Whether you were a fan of a certain Thin White Duke or claimed Directioner as your religious following, this week was unquestionably the shittiest for large swaths of music fans.

But, while the early months of the year are usually a resting time for live music, the remainder of this week in local music seems to have been unknowingly tailored to distract from nonstop mourning. With local favorites like Clicky Clicky Music and Starlab putting on solid shows tonight, a tribute show to Bowie himself at Out of the Blue Gallery on Thursday, and one of the most excellent lineups we’ve seen from Show Mom Collective in a minute on Saturday, your humble friends here at Pudding present a tearless offering for your Friday night.

Opening our first show of 2016, Earthquake Party! is one of the few exclamation point-affixed bands that honestly deserve to proclaim their excitement via band name. Carefully mastering the line between “too loud, but it’s kind of more fun as a result” and “oh my god, I can’t believe I’m happy that my eardrums popped and are in a pool of blood on my shoes,” the Earthquake Party! folks have earned their title as one of Allston Pudding’s longest standing favorites in garage-y noise pop.

New beginnings are, of course, terrifying as fuck and should be avoided at all costs. Honestly, if everything just began at the middle of its timeline, I think everyone would be much happier… but also, that would mean we’d all be middle aged and all middle aged people talk about are their 401Ks and Yanni CD collections. In the case of dæphne though, they’re getting the best of both worlds by premiering their new status as a trio with bassist Laura Brogan handling vocals. With this past November’s exceptional Full Circle still fresh in our minds though, it’s kind of like dæphne get to have their cake and Yanni CDs too.

Question: It’s 11 o’ clock… do you know where your supermassive, planet-heating, 4 billion year old stars are?

Answer: I mean, probably heating another part of the Earth, dummy. But if they happened to gain sentience, they’d probably be contemplating whether they should attend a Sun Young show. On the pros list, the Boston trio’s “Sun Theme” does a pretty solid job of outlining the struggles of being Earth’s primary heat source (being a baby boi, being far away from us, etc.) inside an ear-worming chorus. On the cons list though, if the Sun ever attended a show on Earth, everyone’s skin would burn clean off their bones and all earthly creation would be grinded down to ash and ember. So, to fully answer the question, the Sun is out there wishing it were you, able to go to a Sun Young show without causing the apocalypse.

I feel for the bands that have to have “featuring members of [insert popular enough band]” perennially pasted to the end of their name. To be fair, “featuring members of LVL UP and Porches” are pretty damn good qualifications in the case of Cende, but oh man, I hope no one’s waiting for any “Headsgiving”/”Annie’s A Witch” moments. Where their other bands thrive in aching, sometimes slacker rock-informed musings, Cende is pure sugar injected into snotty garage rock à la White Reaper. If their self-titled EP out this month is any indication, their lust for hooks delivered at breakneck speed won’t stop until writer jerkoffs like me stop suffixing that “featuring members of…” bit on their name.

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