THE HELIO SEQUENCE
(Music Millennium, 3158 E Burnside) See My, What a Busy Week!

THE HOLYDRUG COUPLE, THE HUGS, BESTIE
(Doug Fir, 830 E Burnside) The Holydrug Couple's 2013 album Noctuary was a mighty fine slice of shoegaze, but not the kind that sheepishly peeks out from behind a thick sheet of distorted guitars. Instead, the Chilean band employed a more outgoing style: cleaner, janglier, unabashedly melodic. Even so, the first track from the band's brand-new album Moonlust is a bit of a shocker. A lithe and bubbly electro-pop number, it pits buzzy '80s new wave against eternally cool Euro-elegance, à la French cosmo-pop icons Serge Gainsbourg and Air. It's... different. The rest of Moonlust shifts slightly back toward Holydrug's spacey sound and languid pace, landing somewhere near psychedelic dream-pop. Which, let's be honest, isn't that far down the genre spectrum from shoegaze. But whatever. Bleeps, bloops, and bliss-out sounds—this is the Holydrug Couple's aim. BEN SALMON

EX-CULT, PRIVATE ROOM, DARK/LIGHT, DJ SUZANNE BUMMERS
(The Know, 2026 NE Alberta) Ex-Cult sound a bit like Mayyors on quaaludes (and, in fact, they sound a little bit like Quaaludes, but let's not push it). For three years the band has terrorized their hometown of Memphis, the West Coast, and everywhere in between with their twisting, looping post-punk, a combination of fried, acid-dosed riffs backed by a continuously deconstructing rhythm section. Their psychedelic motorik attack unites punks of all stripes, from the garage kids to the reformed hippie punks to the neck-muscle floor-punchers, kind of like a weird punk Summer of Love. See them trip everybody out with similarly minded Portland freak punks Dark/Light, and Private Room, a collaboration between members of Iron Lung and Criminal Damage that will hopefully make up for the dearth of Iron Lung shows in 2015. MAC POGUE

STEVE POLTZ, GRANT-LEE PHILLIPS
(Alberta Rose Theatre, 3000 NE Alberta) As every Blazer fan knows, Portland is where knees come to die. This is why quiet, resigned disappointment greeted the news of Grant-Lee Phillips' torn ACL here a few years ago, an injury that robbed us of a Grant Lee Buffalo show in the process (I'm still not over it). Not sure if his hops are back yet or not, but Phillips' honey-drenched tenor persists. It's still every bit the voice that busked in those Gilmore Girls episodes you cried over once upon a time, the one that's starred in the under-appreciated solo catalog that followed his Buffalo days. While the best moments among that output remain early on (look to 2000's Ladies Love Oracle and 2004's Virginia Creeper, in particular), Phillips broke ground on his eighth studio album last month in Nashville and he sounds energized by the results thus far ("unhinged" and "raw," he's called them). The money's on him laying some of that new stuff on us tonight as he shares headline billing with Rugburns frontman Steve Poltz. JEREMY PETERSEN