Agent Ribbons, of course, is nothing like punk. Their collection of love songs is charming, pleasantly full of sass and embodies a whimsy more along the lines of LA’s the Ditty Bops, though without the signature vocal harmonies and less complex songs. However, the lyrics are intricate and clever; paired with the music, the songs bring to mind the some Anne of Green Gables universe where troubles are something that can be kissed away. Considering that Agent Ribbons boasts a mere two musicians, drummer Lauren Hess and singer/guitarist Natalie Gordon who play without a backing band, they’re also remarkably complete. “Birds and Bees,” a fifties throwback ballad, is filled in on the chorus with a quickly strummed guitar and Lauren’s tom playing keeping time until the music simplifies to the next verse to give attention to the lyrics.

Natalie is the more visible of the two, partially for her hair: cherry red curls that don’t so much fall to her chin as extend from the sides of her head. More striking is her stage persona, her confidant carriage as she stands in front of an audience. Her presence is strong and assured, yet lively and open. There is a constant swishing about her, during the openers and setting up on stage she moved constantly to music. But when she plays, it’s given focus. Constant movement turns to dancing, a performance to show the audience exactly how much she enjoys playing. Halfway through the set she had to pause to remove her denim jumper whose straps had been twisting with her movement. “I’m not trying to be sexy,” she excused herself. “It’s just that this thing is driving me crazy.” She finished the show in a bright striped shirt and stockings. Hair splashed in her face as she sang, eyes closed, squeaking out the high notes to add a beguiling innocence to the whole affair. And all this was done through a cold.

The set list was standard Agent Ribbons. The ragtime-y “Chelsea, Let’s Go Join the Circus” was played, “Birds and Bees” and “The Boy with the Wooden Lips.” It also included two new songs “The Wolf” from their latest seven inch and an unnamed vocal opener Natalie swirled her way through. New songs would come, Natalie assured us, as soon as they weren’t “Shitty-assed pieces of crap.” They’ve got a good start.

Secondly, and of more immediate importance, was the first upcoming show flier from Abstract Entertainment that I’ve seen in months. I was pleasantly surprised. Gird your loins, folks, and start saving those pennies because the next couple of months are going to be a marathon for music enthusiasts who’ve been hoping for some decent out of town acts to come around.

First up on Saturday, February 9th is the Horrorpops returning to Sacramento for the third time in three years. As promised by singer and front(wo)man, Patricia Day, the ‘Pops are touring to promote their new album Kiss Kiss Kill Kill. Like the last time, this show will be at the Boardwalk in Orangevale. If you’ve read my very first typo-ridden post (and I honestly hope you haven’t) you’ll know that a Horrorpops show is a great time, lousy security and teenagers aside. Go, and expect Day’s gravelly captivating voice, two pretty girls in candy striped dresses onstage and a whole mess of pompadours, flattops and Betty Page bangs.

Second is San Francisco psychedelic rock band Blue Cheer. Precursors to the heavy metal movement, their blues-based rock began in the Sixties but never quite made it out of the Bay Area. Now they’re back and will be playing at the Blue Lamp on February 23rd.

New York’s Balkan Beat Box, a world music duo with one of their members a veteran of Gogol Bordello, is playing on Wednesday, March 5th at Harlow’s. For a live show they usually tour with at least five musicians and, so I’m told, hit the stage wearing rubber demon masks. Drum pounding and saxophone wailing soon follows. If what I’m told stands true, this might even rival the Man Man show from a few months ago.

For those of you who want something a little lower key, it might be worth it to check out Hot Buttered Rum or Nada Surf at Harlow’s on March 20th and 25th, respectively. HBR is a California banjo driven bluegrass band. Nada Surf first made a splash in 1996 with their sarcastic teen focused “Popular.” Since then they’ve put out four more records of which the latest, Lucky, will be released in a few days.

Sacramento’s own Jackie Greene will be at Empire on March 29th to release his latest CD, Giving Up the Ghost. Plucked from Sacramento open-mikes and signed with a local label, Jackie is now an established musician with this latest his fifth album.

And finally, for you hipsters, rock snobs and indie kids, returning to Harlow’s on April 28th will be Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks to promote their latest, Real Emotional Trash. For those of you who don’t know, Stephen Malkmus was frontman to Stockton based indie legend Pavement. For those of you who do, remember that last year’s show was packed and that Stephen blew the roof off of the joint. Get your tickets as soon as possible, and if you want the coveted couch seats in Harlow’s get there as early as you can.

