Aaron Mannino, Low Places

(Comet) Aaron Mannino's songs always hit your ears in a pleasant way: a cockeyed waltz, a lonesome synthesizer beat accompanied by a chorus of Beach Boys—like vocals, a plaintive country guitar lick. You get the sense that he wouldn't want to shy away from Elliott Smith comparisons—at a few points, especially in the song "Wreckage," he sounds eerily similar to Smith, and it can't be by accident—but his own voice and songwriting skills are so compelling that you're willing to forgive the moments of outright hero worship. Listen to "Gemini" with all its late-Beatles weird drama, and you'll get swept in before you even know it. Mannino is naturally seductive, and his songwriting voice is sure and true. PAUL CONSTANT

The Nightgowns, Wallpaper, the Redwood Plan, Skeletons with Flesh on Them, Special Places, Christmas Belles

(Chop Suey) Tonight is local "sparkly indie pop press" Three Imaginary Girls' annual holiday party, and if for some reason you're unfamiliar, the lineup isn't a bad introduction to the site's main bag: local bands that play (more or less) poppy indie rock. (A piddling gripe: "Sparkly" is a terrible adjective unless you're talking about, like, a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper.) Tacoma's the Nightgowns and Auburn's Wallpaper are worth catching; the former deal in appealingly doleful indie-tronica, the latter spit out sweet wads of bubblegum pop. Less worthy are Skeletons with Flesh on Them's ambitious but thus far middling jangle and the Redwood Plan's overly obvious and rather toothless dance punk (whoever said Gossip fans would love this band severely underestimated the good taste of Beth Ditto—heads.) ERIC GRANDY

And there's always more in our complete music calendar listings.