Concert Previews

Back in his 1970s heyday, R&B/jazz poet Gil Scott-Heron didn't fit neatly into any musical category, other than the one for visionaries ahead of their time. The 60-year-old rap godfather best known for such socially conscious streams of consciousness as "The Bottle" and "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" is back with his first new studio album in 16 years, the cheekily titled

I'm New Here

, which comes out Tuesday. He plays two shows at the Tin Angel on Saturday night, and two more on Sunday.

- Dan DeLuca

A frequent collaborator and occasional solo artist when not fronting a rebooted version of the Lemonheads, Evan Dando has a wealth of material for his solo acoustic tour. In fact, last year the Lemonheads went the covers route for Varshons, reworking the likes of Townes Van Zandt's "Waiting Around to Die" and Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful," with vocal help from Kate Moss and Liv Tyler. So Dando can pull from eight previous Lemonheads albums - including 1992's adored

It's a Shame About Ray

- as well as a slew of cover songs that may or may not include the band's scrappy, fluke-hit take on "Mrs. Robinson." Either way, this will be Dando up close and stripped down.

- Doug Wallen

The Residents'

Talking Light

tour stop here is a can't-miss for fans of superefficient audiovisual stagecraft incorporating character-driven storytelling and strange, haunting, abrasive, and melodic music. The Residents draw from a diverse, four-decade-old catalog - all played with improvisational freshness, conveyed via cutting-edge technology. It's also thoughtful, satirical, and laugh-out-loud funny. Case in point: their bent tale of a "Pudding Roll-Up" serial killer who rolls victims up in carpet, their mouths stuffed with an '80s snack food.

The Residents' image has long been that of anonymous oddballs in tuxes with top-hatted eyeball heads. This edition features two black-clad, masked musicians in goggles, heads sprouting synthetic dreadlocks: "Chuck," on keyboards/crucial laptop; and "Bob," a seated electric guitarist given to blistering prog/jazz/out solos. "Randy" is the focus, a tottering old-man persona with hairy ears, scratching at his bathrobe as he bellows in song or raves about "the mirror people," his creepy fingers wiggling. It's a loosened-up career-retrospective set, with reinterpretation enhancing such live gems as their chilling take on Hank Williams' "Six More Miles (to the Graveyard)." (That tune was a characteristic highlight of Stars and Hank Forever!, the Residents' telling 1986 dual tribute album to Williams and John Philip Sousa).

- David R. Stampone