Best bets: Our picks for this week’s concerts in Connecticut

Those musicians who were huge stars during an earlier time have varying things to offer today’s audiences: singer Avril Lavigne, at the Oakdale on Oct. 5, has matured and ’70s rock band Foreigner is just celebrating the band’s hits at Mohegan Sun Oct. 3. But our picks this week explore new territory, too: Les Filles De Illighadad, a female guitarist and singer from a remote village in Niger, the Australian band Psychedelic Porn Crumpets and the experimental NY duo ESSi at Willimantic Records. Here are the details.

Avril Lavigne

Avril Lavigne is proud of her new record, “Head Above Water.” She got to sit on the songs for a while, reconnecting with old collaborators, and getting to do a little work as a producer herself. She just turned 35, and she’s a little less angsty these days.

She grew up singing in church, and she’s become a fan of classic jazzy singers like Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra. The Canadian singer struggled with Lyme disease in recent years. She thought she was dying at one point. It required that she take time off from music. But now she’s back, with her sixth studio record, addressing her struggles and hoping that her new material will inspire and pull people through some tough times.

Lavigne isn’t quite the attitudinal snarler that she was when she came out with her debut in 2002 with hits like “Complicated” and “Sk8er Boi.” Life’s like that: people grow up and suffer and somehow sometimes they become more anchored and hopeful. One could always hear a connection to other big Canadian hitmakers like Shania Twain, Bryan Adams and Alanis Morrisset in Lavigne’s songs. That connection remains.

Avril Lavigne performs at Toyota Presents Oakdale Theater, 95 S. Turnpike Road, Wallingford, on Oct. 5 at 8 p.m. $36-$86. 203-265-1501,

Les Filles de Illighadad

Les Filles De Illighadad come from the remote desert in Niger. They live in a place of rural seclusion without electricity or running water. They perform a type of Tuareg music that is related to what’s become known as “desert blues,” made popular by bands like Tinariwen.

But Les Filles De Illighadad are rare in that they have a female lead guitar player and singer, Fatou Seidi Ghali, in a genre dominated by men. What’s more, the desert blues is a style that is in part based on a traditional call-and-response singing that then got adapted and transferred to guitar. The mix of drones and complex rapid-fire ornamentation with the fretting fingers, coupled with group singing, polyrhythmic hand-clapping and head-nodding grooves translate to deeply hypnotic music. There’s trance and grit and history all woven together in this music.

The excellent label Sahel Sounds has helped bring this group to listeners, on record, in videos and on tour, and it is really a rare opportunity to hear and see brilliant music that has been nurtured in a kind of distant isolation. Ghali is a top-notch guitarist who plays with a quiet subdued focus and intensity. She has the power of a master mason steadily chipping away at a hunk of marble to reveal contours and textures. You can watch videos of the group performing in Niger with audience members approaching Ghali to shower her with money, a common form of tribute for gifted performers in Africa. She impassively appears to be earning every dollar and plenty more.

See Les Filles De Illighadad at The State House, 294 State St., New Haven, on Oct. 9 at 8 p.m. $15-$20.

Psychedelic Porn Crumpets

Band names only tell you so much about what someone’s music might sound like. But they do tell you something. Psychedelic Porn Crumpets, from Australia, at the very least signal that they don’t much care about pleasing anyone by holding onto a sense of propriety and caution. And it’s true: they’re psychedelic.

The band makes maximalist face-melting delirious freak rock. Excess and sensual thrills are what they’re after. If you like restraint and sobriety, look elsewhere. The Crumpets are part of a tradition going back to Secret Machines, the Flaming Lips and Pink Floyd. They’re releasing a lot of music, a near-constant flow, which fits right in with their discursive aesthetic. The band makes epic jammers, but they drift more toward the gnarly metal-and-prog end of the exploratory spectrum than the noodly amorphous zone.

Australia has been sending a lot of interesting indie rock out into the world in recent years, and the Crumpets are a part of a particularly live-music-centric scene in their hometown of Perth. They view psych rock as a genre without borders, one that contains multitudes, and they’re trying to keep pulling different approaches into their wide-eyed grab-bag sound.

Psychedelic Porn Crumpets play Space Ballroom, 295 Treadwell St., Hamden, on Oct. 5 at 8 p.m. $15. 203-288-6400,


Foreigner was a huge chart-topping band, playing radio rock, without the operatic flourishes of Journey, without the New Wave bona fides of the Cars, and without the working-class poetry of someone like Billy Joel, and yet the band had something of all that. If you tally up their hits, the list is staggering: “Cold As Ice,” “Feels Like the First Time,” “Jukebox Hero,” “Head Games,” “Hot Blooded,” the list really does keep going, even until their re-invention and career-defining gospel-romance classic “I Wanna Know What Love Is” in the MTV era.

