"Go See A Show!" Our Live Music Picks For This Week

::Tuesday, April 3::

Heartless Bastards at Echoplex

According to frontwoman Erika Wennerstrom, Heartless Bastards take their band name from one of those touchscreen bar games, which presented "Tom Petty and the Heartless Bastards" as one of the incorrect multiple-choice answers to Tom Petty's backing band (who doesn't know the Heartbreakers?). Like Tom Petty, Heartless Bastards are deeply rooted in American blues rock, but their niche is somewhere between the smooth, country-influenced sound of Petty and the hard-edged riffs of former Fat Possum Records labelmates The Black Keys, to whom they were occasionally compared early on. Their newest album, Arrow, finds Wennerstrom experimenting with classic sounds, both plugged and unplugged, and the result is an album that feels like it combines elements of many of the most classic rock bands of all time, to creative something new and catchy the very first time around. [Details] [photo via]