There’s no doubt the Little Penguins should have received more local attention for Welcome To The Celebration, the band’s first album of somber pop songs. But sophomore release Offer You This Cape, which features a new, fifth bandmate (Penguins frontman Will Hallauers Turn Ons bandmate Erik Blood), might just get the Penguins the attention they deserved the last time around. Keys, harmonicas and twangy, distorted surf guitar riffs bleed together with the expert touch of a concert pianist pressing the damper pedal. In conjunction with Will Hallauer’s melancholic vocals about cheating death and the nuclear age, Cape is an album of eerie sonic mutations, a sumptuous combination of shoegaze-y pedal work, Americana and modern cynicism.
Fri., Nov. 28, 9 p.m., 2008
