The Eight Best Concerts in Phoenix This Week

This week’s collection of best concerts in the Valley offers a bit of everything. There are nostalgia tours (The B-52s, Collective Soul), country crooners (Jason Boland and the Stragglers), indie favorites (Alex Lahey), and one band making a helluva lot of noise (3Teeth).

Other acts scheduled to perform at music venues around the metro Phoenix area this week include post-hardcore favorites Touché Amoré and reggae act Passafire. Plus, hometown heroes Gin Blossoms will be in concert and the annual Summer Slaughter Tour 2019 will bring plenty of death metal acts to town that are ready to turn things up to 11.

Details about each of these shows can be found below. And for even more live music happening around the Valley this week, hit up Phoenix New Times' online concert calendar.

Touché Amoré

Monday, August 12
The Rebel Lounge

If it seems music, in general, is always full of surprises, some music journalism can be surprising for artists who find themselves placed into a genre they may not agree with. After more than a decade, Los Angeles' Touché Amoré know this all too well after being tagged in many genres, but that hasn't slowed them down by any means.

While Touché Amoré have been around for about a decade, singer Jeremy Bolm admits it doesn't feel as such. "It doesn't feel that long in my brain," he says. "Once you find punk rock, in a good way and sometimes in a bad way, it can stunt your growth." Touché Amoré's frequent tweaks of their sound over the years have led some critics to place them in spaces they would never dare call themselves. "We're just a punk band; the same thing I'd tell a distant relative or anyone else," shrugs Bolm. "It just seems easiest to categorize ourselves as that."

Touché Amoré currently are touring in support of Dead Horse X, a re-recording of their debut album ...To the Beat of Aa Dead Horse, and will hit The Rebel Lounge on Monday night. Jerome's Dream and Dangers will open the show, which starts at 8 p.m. Tickets are $20 to $23. David Garrick

Summer Slaughter Tour 2019

Tuesday, August 13
Club Red

The self-proclaimed “Most Extreme Tour of the Year” is on its way for the 11th year running. That's a long time to be extreme. The Summer Slaughter Tour has been slaying metal fans since 2007 and has been one of the only tours to provide a venue and platform for the more savage music fans among us. This year's visit to the Valley should be no different.

é The event, which invades Club Red in Mesa on Tuesday night, promises to dish out as much brutality as its fans can handle. And with Cattle Decapitation as its headliner, the tour's musical offerings will range from progressive metal to death metal and tech-death. For an event that will feature a total of nine metal acts – including Carnifex, The Faceless, Rivers of Nihil, Nekrogoblikon, Lorna Shore, Brand of Sacrifice, Dead World Reclamation, and Malnourished – this is sure to be one hardcore helluva time. The death metal madness starts at 3 p.m. Tickets are $27 to $30. Molly Mollotova

Collective Soul and Gin Blossoms

Tuesday, August 13
Comerica Theatre

Sturdy nice-guy rockers who came above ground in the post-grunge explosion, Collective Soul never claimed to be tortured artists, unlike the souls in Bush and Live. Albums like 1993 debut Hints, Allegations & Things Left Unsaid, a 1995 eponymous disc, and 1997's Disciplined Breakdown made them mainstays on pop radio, with a mix of subdued ballads and earnest, workmanlike rock singles.

Dosage, released in 1999, went back to what made that second album so palatable to programmers, and became one of that year's best-selling records (if not a critical favorite) behind singles "Heavy" and "Run." "Run" also got a boost from an appearance on the soundtrack to the MTV high-school football dramedy Varsity Blues. Their popularity led the Atlanta-based group to get inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in 2009.

For this tour, they’ve teamed up with Valley jangle-pop legends Gin Blossoms for a summertime tour steeped in nostalgia. It comes to Comerica Theatre on Tuesday night. Performances start at 7 p.m. Tickets are $45 to $60. Craig Hlavaty

Alex Lahey

Wednesday, August 14
Valley Bar

Imagine if Hayley Williams had ditched the dudes in Paramore and struck out as a solo songwriter, developing a surf-rock sound with soaring pop choruses and specific-as-hell lyrics. Well, then, she would sound a lot like Alex Lahey.

