Critic's Pick: Deer Tick

Deer Tick’s new album Coin-O-Matic sounds like the kind of music you’d want to hear in a new city where you’re beginning to learn the local lore. Led by singer and songwriter John McCauley, who moved back to his hometown of Providence, R.I., in 2021 after spending a decade in Nashville, the band conceived Coin-O-Matic as a tribute to Providence’s history. The music splits the difference between Americana and 1970s-style rock, and it’s special — the album’s “Sweetest Things” sounds like the Grateful Dead channeled through, say, The Climax Blues Band. For that matter, Deer Tick has always played with the conventions of mainstream rock. Writing about the band for the Scene in 2010, I called their 2009 release Born on Flag Day “a cross between The 13th Floor Elevators and America,” and Coin-O-Matic is similarly genre-defying. The aforementioned “Sweetest Things” is as catchy as “Endless Loop,” itself an unclassifiable slice of all-American rock ’n’ roll. Coin-O-Matic bears comparison to Low Cut Connie’s recent work, and “Endless Loop” and “Exit Door” would fit nicely with tracks from that band’s 2023 full-length Art Dealers. It might be Deer Tick’s best album to date, which is saying something for a band that’s released plenty of great music already. Americana folk duo DUG opens.

8 p.m. at The Basement East

917 Woodland St.