The Juan MacLean, the Field, Nordic Soul

(Nectar) Here we have two totally distinct electronic musicians both working at the top of their game. The Juan MacLean's latest, The Future Will Come (DFA), expertly mixes Human League—style synth-pop (with female vocal counterpoints supplied by longtime collaborator Nancy Whang) with classic house to craft surprisingly sincere songs about robots and humans, love and heartbreak. On the Field's new one, Yesterday and Today (Kompakt), the Swedish producer expands his blissed-out, microsampled techno with increased live instrumentation (including a little drumming from Battles heavyweight John Stanier) for an album as sublime as his debut, only with more subtlety and depth. (Nectar, 412 N 36th St, 632-2020. 8 pm, $15, 21+.) Eric Grandy

Love Is All, Still Flyin', TacocaT

(Neumos) Taking their name from a slogan scrawled across a hippie compound in an episode of Man from U.N.C.L.E., Love Is All are a punky Swedish quintet that, like the punky Welsh septet Los Campesinos!, seem to compress several decades of alternative rock into each of their hit-and-run songs. What Love Is All have that the Welsh farmers don't: lead vocalist/keyboardist Josephine Olausson, who hollers and frets and searches (there's a reason the latest record's called A Hundred Things Keep Me Up at Night) like a long-lost daughter of Liliput; and multi-instrumentalist James Ausfahrt, whose saxophone blasts lend songs a perfectly fitting X-Ray Spex-iness. Tonight, Love Is All tear up Neumos, with support from the sprawling San Francisco collective Still Flyin'. DAVID SCHMADER

311, Ziggy Marley

(WaMu Theater) This comparison will immediately make sense to those who have read Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Ziggy Marley, the eldest son of Rita and Bob Marley, is to his father what Nwoye was to Okonkwo. Nwoye, Okonkwo's eldest son in Achebe's groundbreaking 1958 novel, is much, much softer and more sensitive than his father, who is a roaring lion of a man. This is Ziggy's situation. As a singer and celebrity, he's much more sensitive than his father, the conquering lion of reggae and an international music god. Ziggy has even released a reggae album for kids called Family Time. This is where his heart is: in home, with children, reading books, telling stories. This private place is far from the one in which his father thrived, the realm of mass production, mass distribution, and mass consumption. CHARLES MUDEDE

Balkan Beat Box, the Bad Things

(Showbox at the Market) Formed by Ori Kaplan (ex—Gogol Bordello) and Tamir Muskat (Firewater), and including MC/percussionist Tomer Yosef, Balkan Beat Box create some of the most pleasurable music on the planet, an intoxicating mix of klezmer; traditional Balkan, Mediterranean, and Arabic musics; and hiphop that will enrich your life immeasurably. Both of BBB's studio records—2005's Balkan Beat Box and 2007's Nu Med—are classics; the new remix album, Nu Made, is a welcome gift for all of us who have played the official releases into the ground. Live, BBB create a world-music-laced hiphop throwdown that melts Seattle's antidance tendencies like butter in the sun. DAVID SCHMADER

More as always in our complete, searchable music calendar listings.