• Brian Chilson
• Rascal Flatts played Verizon Arena Saturday.

For anyone who might try to quibble and suggest that Saturday night’s country concert at Verizon Arena in North Little Rock wasn’t really all that country, that Rascal Flatts was great but more Elton John than Merle Haggard, that opening act Hunter Hayes was handsome and talented and all that, but in a black T-shirt, jeans, tennis shoes and red belt he, um, didn’t remind them of George Strait, we have two words: Sara Evans.

Sorely missed from the top of the country charts for a few years, Evans returned with a new album in 2011 with plenty of great tracks, but it was her 2004 up-tempo anthem to, as she puts it, “a rotten teenage girl who falls in love with a redneck boy” — that would be “Suds in the Bucket” — that guaranteed none of the 10,417 fans in attendance left without their minimum daily requirement of traditional country.

The girl, of course, runs off with her guy, the big voice in six-inch heels delights the crowd and the evening’s a success long before the headlining act comes out. Evans has a way with a country song — well, she ought to; she’s been on stage since she was four — and with her powerful voice, she doesn’t have to do much more than stroll around in those heels and skin-tight pants, smile, wave and sing her heart out.

• The Polyphonic Spree played Revolution Wednesday night.

It should be a no-brainer that live music fans would come out to see a sixteen-piece white-robed bright pop ensemble, simply for the spectacle. I guessed the crowd would be a gathering of Bonnaroo- and Wakarusa-attending college kids there to catch a whiff of impending warm-weather festival euphoria. Needless to say, the crowd for Wednesday's Polyphonic Spree set was thinner than expected — there was only one presiding hula hippie and she pretty much dropped the ball twenty minutes into the show.

As much childlike fun as PS can be, with its orchestral balladeering glam-rock arrangements reimagined for the hippie set — it's also totally overwhelming. Multiple songs segue from one to the next with long passages of ambient looped flute noise and other dissonant effects, like new age music. I admit there was an entire left wing of the stage that I fully neglected to watch, and that's where the violin and cello (my favorites!) were located, as well as an additional percussionist helming such wonders as chimes and a bell lyre. The band's layout was confusing — the flutist and a guy alternating between trumpet and a mixing console were practically front and center. The four-girl back-up chorus was elevated at the rear of the stage beneath the band's flag. They were cute but their Supremes-esque choreography was so unwavering and robotic it ultimately gave me the creeps.

• Austin Lucas played a house show in Little Rock last night.

Austin Lucas has a booking agent. Austin Lucas is signed to a record label. Hell, he is signed to a few record labels. So why is Austin Lucas doing a tour of house shows? Because he wants to, that’s why. I had a chance to speak with Lucas following last night’s house show in Little Rock. He explained to me that his roots are firmly in the soil of DIY punk music and that is what he grew up doing — playing house shows. He said it offers him a different kind of interaction with the crowd.

“People that come to house shows are the die-hards,” he said. He’s right; the house was filled with as many as 40 die-hard fans. Many called out for their favorite songs, and when he indulged the request, most were singing right along with him, some in harmony. There was no amplification; this was an acoustic set in the truest sense and included no fewer than 12 songs, two of which were newly written. All were very well received by the capacity crowd, but for me the highlights were “Hollywood,” “Dead Factories,” “Go West,” “Somebody Loves You,” and “Wash My Sins Away.”

• Natalie Elliott
• Gringo Star played White Water Tavern last night.

Last night's show opened with 2011 Arkansas Times Musicians Showcase finalists of late, This Holy House — now a four piece, having added an awfully talented, cowboy-booted and paisley-cuffed lead guitarist, who, like the true Wilco fan he is destined to be, skillfully pushed the guitar to its scroungiest sonic limits.

THH, despite having noticeably improved since last year, still seem divided over the band's aesthetic. Even with this new lead guitarist's twangified contributions, the frontman remains married to his Sunny Day Real Estate-style crooning over lush rock 'n' roll thrashing. Of course, this devotion was betrayed when they launched into their best song of the night, a straightforward ballad. And that's when I realized: Really, somebody should give this man a grand piano. He could move a venue to tears, probably, as an emotive balladeer, what with his song pleas for "a good woman" and all. His vocal capabilities — expression and clarity of tone — aren't as effective in rock 'n' roll as they want to be. That being said, his stage-presence enthusiasm is nothing short of admirable — in their finale, he managed to stamp up an impressive cloud of dust from the token area rug on White Water's stage.