Lahey is a 20-something Aussie whose 2017 full-length, I Love You Like a Brother, was largely underappreciated in this hemisphere, though it’s chock-full of gems. Lahey’s persona is scrappy, with the clever self-deprecation of Courtney Barnett (she wrote a song called “Perth Traumatic Stress Disorder”), but she’s also got an undeniably tight grip on blast-off pop hooks. She looks up to Dolly Parton and Bruce Springsteen, and like those idols, she has a way with metaphor: On “Backpack,” for instance, Lahey clings to a lover who she knows is unavailable, singing, “It’s hard for me to put my arms around you / When your backpack’s on."

This week, Lahey comes to the Valley for a Wednesday night performance at Valley Bar. Kingsbury and Sydney Sprauge will open the evening, which starts at 8 p.m. Tickets are $14. Katie Moulton

The B-52s

Wednesday, August 14
Comerica Theatre

Veteran rock band The B-52s return to the Valley in middle of August for a performance at Comerica Theatre. It's the band's 40th-anniversary tour, so expect a lot of the hits – including such longtime crowd-pleasers as “Love Shack,” “Rock Lobster,” “Private Idaho,” and “Planet Claire” – to be played loudly and enthusiastically. Fellow ‘80s favorites OMD (a.k.a. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark) and Berlin will open the show, which begins at 7 p.m. Tickets are $39.50 to $205. Jeff Strowe

Passafire

Wednesday, August 14
Crescent Ballroom

Out of Savannah, Georgia, Passafire's palmetto-shaded brand of conscious reggae, dub, and alt-rock goes over equally smooth with tattooed Sublime lovers and spliff-passing Rasta traditionalists, and now they're seeing more than a decade of hard work paying off. After years of opening for many of reggae-rock's top names – 311, Pepper, Matisyahu, and The Wailers among them – they've won so many converts of their own.

Passafire's fifth studio album, 2013’s Vines, debuted at No. 1 on Billboard's Reggae charts. They’ve put out two more albums since then, the Interval EP in 2015 and 2017’s Longshot. Catch Passafire in concert on Wednesday night at Crescent Ballroom. Kash'd Out and Scattered Melodies will open. Tickets are $17 and the show starts at 8 p.m. Chris Gray

Jason Boland and the Stragglers

Thursday, August 15
Rockbar Inc. in Scottsdale

If you stay in the game long enough – any game, really – you’re going to experience some ups and downs. Jason Boland and the Stragglers are no exception. For the better part of two decades, the band have created a unique brand of country music. Hailing from Oklahoma but infused with plenty of Texas country, Boland and his bandmates have developed quite the following and have survived in an industry that often breaks bands under the weight of expectations, in-fighting, and financial struggle.

Boland and the crew’s music is interesting in that a number of their tunes are fun, up-tempo country jams. Others are slower and more introspective. They’re able to blend any number of styles into one unique brand of country music. This week, Boland and the Stragglers amble into Rockbar in Scottsdale for a Thursday night gig, which kicks off at 7 p.m. Tickets are $20. Clint Hale

3Teeth

Thursday, August 15
The Rebel Lounge

Los Angeles-born industrial band 3Teeth have been around six years and have made plenty of waves in that time. The group released their self-titled debut in 2013 through Canadian industrial label Artoffact Records. That album, along with 3Teeth's strong visuals, garnered plenty of attention for a multimedia endeavor. A string of North American shows brought the band even more attention from a wider audience. 3Teeth released their third studio album, Metawar, last month on Century Media Records. They invade The Rebel Lounge on Thursday night with support from Lana Del Rabies and Author and Punisher. The music gets going at 7:30 p.m. and tickets are $18 in advance, $20 at the door. Jose D. Duran