There is also a tentative possibility that the nationally recognized Davis beatboxer Butterscotch will perform in February, but don’t hold me to this one. Dub Trio, a crossover rock band from New York will be playing in Sacramento on February 17th. Both Dub Trio and Butterscotch toured as part of Mike Patton’s (Faith No More, Tomahawk) Peeping Tom. I can’t imagine that the band would stop in town without bringing Butterscotch on stage. However, neither Dub Trio’s website, nor Butterscotch’s Myspace confirm this. To add to the confusion, Dub Trio says they’ll be performing at Harlow’s while everything I see published says the Blue Lamp. So it goes.

It turns out that Phillip is excellent with a band behind him, making his self released album Four Track Mind well worth the cost of a burrito that I sacrificed and more. Playing with a band expands his songs from standard guy with a guitar fare to pleasant guitar and banjo-centered folk spiced with funk bass when he feels like throwing it in (“Slide on By.”) Other songs, like “Hollow Days” would lose its impact without the background strings.

Better yet, the newfound melody keeps his vocals from crying “Uncle!” because they’re being abused too much. Phillip Flathead may have a voice with character but no one could call it subtle. Think Conor Oberst with the tang of Bob Dylan, especially when he decides to let loose. Any flaws in the album come from speaking up too much and not letting the instruments do the work, like in “Downstream” where Phillip engineers his voice into a clumsy echo when he should have let the banjo and bass take care of the mood.

But what’s a little goof here and there among friends? If Phillip Flathead is worth his salt, and I strongly advocate he is, he’ll learn that his strength lies in leaving the fancy effects out. As his album title suggests, he was born for lo-fi.

Good enough for me, but not so much for the four friends I dragged along with me who aren’t really concertgoers and instead of finding new bands themselves rely on people who do things like, say, read and write music reviews. They kept asking me what Man Man sounded like as we stood in back of the venue during the yawn inducing moans of opening act Sleeping States and when I couldn’t say, they asked people around us bringing back answers like “it’s sorta rockabilly” (wrong) until Stickie chimed in with “carnival Tom Waits.” Which is a decent description, but a tad limiting. You can hear a distinctly Waitsian growl in some of their songs and the keyboard loops on “Feathers” brings to mind freak shows and funhouse mirrors. However. Listening to Six Demon Bag, their second album, you hear a lot more than that. “Engrish Bwudd” bandies with a muted Dixieland trumpet. “Banana Ghost” features an infectious hook that sounds like it could come out of Eastern Europe. Other songs that are drum heavy, or more drum heavy than others, rather, can only be described as tribal. It’s a tough call to describe them and until a suitable rock sub-genre is named (“punk-wop” doesn’t count, Wikipedia, if you don’t have an entry for it) then the way that I’ll describe Man Man will be vaudevillian. That doesn’t describe their genre, of course, but it describes their show in all its wild yet amazingly controlled glory.

True to what I’ve read, all of them were bedecked in white with war paint splashed across their cheeks and noses. And they didn’t take breaks. But those words fail to fully describe what that means. A Man Man show, it turns out, is a furious collection of motley dudes playing an even more motley set of instruments. It’s loud and driving and everybody gets a drumstick so they can hit various objects on stage. In the case of keyboardist Honus Honus, that meant anything he could reach within the area of his flailing arms. Other times he was swinging the microphone around by the cord, climbing on the amps or engaging in the type of Indian war dance that would make Crazy Horse go on the warpath. Around him, band members Pow Pow, Sergei Sovay, Chang Wang and “Cougar” Borg worked through a menagerie of instruments during each song inserted themselves so precisely you could throw them in a box and call them Legos. That’s the key to their show. Despite how much they scream, how much stuff they hit and how ragged they appear, everything they do is fine tuned and rehearsed, plumped up for your entertainment with little room for mistakes. It’s about letting the audience have a good time. Pow Pow beckoned us closer as the show started.

Based on repeated listening to Six Demon Bag after the fact, Man Man live doesn’t differ much from Man Man on CD, but for once that didn’t turn out to be a problem. They played with a confidence and energy that I’ve seen in few other bands. To keep the tempo going, they steered away from slower songs like “Van Helsing’s Boombox.” “Feathers” was early, the opening chant sung by the whole band, Sergei Sovay’s eyes wide and rolling above his full ‘n’ thick beard. Otherwise, I couldn’t say what they played. All the songs bled together, held in check by Honus Honus and Pow Pow positioned front and center. At the end of it, they all jumped offstage and headed outside except for Sovay who sat down quietly in his little corner as we stomped and cheered for an encore. After a moment he looked up and picked up his bass as if to say “what, this?” before launching into a throbbing bass line that brought the rest of the band back onstage for one last song. After that, they were done and no, we weren’t allowed one more. As they said when they went offstage again, that was an encore. A pity, but they’d already bled on stage for over an hour. I went and grabbed a shirt and CD.