Atlanta's Gringo Star peeled out much as expected, with a decidedly Southern-garage number recalling '60s forebears like Zakary Thaks. The band is made up of four dapper gents, but with five instrument stations onstage. I say "stations" because part of the band's performance is rapid switching between positions for each song. That is, there seems to be some murky notion of a regular bass player, regular rhythm guitarist, and regular drummer, but they all alternate between each other. All except one share vocal duties, three take turns on the keyboard, and only two switch off between playing drums. While this displays a swaggering kind of showmanship, it seems to tamper with the band's cohesiveness. Some numbers are peppy garage riffs and tinkling keyboard flourishes with "oooh la la" backing vocals and gut-thumping percussion. But when the regular drummer steps to the front of the stage, however, GS takes on a more flannel-shirted, ’70s Southern rock appeal, wrenching out alt-country songs that would be dusty and tired if it weren't for refreshingly complicated vocal melodies.

It's a great show, though — the somehow endearing hospital smell of their readily dispatched fog machine, their intricate song structures that move between facile pop chords abruptly into key changes, or the rhythm chugging quickly into a lonely-boxcar rockabilly-style syncopation. The lead guitarist's work with a Rickenbacker is phenomenal, garnishing certain songs with a complexity that might risk sounding too conventional without him. The biggest issue, quite in contrast with THH, is their stage personas. Maybe they were in a bad mood, or something's come to sour on this tour, but I think I saw only a single smile from one of the band members during the entire set. They're obviously self-serious kind of performers, engrossed in the instrument at hand, but it occasionally conveys a joylessness that a naturally ebullient genre, such as garage rock, feels kind of heartless without.

• Cheree Franco
• John Paul Keith and the One Four Fives at White Water

There's nothing new about Memphis's John Paul Keith and the One Four Fives, and frankly, that's why they work. The hooks, melodies, phrasings and structures are copped straight from rock pioneers. They're dishing sweetheart country, 50's sock hop, natty British Invasion and it's fuzzy, lo-fi afterbirth. Everything they play is tried and true, even if it isn't. You never know when Keith is covering an obscure great or delivering his own take, and it doesn't matter, because it's all timeless and familiar. Keith is like a pre-digital mashup DJ, saddled with a host of audiophile compulsions that come etched in the dusty vinyl of honky tonk jukeboxes. Anything committed to tape or CD need not apply.

Openers Kentucky Knife Fight, out of St. Louis, offered a ramshackle dose of southern gypsy punk, heavy on the buzzing banjo and froggy vocals. They channelled a mix of 90's radio rock and something grittier, more fantastic and subversive.

To all the people on top of whose toes I jumped last night, I apologize. Lucero's Wednesday night show at the Rev Room was a raucous, but jovial, one. The band launched into the set with "That Much Further West" and pounded out crowd favorites for the next couple of hours. It didn't matter if it was an older tune like "Raising Hell," or a somewhat unfamiliar song off their forthcoming album "Women and Work," the crowd absolutely ate it up. The set list included a couple of new songs including "Women and Work" and "On My Way Downtown." Beers were raised to older favorites like "Drink 'til We're Gone" and "My Best Girl."

By the end of the night, folks had their arms around people they didn't even know, shouting lyrics at the top of their lungs. Rev was packed to the gills with people who were, like me, tired and stressed from all the last minute Christmas hubbub and looking for a way to cut loose. Lucero provided the perfect background music and looked like they were having just as much fun as the crowd.

• Blair Tidwell
• A.A. Bondy played Stickyz Friday night.

The big questions at Friday night's A.A. Bondy show were: Drunk? Hungover? Migraine? Crippling anxiety/depression? Some combination thereof? There was something amiss about Bondy's physical and/or emotional state during his puzzling performing at Stickyz. Poke around online and you’ll find plenty of rave reviews of the alt-folk singer’s emotionally-wrought live shows. So I was left wondering (along with several concertgoers around me) what made the performance so lackluster. But more about that in a jiffy.

• Blair Tidwell
• Randall Shreve and The Sideshow played Stickyz Friday night.

Randall Shreve and the Sideshow pulled a rock 'n' roll carnival caravan into Stickyz on Friday night to celebrate the release of "The Jester," the follow-up to 2008’s "The Entertainer." The show was a family affair, with Shreve’s brother Benjamin Del Shreve joining as an opening act and even the Shreve family patriarch cheering in the audience. The Arkansas residents also brought along Fayetteville friends, A Good Fight; I only caught enough to hear a heavy late '90s punk influence and to see a lack of enthusiasm from the audience. Clearly, Little Rock was there to get a double dose of Shreve.

• David Lewis
• Split Lip Rayfield

The hills were alive with the sound of banjos.

The Yonder Mountain String Band’s Harvest Music Festival turned pastoral Mulberry Mountain into a non-stop string-pickin’ newgrass jam Oct. 13-16. Think of it as a smaller, tamer version of its cousin, Wakarusa, which occupies the same Ozark hillside space in the middle of summer. Not that Yonder Mountain is either small or tame.

