9 buzzworthy concerts coming to Charlotte in the next week

The musical alter ego of Durham’s MC Taylor and his backing band return to NoDa following last year’s “Hallelujah, Anyhow” – which isn’t an overtly political record, but is a perfectly melancholy yet hopeful soundtrack for these particularly dark days.

The revered vocal quartet’s “Homecoming Tour” makes a stop uptown to warm Charlotte up for St. Patrick’s Day, revisiting material that was captured live for its December PBS special. Susan McFadden, Mairead Carlin, Eabha McMahon and Tara McNeil are joined by pipers, dancers and a full band playing bouzouki, tin whistle, bodhran, Uilean pipes and other traditional Irish instruments.

For “Basement Séance” (his first Dirty Art Club album in four years), Charlotte’s Matt Cagle drew on samples from rarely heard albums, blending and repurposing them into new tracks that create a sound the evokes retro movie scores woven together using sometimes stylistically disparate soul, jazz, folk and psychedelic sources.

On its latest album, “You Can’t Stay Here,” the amusingly named Long Island punk band balances that sense of humor with darker, more poignant songs that urge listeners to join in on heartfelt group singalongs – yet the sincerity and motivational feel of the driving tracks allow it to avoid the whininess of the emo tag.

The Los Angeles duo builds sunny, electro-pop tracks with blooping keyboards and spurts of guitar, as well as equal allegiances to the Beach Boys, Weezer and beat-minded tracks that indicate the pair grew up on hip-hop and late-’90s/early-’00s pop and rock. With Netherfriends and Trash Panda.

The solo project of blues singer-songwriter Jonathan Linaberry – the one-man band who’ll release his third album, “Ones to Keep Close,” in May – these bones need little more than Linaberry’s foot-stomping rhythms and blend of Appalachian folk and blues.

Twenty years have passed since his solo debut, but the critically acclaimed Houston rap legend and sometime actor is still taking the road less traveled, sharing humorous, self-deprecating rhymes, relatable biographical storytelling, and odes to recreational drugs on his latest full-length, 2017’s “Acoustic Levitation.”

Possibly the only artist of his generation still performing live in his 90s, the 20-time Grammy winner – who according to recent reports hasn’t lost his signature croon – is still at it at 91. He’s joined by daughter Antonia Bennett, who has long been a fixture as an opening act at her father’s shows.

Rescheduled from last fall (when she was still recovering from a car crash), the singer-songwriter is back with some of her strongest material to date. Mayfield takes a lyrically confessional trek through reclaiming her independence following an abusive marriage on her new album “Sorry Is Gone,” which revels in the rootsy Americana and ’90s grunge she grew up on.

This story was originally published March 7, 2018 at 7:22 AM with the headline "9 buzzworthy concerts coming to Charlotte in the next week."