By Chris Klimek

It's perfectly reasonable to be suspicious of a musician with as mighty a moniker as Kurt Vile. If that was a stage name (it's not) the intimation would be of the most confrontational, petulant punk, but the Philadelphia-based Vile's defiantly primitive, accident-prone songs are lazier and hazier than that, rarely straying from the long and droning road but hinting at melodic paths untaken. Imperfection is his ideology.

("The cacophony was more ethereal than kinetic," after the jump.)

D.C. quintet Le Loup is coming home. The band has spent the last month on the road in support its second album, "Family," a collection of carefully adorned folk songs in which banjo, group vocals and rumbling drums all gently mingle with each other. Moira McLaughlin has a profile of the band in today's Weekend section, so we thought we'd ask frontman Sam Simkoff about the six things he's most looking forward to about settling back in at home. Le Loup performs Saturday night at the Black Cat.

1. My Wife
I'm a real homebody. I miss my wife.

2. A Vegetarian Meal
I'm not a vegetarian, but all we eat on the road is, well, road food. And 90 percent of road food is meat. We were driving through Arizona, and we passed this huge cattle ranch -- this giant cow landscape in the middle of the desert. Not a single blade of grass for a thousand miles. And just cows packed shoulder to shoulder in front of these feeding troughs. It looked miserable and unnatural. And then we had burgers for dinner. Gross.

(TV and the radio, after the jump.)

By David Malitz

San Francisco indie group Girls (consisting of four guys, of course) came to the Black Cat Tuesday as one of the most hyped bands of the year -- and some of it even has to do with their music! The backstory has simply proven too irresistible. Frontman Christopher Owens grew up in a cult and spent the first 16 years of his life continent-jumping and proselytizing on behalf of Children of God. Eventually he landed in San Francisco and developed a close relationship with every type of pill the FDA tells parents to keep away from children. And he's more than happy to talk about both of these subjects in interviews.

The band's latest single, "Lust for Life" -- yes, the same title as the Iggy Pop hit; no, those words don't appear at all in the lyrics -- is accompanied by a designed-to-shock video that crams so much graphic nudity into its two-and-a-half minutes it would make Larry Flynt blush. Oh, there's also that self-titled album of warm and jangly indie-pop, in case anyone cares.

(Don't believe the hype? The advice that keeps on giving, after the jump.)

By Mark Jenkins

The Very Best has fewer members than most African bands have drummers, and the London-based Afro-electro-pop trio didn't even bring its full complement to its sold-out Monday gig at DC9. But singer Esau Mwamwaya and programmer Etienne Tron had no trouble holding the crowd's attention with a mostly prerecorded set of blithe dance music.

(Bare-midriffed dancers and grumbling from fans, after the jump.)

Bruce Springsteen brought his usual energy to Verizon Center on Monday night. The audience was up to the task of matching his enthusiasm. (By By Toni L. Sandys/TWP)

By Chris Richards

When the house lights go up at a rock concert, the illusion of magic evaporates. Show's over. Don't forget your belongings on the way out.

Not so at Verizon Center Monday night, where Bruce Springsteen cranked up the lumens in the middle of his set.

When the overhead lights flipped on during the opening bars of "Born To Run," an indistinct mass of fans was suddenly thrown into sharp relief and the audience appeared as real and human as the band sweating it out on stage. The illusion didn't evaporate. It exploded into something profound.

View a gallery of photos from Monday night's show.

Revelatory moments like this are stock-in-trade for Springsteen, who was making his second Verizon Center concert appearance this year. The performance featured a song-by-song rendition of his 1975 breakout album "Born To Run," along with a surplus of career-spanning hits, including "Dancing In the Dark," "Hungry Heart" and "Badlands." (The concert also comes after news that Springsteen will be one of the five recipients of the annual Kennedy Center Honors in December.)

Onstage, the Boss quickly proved that kinetic rock stars beget kinetic crowds. From the sweatiest general admission cluster to the bloodiest nosebleed, fans pumped their fists ceaselessly to The E Street Band's sturdy pulse, as if trying to pound down 20,000 phantom doors. Springsteen pumped his fists, too -- jabs and uppercuts punctuating lyrics as they erupted from his mouth.

(The audience returns the energy, after the jump. Were you at the show last night? Leave your thoughts in the comments.)

Nils Lofgren and Bruce Springsteen back in May at the Verizon Center. (By Linda Davidson/TWP)

It seems that we've been saying this a lot lately, but -- the Boss is in town. It's his third trip to D.C. in just under three years but is the first time he won't be pushing a new album. Instead, he'll be pushing an album that needs no pushing at all -- his 1975 classic "Born to Run." Springsteen is just the latest performer to hop on the overflowing perform-an-album-in-its-entirety bandwagon, which surely has no more room left on it now that the entire E Street Band on board. Right? If you're going to tonight's concert at Verizon Center you'll hear the eight songs on the album, in order, probably in the middle portion of the show.

During a recent run of concerts at Giants Stadium Springsteen highlighted three separate albums on three separate nights -- "Born to Run," "Born in the U.S.A." and "Darkness on the Edge of Town." So what other album could Bruce successfully devote (a small portion) of his show to? To us there's only one answer, after the jump...

By Juli Thanki

"I want you to feel like you're in my living room," Patty Loveless said to a worshipful Birchmere crowd Sunday night. The giant '30s console radio and table lamps onstage certainly added to the effect as the honey-voiced Loveless delivered two hours of country and bluegrass music, or, as she put it, "sharing music about real people and real life situations."

(A pair of standing ovations and covers of George Jones and Emmylou Harris, after the jump.)

By Mark Jenkins

Iranian musician Bahman Panahi is pursuing a doctorate at the Sorbonne, so it's fitting that his concert Friday evening at the Freer Gallery was instructive. He demonstrated the different tones and moods of the tar and the setar, the long-necked lutes central to West Asian music. He also offered a lesson on improvisation.

(Awed gasps, graceful glides and sensuously bent strings, after the jump.)

Yardfest, the annual concert held during homecoming at Howard University, is already a week in the rear view, but I'm still sifting through the copious freebies. Last Friday, street-teamers prowled the H.U. quad, passing out eye-popping party flyers, bottles of soda that tasted like dish soap (I was really thirsty) and oodles of mix tapes from rappers hoping to win new ears.

After listening to the dozen CDRs I took home, three stand out: Black Cobain's "Now Or Never," K-Beta's "89 to 09" and Nipsey Hussle's "Bullets Ain't Got No Names Vol. 3.1"

(Links to all three mix tapes, after the jump.)

By Juli Thanki

It's a rare performer who'll quote both the Old Testament and "Slingblade." But when the performer is Ricky Skaggs, who shared a stage with Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass, at five years old and turned pro at an age when most are worried about finding a date to the prom, just about anything is possible. Backed by his crack six-man band Kentucky Thunder, Skaggs wowed the Strathmore crowd Thursday night with nearly two hours of acoustic music, punctuating originals and bluegrass standards with breakneck instrumentals.

(Skaggs whips it like a mule, after the jump.)