It List: Monday

Skeletons/Sydney Confirm/Florene/h...n (Club Dada): Skeletons are a group that I've been listening to ever since I first stumbled across their debut in early 2004, and I'm still having trouble figuring out a way to describe them. This really isn't much of a surprise considering that many of their label mates on Ghostly International present similar problems, but pin pointing their influences can be a bit challenging. It isn't that their music is particularly inaccessible or unclassifiable, it just difficult to figure out what the group is really trying to be sometimes, and fortunately, this confusion is ultimately a good thing. You can hear a wide range of influence in most of their material, incorporating everything from the hyper psychedelic musings of Silver Apples to the quiet, electronica side of post rock a la Sea and Cake and the innocent wide eyed disco of Arthur Russell (probably the most pronounced influence) but what really stands out, aside from the group's dark, surrealist lyrics, is the overall pop bent that ends up erupting into the foreground of their best work. At the end of the day, a lot of this stuff ends up sounding like pure R&b sweetness, although perhaps on an acid come down. This is generally cheerful electronic pop that never forgets to remind you of the dark side of life, and I highly recommend it.

Doomhawk/Filth Mattress/Division of Power/Big Fiction/Csygnus Psyanide (Exploding House): Seattle's Doomhawk plays a very theatrical kind of metal (kind of liked a tripped out Dungeons and Dragons take on black metal) that should take on an oddly appealing character when witnessed at a house show. Exploding House is located in Ft. Worth at the corner of Hemphill and Page st.

Cool Out (The Cavern)

Young Doc Gooden's Soul Glow Mondays (Hailey's): A format change over at Hailey's tonight, with YDC focusing more on funk, disco and soul records.