The Menzingers highlight a great triple bill tonight in Lawrence, Katy Guillen and the Girls pet Voodoo Kittens, and more must-see shows

There are a few good reasons to go to the Bayside show tonight at the Granada, in Lawrence, but Bayside isn’t really one of them.

Bayside is great, of course — that third-wave emo holdout has delved more into pure pop theatrics as it’s gotten older, without forgetting to write big, powerful punk songs. But what you want to do is arrive early for Sorority Noise, at once the catchiest and darkest of its fourth-wave contemporaries. The band’s new album, Forgettable, is full of raw, vulnerable songs that reach Weezer-blue-album levels of catchiness, just before they detonate with gut-punching despair. Even the Sorority Noise songs that cut the deepest into your red beating heart — or wherever it is you keep your self-esteem and your ability to love — are delivered alongside gang vocals and clap-clap-clap hooks. When you sing along this hard to songs this tragic and anxious — that, my friends, is what catharsis looks like.

Sorority Noise opens alongside the Menzingers, which has quietly become one of the most crucial punk bands of its generation. At one point, you listened to Menzingers and thought: This band is going to be the Bouncing Souls one day. It’s going to be indispensable to the genre. And then it happened: The band released perhaps the best punk album of the in-progress decade with 2012’s On the Impossible Past, recorded a split EP with Bouncing Souls in 2013, then topped it with Rented World, the 2014 full-length that gets better, deeper and more beautiful with every listen. Its new record, After the Party, should be out later this year, and it should be excellent. See Menzingers tonight — and why not, stick around for Bayside.

Saturday, September 17

Any Kansas City blues fan must feel like he or she is best friends with Miss Katnip and Stray Cat by now. The two (human names: Cindy Terwilliger and LaDonna Sanders) have been hosting KKFI 90.1’s Voodoo Kittens show every Tuesday afternoon for nine years now, playing music from across the broad blues spectrum, from B.B. King to Big Mama Thornton. In feline terms, nine years is a big event, cats being reported to possess nine lives and so on. So to celebrate, Terwilliger, Sanders and their cohort Art McDonnell are gathering blues rockers Stone Cutters Union and Katy Guillen and the Girls at Knuckleheads for a shindig. 

Wednesday, September 21

At this point, the Legendary Pink Dots are indeed legends. The band’s catalog spans 40 or so albums. It has not only defined what experimental music would sound like in post-punk London in the mid-1980s, but continued to push and pull and manhandle the boundaries of genre well into this millennium. Its live shows fall somewhere between goth shuffling and neo-tent revivals, if you replace all the acid-wave hippies with whatever their modern weirdo equivalent is. The Dots are musical oddities to the core, a jumble of straight guitar rock, thudding electronica and avant-garde noise strangeness. But even the most glorious musical mutants can’t last forever, so see LPD while you still can (at the Record Bar).