Japanther play the Funhouse tonight! Tacocat, Mosquito Bandito, and Problems are also on the bill. Eric Grandy reviewed their new album in this week's paper:

Have I gotten old, or is it just Japanther? For a while there in the early '00s, when the Brooklyn bass and drums duo were touring relentlessly (nine times in two years), they seemed like the most exciting punk band in the country—like Lightning Bolt only with sing-along pop songs. In 2007, I even ranked Skuffed Up My Huffy as one of my top 10 albums of the year in the Pazz & Jop critics poll. Although in retrospect, while Huffy was a fine album, I think that placement was more like the belated Oscar award for a less-than-phenomenal film really meant to honor an entire career. Which is just to say that since their peak—2003 to 2005's run of Dump the Body in Rikki Lake, The Operating Manual for Life on Earth EP, and Master of Pigeons—Japanther have been coasting on their bikes rather than shredding, with diminishing returns.

So what does he think of the album Tut Tut, Now Shake Ya Butt? Click here to find out and read the rest.

Raphael Saadiq
(Showbox at the Market) A couple years ago, Amy Winehouse's Back to Black (created with invaluable help from Mark Ronson and the Dap-Kings) reminded a whole bunch of (white) people of the vast aural pleasures of old-school soul. Legendary singer-songwriter-producer Raphael Saadiq has devoted most of his life to these pleasures, leading the chart-conquering new jack swingsters Tony! Toni! Toné!, producing the deep funk stew of D'Angelo's classic Voodoo, and, most recently, releasing his freakishly accomplished 2008 solo album, The Way I See It. The latter is an impeccable dazzler that comes on like a one-man Motown show, with Saadiq playing all the parts, from mastermind Berry Gordy to songwriting factory Holland-Dozier-Holland to singing-songwriting superstar Smokey Robinson. That the end result manages to spring to its own 21st-century life is a testament to Saadiq's gifts. Amy Winehouse can only cry in her crack. DAVID SCHMADER See also My Philosophy.

Efterklang, Peter Broderick, the Kindness Kind
(Nectar) Efterklang are a Danish orchestral/electronic ensemble whose name is apparently the Danish word for both "reverberation" and "remembrance" (literally translated as "after sound"). The group's core is a quintet, but their live band bulk up to nine, and the liner notes for 2007's Parades list some 30 guest musicians, on duties ranging from flügelhorn to boys choir to "additional percussion and tap dance." So what exactly do all these crazy Danes get up to? For the most part on Parades they play glacially progressing symphonic pomp, distant choruses arising out of stretched string passages, their electronic side entirely confined to some rhythmic sputters on opening track "Polygyne." All together, it sounds like something in between the wordless transcendentalism of Sigur Rós and the less boisterous of the Arcade Fire's theatrical hymns. And it all looks like quite a spectacle live. ERIC GRANDY

And don't forget: Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band scoop their new ice cream flavor at Molly Moons tonight at 6 pm. Yum! See the rest of tonight's listings here.