The Yonder Mountain festival is 60-plus national touring artists playing 100 or so sets on four stages over four days. Mulberry Mountain is a 650-acre lodging and event resort on Highway 23 (The Pig Trail) about five miles north of Turner Bend. On most days Mulberry Mountain is a huge open field with a couple of buildings near the entry and a permanent covered stage at the far end of the property. In mid-October, though, it transforms into a community of about 7,000 music lovers listening and dancing to high-energy acoustic tunes and sleeping — when they sleep at all — in tents and RVs.

• Brian Chilson
• Taylor Swift played Verizon Arena last night.

It was a youthful girls’ night out (that continued way past a lot of their bedtimes) Tuesday evening at Verizon Arena in North Little Rock as a crowd of 13,566 screaming, sign-carrying schoolgirls, the Moms and Dads who brought them and maybe a few siblings hung out with Taylor Swift.

Amid ever-changing sets, themes and costumes, the country pop superstar kept them squealing, smiling and singing along as she demonstrated her prowess not only as a singer-songwriter, but also as a seasoned, creative performer who can draw thunderous applause just by standing on stage, turning her head and changing expressions.

Throughout her still-young career, Swift has admittedly focused on love and breakups — there’s “nothing more fascinating” than relationships, she told her audience — and her songs tell these stories. She belted out hits like “Our Song,” “Mean,” “The Story of Us” and “Sparks Fly” before closing the show with an encore performance of “Fifteen”
and “Love Story” as glow sticks, cell phones and battery-powered homemade signs lit the arena.

Likable rising country artist Charlie Worsham opened the show followed by hard-charging Needtobreathe, a rock band out of South Carolina.

• Natalie Elliott
• Finding Fiction at Vino's.

I spoke with their dry-witted keyboardist, Andrew Toups, who wandered around the venue with his spray of curly hair, a thrift-store tie replete with tie clip, toting a glass of red wine and generally seeming like a cocktail-lounge philosopher—they're some affable dudes whose 2010 release on Park the Van Records is certainly worth seeking to satisfy your indy-pop inclinations.

Brooklyn's Finding Fiction continued the awkward-pop trend of the evening, but with more teenage-sounding, plaintive vocals and an obvious attempt to channel the Weezer of a time long since past. They were most musically interesting during their slow jams and breakdowns, which seemed like micro-experiments in the arhythmic, atonal blasts of a post-punk three piece, but usually teetering on the edge of completely falling apart.

The synth dabbled too much in shrill car-alarm sounds, and when it was employed properly, was barely audible, which makes one wonder whether or not it should even be a part of the lineup. The band itself appeared trapped in the amber of a computer-geek adolescence, with their flat stage banter and fumbling presence. A friend commented that their set would have made a perfect soundtrack to an episode of Degrassi, and it was true — in fact, the whole back room at Vino's, with the snarky indy pop, the sparse crowd, and long cafeteria-style tables gave the feeling of hanging out at an alt-prom that even the losers forgot to attend.

Richard Buckner came through town last night and played a stellar show at Stickyz. It's been two years since Buckner visited Little Rock and a small but dedicated crowd showed up to get their fix. Buckner is a big guy, a real commanding presence on stage. But his lilting voice and dense lyrics really drew the audience in. In fact, I think this was probably the quietest show I've seen since the last time I saw Buckner play. Aside from applause, the small-but-attentive crowd barely made a sound. The audience sat rapt as Buckner rolled through a mix of songs, some off his new album, "Our Blood," with a smattering of older tunes mixed in. Unlike last time, Buckner had accompaniment. Jeff Kazor, of the Crooked Jades, supplied shakers, keys and harmonium (which you can see on the video below). The combination of Buckner's percussive strumming and the moan of the harmonium almost made it feel like church. Hopefully it won't be two years before Buckner graces a Little Rock stage again.

Cory Branan played a nice, long set last night at White Water Tavern, rolling through a number of new songs and throwing in old favorites as well. It was the perfect atmosphere for a show on a muggy summer night. A lot of people showed up, but not too many to call it crowded. Some folks stood in front of the stage as Branan crooned, but others just sat back and enjoyed the music, sipping beers in between chatting with friends. The set included "Daddy Was a Sky-writer," "Free Fall," "Prettiest Waitress in Memphis," "The Corner" and a great rendition of a Townes Van Zandt tune, along with a host of others. Branan played a few songs off his newest record which will come out soon, he said. The album's been done for over a year, just waiting for the right record deal to come along. It looks like it finally has.

On the jump, Branan channels Tom Waits in a song off the upcoming release.