Within the album we have “Gamma Rays” in which lies the revelation of eating pancakes with Grandma, “Shun-shine” a tiny footnote of a song that illustrates how much songwriter Dean Haakenson can drag out a simile and then slap you in the face with it, and “Secrets,” Haakenson’s four and a half minute spoken word track carries the prize for the most odious of lines, with meaningless quotes like “he had the practiced stubble of a civil engineer” and the irritating paradox “silent din of the darkness.” The last is as unnecessary as it is irritating because it’s a prologue, set to explain the premise of “The $1000 Grape Drive-By.”

But BBBR can play and “Those Things” boasts a plunky banjo climax sweeping you into the story of a night out to meet girls. If Haakenson reins it in a little bit, their second album will probably be worth the money you didn’t pay for the first.

Rock critic Lester Bangs (y’all might know him best as that guy Phillip Seymor Hoffman played in Almost Famous) wrote “the chemistry between an audience and an act is always a more delicate thing than some people realize,” which is true as far as my experience has told me. Call the T.I. Music Fest a couple of weeks ago Exhibit 1, in which during a rollicking Spoon set the audience only managed a few head nods going “a-yup.” Who knows when it’s going to go right? It’s all dynamics, dynamics, dynamics and last Friday night TMBG was spot-on with the anticipation high as soon as you got past the double doors. I’d heard that TMBG shows were something to be experienced. Apparently everyone else had, too. And then it happened.

“Good afternoon, Sacramento! How the dickens are ya?” yelled John Flansburgh into the mike. Well, heck, John! We’re alright! Thanks fer askin’!

And they launched right into it, hop skipping through fan favorites like “Birdhouse in Your Soul” and “Dr. Worm” before taking a pause to bring out their phone that talks to the dead in which they contacted Albert Sac, founder of Sacramento who discovered a more efficient way to pick Mentos off of the mentos tree, thus giving our metropolis its name. It says a lot about a band that they were able to make that funny, but this is the band that dropped from New York as more of a stage show than a band and they know how to interact with an audience. E.g. before launching into “Drink”, Flansburgh coordinated us to yell “No Wait!” when the song’s title was mentioned. Which we did, making the song go “Let’s drink! (No Wait!) Drink! (No Wait!)…” Unless you didn’t pick up on what they were doing and sang straight through the chorus like an idiot, so in case any of you were wondering what I looked like, just remember that guy.

When they ran offstage before the encore, the audience was left chanting for “Istanbul”, except for my brother, who felt the need to be more obscure and chanted for “James K. Polk.” Eventually TMBG ran back on and introduced their horn section before they played…“Istanbul!” including extended solos from the trumpet, sax and trombone (oh! The trombone!). “Thank you!” they said for the last time before we were ushered into the night. Thank you, John and John. You guys had me when you said “dickens.”

However, this does bring me to my second point that is slightly about teenagers, but more about going to shows in which the crowd is on the whole younger. My point is this: knock it off, you dorks. I can understand expressing yourself and, though I cringe with embarrassment whenever I see it, I can understand that the process of self discovery and individuality includes several gaffes that’ll out someone as a poser. But certain things are ridiculous, such as someone whose facial hair looks like explorers conquering uncharted territory wearing a t-shirt for The Clash. That night I also saw innumerable Betty Page haircuts, pompadours, flattops and dresses with cherries on them. Lord help me. But I can also imagine those same children mocking kids their age who are getting their jollies listening to New Found Glory or Fergie and I have to admit that at least they had the good sense to pick a band to listen to like the Horrorpops, who I should state rock the hell out of their audience.

My roommate calls them ridiculous and it has to be said that the Horrorpops candy-goth themed psychobilly can’t be described any other way. The immediate example brought to mind is the two stage dancers that pop out of the wings as the first crescendo peaked attired in white flouncing dresses with skeletons on ‘em. What the hell, why not have them pose with oversized wooden lollipops too? Or obviously plastic toy revolvers? And see if you can roll your eyes a bit more, Kim Nekroman as you play the guitar. You licked the microphone! Awesome initiative!

Oh, but silly as they may be, though, the energy can’t be denied as Patricia Day plunks on her stand up bass while grinding her voice into the microphone and despite what a nitwit he can look like on stage, Kim’s can shred a decent guitar. If it was at any venue besides the Boardwalk, Patricia might have gotten the circle pit she was asking for. Ah well, they should be proud of their encore. As she launched into “Psychobitches Outta Hell” there wasn’t anyone who could keep their fists out of the air. This was the second time the Horrorpops have played in Sacramento in two years. Don’t miss the third.