Weekend Show Suggestions

Fruit Bats, Sera Cahoone, Moon Pulls the Ocean at Vera Project, 7:30 p.m., $13

Because it is going to be amazing, this show is sold out except for a few tickets at the door, so you might want to show up early.

Eric Johnson, songwriter for the Fruit Bats, released two great folk-pop albums, Mouthfuls (2003) and Spelled in Bones (2005), before he and his band dropped off the musical map. At the time, Johnson had taken up performing with Subpop label-mates the Shins and more recently (however briefly) Vetiver.

So, it's exciting that the Fruit Bats have returned to the West Coast - and are toting some new material to boot. Despite his efforts to write darker stuff, Johnson's songs are arrestingly catchy windows into the stops and starts of love. Considering that his work bore a certain resemblance to the Shins' pop perfection even before shackin' up with them, it'll be interesting to see where their influence has taken him. Sera Cahoone's songs feel like a deep bruise: invisible on the surface, but cold and heavy when you slow down to feel their weight. Between drumming in Carrisa's Wierd and Band of Horses, and her solo writing in the Buck Owens/Patsy Cline tradition, Cahoone's work will pull you in like an irresistible, familiar truth. ERIK NEUMANN

Nightmares on Wax at Chop Suey, 9 p.m., $17

A couple of months ago - just before Britain's Nightmares on Wax, led by DJ/producer and Warp Records veteran George Evelyn, announced its first-ever U.S. tour - I revisited 1999's Carboot Soul (in truth, I found it while rummaging through a box of long-forgotten CDs in my spare bedroom). A decade later, its mix of ambient/downtempo soultronica and playful, Plaid-style IDM seems a little dated, naturally, but at the same time it's a rather easy, appealing listen, and certainly significant as one of the more valiant efforts to escape trip-hop's established boundaries post-Portishead's Dummy before the whole genre dissolved into pure parody. Then I downloaded NoW's recent Thought So... and realized that sonically, Evelyn hasn't really progressed much from that point (if I'd purchased a CD copy, it probably would've ended up in that box to be forgotten until 2019). But again, Evelyn's lazy, hazy chillectro is hardly unpleasant on the ears, and hopefully he can crank up the interesting with the full band he's bringing along on this inaugural American jaunt. MICHAEL ALAN GOLDBERG