Two shows on either side of Tampa Bay you should be hip to.
Depending on your age and musical inclinations, there’s a rather good chance you don’t know much — if anything — about British cult hero Robyn Hitchcock. He came up around the same time as contemporaries like Gang of Four, Joy Division and Echo & the Bunnymen, and played in three different bands over his nearly 40-year career (The Soft Boys, the Egyptians, and V3 with R.E.M.’s Peter Buck), in addition to issuing 10 albums of solo material. His charming, eccentric, cerebral yet heartfelt pedigree is influenced in part by the late Syd Barrett, his sound a blend of folk, jangle pop and psychedelia marked by Beatle-esque melodies.
[jump]Hitchcock’s 2013 latest Love from London earned high marks in Rolling Stone; vet critic David Fricke lauded it as “an album Syd Barrett might have made if he’d stayed cogent and seen the end of days … 10 songs of chiming folk-rock grace and slippery black humor.”8 p.m., Palladium Theater, St. Petersburg, $28.
Signed to Kings of Leon label Serpents & Snakes, Turbo Fruits is a Nashville garage rock quartet with energetic punk drive, hooky throwback melodies and bouncy rhythms, a lead singer whose scratchy-sweet vocals are dosed in just the right amount of longing and world-weariness, and songs that tell stories about whiskey-drenched and weed-hazed nights, unattainable women or the ones that won’t stick around, and other not-super-earnest topics. Turbo Fruits is renowned for staging howling fun live shows, and paired with a few great local support acts Luxury Mane, and Empire Cinema, this should make for a high-octane Thursday night bill. 8 p.m., Crowbar, Ybor City, $10.