The Hold Steady w/ The Dynamiters @ Turner Hall Ballroom, 8 p.m.
Considering the number of pejoratives leveled at The Hold Steady, it’s hard to believe that the group’s last release, 2006’s Boys and Girls in America, garnered such a warm public and critical response (including an increasingly difficult 9.4 rating from Pitchfork). Often derided as little more than a glorified bar band, The Hold Steady devotes some record-space to literary odes to seemingly unremarkable events like passing out at concerts, stumbling around drunk or meeting a make-out partner at a detox tent, but those tales hardly tell the entire story. Lyricist and frontman Craig Finn packs songs with allusions to the works of Jack Kerouac and fellow Minnesotan John Berryman (suddenly an indie-rock poet of choice), marrying blistering classic-rock guitar reminiscent of Thin Lizzy with the overarching lyrical ambition of Greetings from Asbury Park-era Springsteen.

The Hold Steady

Bitch & The Exciting Conclusion w/ The Addy Janes, Jeannie Mayotte @ The Stonefly Brewery, 10 p.m.
After her mostly spoken-word and minimalist work on a few records for Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe label, Bitch turned to a more fully realized sound when she united with her backing band, The Exciting Conclusion. The product of that pairing is 2006’s Make This/Break This, a collection of tracks that blends her electric violin sound with hushed, sparse lyrical themes. When on stage, Bitch is a wildly dynamic character given to spastic and violent physicality, a perfect complement to her vivid, borderline-radical lyrical bursts.

Bitch

Hanson @ The Rave, 8 p.m.
After their 1997 mega-hit “MMMBop” ran its course, Hanson set upon the arduous task of establishing themselves as a real band, a major challenge for a group whose charm was specifically that they never seemed like a real band, but rather just three singing brothers chirping disposable pop. Since their subsequent “mature” albums failed commercially, the group has made more of an effort to meld their adult-alternative leanings with the sugary pop that made them draws in the first place. They likely don’t have another hit single in them, but given the teen-pop stigma they’re saddled with, the mere fact that they’re still touring behind semi-respectable new material is something of a triumph.

Saturday, April 12

Lisa Lampanelli @ The Pabst Theater, 7 and 10 p.m.
Like that other race-baiting white woman, Sarah Silverman, Lisa Lampanelli relies on her unassuming, non-threatening appearance to cushion the blow of edgy observations that would make Don Imus blush. The insult comic’s stock has been rising of late, thanks to her own comedy specials and her riotous Comedy Central roasts of William Shatner and Flavor Flav, but there are signs she may be getting a little overzealous with her career.

In the last two years she’s appeared in not one, not two, but three different Larry The Cable Guy vanity projects—Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector, Delta Farce and, for the love of god, Larry the Cable Guy’s Christmas Spectacular.

Lisa Lampanelli

Sunday, April 13

Ryan Montbleau Band @ Shank Hall, 8 p.m.
A burgeoning singer-songwriter in a jam-rock circuit oversaturated with burgeoning singer-songwriters, Massachusetts’ Ryan Montbleau is as freewheeling as more established jammin’ bros like Keller Williams and G. Love, but sets himself apart with flashes of ragtime and zydeco music. In the spirit of the Dave Matthews Band, the touring Ryan Montbleau Band is drawn to the fiddle like Blue �yster Cult is to the cowbell.