The band had synths, but they had muscle, too. They even had a peculiar prog-folk side with early songs like “Starrider.” They were epic, but they also knew to keep their epic tendencies just enough in check so as to sound grandiose. British guitarist Mick Jones assembled the band because he knew had a juicy tune that would climb the charts with the right people behind it. He was onto something. Like golden-era Fleetwood Mac, Foreigner was a mix of Americans and Englishmen. That continent-spanning aspect might have something to do with their scope.

Jones and his bandmates had worked with a range of interesting other artists, from King Crimson to French pop stars and backing the frontmen of Mott the Hoople and Mountain. The rock DNA was there. There were rocky periods over the years, prescription drug abuse, breakdowns, disagreements and the standard list of Behind the Music drama. The band is back though, pulling together old and new members to celebrate the deep back catalog.

Foreigner plays Mohegan Sun Arena, 1 Mohegan Sun Blvd., Uncasville, on Oct. 3at 7:30 p.m. $39-$59. 860-226-7711 and

Nnenna Freelon

Nnenna Freelon is a serious triple-threat, maybe a quadruple or quintuple threat. She’s a singer, producer, arranger, playwright, educator and composer. She’s worked with Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Herbie Hancock, Clark Terry and many more. Perhaps more importantly, she has done some profound work demonstrating the significance of song and voice and melody to young children and babies, and the related effort to get grown-ups to sing to their children to forge that musical bond and overcome any self-consciousness about using our voices.

She plays standards, but she approaches standards as something that endures and can be interpreted in a non-standard way. Freelon is a passionate believer in equal-opportunity music and long-term creative commitment. She’s paid tribute to the music and careers of Billie Holiday and Ray Charles in different musical/theatrical settings. Freelon is a singer with a voice that’s versatile enough to cover the many strands of her interests, from gospel, to jazz, to soul, to pop.

Nnenna Freelon performs at Infinity Hall, 32 Front St., Hartford, on Oct. 4 at 8 p.m. $44 - $59. 866-666-6306 and

Nutmeg Dulcimer Festival

The dulcimer is an under-appreciated instrument. And yet it’s one that is played, in different styles, all over the world. The Nutmeg Dulcimer Festival will highlight some of those varied traditions, with performers showcasing mountain dulcimer, hammer dulcimer and klezmer dulcimer. Many folk fans have been entranced by the possibilities the mountain dulcimer presented in the music of Joni Mitchell, Jean Ritchie or Richard and Mimi Farina.

The dulcimer is a humble and quiet instrument that probably doesn’t attract players who want to stand out as virtuosos, but Kevin Roth is a first-rate performer, demonstrating the ways that strumming patterns can create percussive counter-rhythms while the fretting fingers coax gentle frictionless melodies from the strings. Roth came to the dulcimer as a kid, after playing piano. He’s brought the instrument to a whole new generation of players and listeners.

The festival will also include performances by Pete Rushefsky, who will play the tsimbl, a hammer dulcimer, in a klezmer context. In Rushefsky’s hands the tsimbl can resemble (or sound like) a harpsichord crossed with a vibraphone. It’s got a thrumming and tinkling sound, but can be made to resonate and swell. David Mahler, a younger player, will demonstrate how more contemporary pop tunes can be approached on the hammer dulcimer. If you’re not looking, you might think someone’s playing a harp with a real physical, aggressive attack. If you are looking you’ll be transfixed by the dexterity required.

The Nutmeg Dulcimer Festival takes place Oct. 4 and 5, at the Mary Taylor Memorial United Methodist Church, 168 Broad St., Milford. For more information and specific times and ticket prices, visit or call 203-661-0503.


The New York-based duo ESSi are about to release their debut record in early October. The album, “Vital Creatures,” starts off with a cycling, distorted arpeggiated pattern that sounds a little like the metallic music of Konono No. 1. But that initial sonic scene-setting comes right before a kind of jump-cut sucker punch of angular bits, abrasion and ominous feedback.

The two musicians have a guitar-and-drums setup, with vocals, and plenty of electronics and gadgetry piled on. Some of the music is lurching and lacerating, in a not-objectionable way, and sometimes the duo contort themselves into moments of a clangorous groove, like on “Break Frame.” At times, like on “02-02,” the effect is almost atmospheric and almost soothing, but instead it hovers in a slightly more off-putting vibe, with bright flickering high notes, and amp hump creating suspenseful emptiness. At other times ESSi make Sonic Youth sound almost like elevator music. Fans of twitchy noise-and-collage artists like Micachu and the Shapes or the Boredoms will enjoy this. Fans of experimentalists like Fennesz will, too.

Willimantic Records hosts a lot of these noteworthy under-the-radar events. This is where the action is, where young artists can explore and get creative outside of the club economy that runs on crowds and beer sales. (Essi plays the similarly inclined Flywheel Collective, in Easthampton, Mass., on Oct. 3.)

ESSi plays t Willimantic Records, 75 Bridge St., Willimantic, Oct. 5 at 2 p.m. The performance is a part of an afternoon of improvised and experimental music. 860-450-7000

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