, pummeling sound. I remember the waves from the bass ripping through my solar plexis. It was brutal, assaultive and it sucked me right in. This was in 1986. Swans pulled a 180 degree spin about two years later and began creating delitcate, atmopsheric music. It was a move away from rage and toward sadness. "I'm sick of flying my skin off for people," singer-guitarist Michael Gira told me back then. "By the end of the show I was naked. There was blood, pretty bad." Gira felt they'd descended into self-parody. Gira put Swans on the shelf in 1997 to pursue other projects, most notably Angels of Light. They recently resurrected Swans and they're on tour - at Royale Thursday Sept. 29 - celebrating the late 2010 release of "My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky," the first new Swans album since "Soundtracks For The Blind in 1997."
   So what to expect: According to publicist and former rock crit Howard Wuelfing, the current two hour long set includes two news songs that will appear on the next Swans album: “Apostate” and the half-hour long “Avatar”; the rest of the set mainly comprises songs from their most recent album plus an older tune “I Crawled” -- all these performances are prolonged exercises in high volume, incredible intense and dense soundscaping.
    "About reconstituting Swans, Gira says, “There was a point a few years ago during a particular show when I was on tour with Angels Of Light, with Akron/Family serving as the backing band. It was during the song ‘The Provider.’ Seth's guitar was sustaining one open chord (very loudly), rising to a peak, then crashing down again in a rhythm that could have been the equivalent of a deep and soulful act of copulation. The whole band swayed with this arc. Really was like riding waves of sound.  I thought right
then, 'You know, Michael, Swans wasn't so bad after all...' Ha ha!
It brought back - in a flood - memories, or maybe not memories, more a tangible re-emersion in the sensation of Swans music rushing through my body in waves, lifting me up towards what, I can only assume, will be my only experience of heaven.