Each week, Lizzy Goodman guides you through the dirty streets of rock and roll.

Gaslight Anthem frontman Brian Fallon lived in Brooklyn for a couple of years but he never really learned his way around. “I think this is the first time we’re playing in Williamsburg,” he said onstage last night at the Music Hall, even though the band has totally played here before. “This place has some of the coolest looking people I’ve ever seen.” It’s a neat trick to make un-hipness seem like the height of style, but Gaslight manage it. Bask in the roar of their unvarnished, red-blooded American rock and roll for a few hours and your taste for artisanal urbane living will wane and you’ll begin fantasizing about a simple life defined by muscle cars and classic rock radio and true love.

“Who needs cool when you have pain, and redemption from it, in rock and roll?”

I arrived in Williamsburg in the mood to forgo cool forever. There’s something about this time of year, when every girl in the city shows up on the L train in the same Urban Outfitters sundress, that inspires a particularly uncomfortable variety of yes-I-too-am-a-hipster self-loathing. I’ve found the best solution to this problem is vodka. So I pushed my way past girls in Frye boots with knee socks and hand-reconstructed vintage Levis denim skirts and headed to the bar. A few refreshingly cheap (yay Brooklyn!) cocktails later and I was feeling prepared to face the throngs of industry folks sure to be in attendance. Last night was Gaslight’s first return to the stage since completing their new album Handwritten (out July 24) and everyone wanted to get a listen to the new tracks, which are awesome, in a live setting. I needn’t have worried, though. Not only was the crowd comprised mostly of the hardest of hardcore fans, people with Fallon’s face tattooed on their bodies, but even the hardboiled rock pros melted as soon as the band launched into the riotous, redemptive “Great Expectations” as their opener.

There may not be enough women in rock and roll, but there would be no rock and roll without women. From to the heartbreak trilogy of Gail, Jane, and Anna in “Here’s Looking at You, Kid” to first wives who leave to starry-eyed girls you spin around on the dance floor to women whose names you tattoo on your arm to the dresses they wear to the sweet sound of their voices to, literally, Juliet’s pull on Romeo the show felt like a celebration of the glorious agony women inflict upon men. And the crowd — flannel and jeans clad dudes and the occasional girl with bottle-black hair — screamed every word. Who needs cool when you have pain, and redemption from it, in rock and roll?

As I filed out into the warm night air off to the neighborhood watering hole for more post-show cavorting I realized I hadn’t been willingly out this late, or this boozy in a long time. Like everything else, going to rock shows, keeping up with the scene, pretending to be cool, it all becomes a job after a while. And sometimes you need a band of Jersey boys who can’t tell Williamsburg from Park Slope to show up and slap you around a little so you remember that this is supposed to be fun. Thanks for the beating, Gaslight Anthem.

Watch the archived stream of Gaslight Anthem’s show at livestream.com.

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Rapper Killer Mike backstage at the Philips Arena on May 24, 2009 in Atlanta, Georgia. Photo: Rick Diamond/Getty Images

Hive Five: Our daily listicle of musical musings

This week marks the release of Killer Mike’s sixth album, R.A.P. Music and so far, it’s receiving heaps of praise, reminding us that Killer Mike has always been killer. Here’s a few of our favorite Killer Mike moments over the years, as sourced from YouTube.

1. Nardwuar vs. Killer Mike

2. Killer Mike, “Pressure” ft. Ice Cube

3. Killer Mike, “A.D.I.D.A.S.” ft. Big Boi

4. Killer Mike, “Grandma’s House”

5. Killer Mike, “Ric Flair” Live at the Apple Store, Atlanta, GA

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The Guggenheim Museum’s current special exhibition is a retrospective of works by John Chamberlain, a sculptor who worked primarily with automobile steel before his death last year. The vast majority of Chamberlin’s sculptures look like miniature car crashes, their crumpled forms projecting chaos, drama and a dark internal rhythm. It’s fitting, then, that during her performance inside the museum’s rotunda, Zola Jesus hit many of these same notes while bouncing her operatic voice off of Chamberlain’s masses of twisted steel. Working her way through a series of compositions written in collaboration with composer JG Thirlwell and performing alongside the Mivos string quartet, the woman born Nika Danilova pushed her already-theatric, large-scale Goth pop to fill the considerable space.

Clad in all white and wearing an apparatus around her neck that looked like an illuminated Fibonacci sequence (not to mention the museum’s spiral ramp), Danilova looked like a sculpture herself, her shock of platinum blonde hair obscuring her face for most of the performance. While Danilova’s arresting presence and rich, mournful voice were clearly the focal point, the performance’s success was owed in no small part to the instrumentation. The Mivos Quartet provided ample lift, weaving their strings in to and out of the spaces in between Danilova’s pounding rhythms and smears of synth. It made even her darkest melodies feel airy.

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Florence and the Machine perform at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, May 2012. Photo: Douglas Mason/Getty Images

Each week, Lizzy Goodman guides you through the dirty streets of rock and roll.

The first time I interviewed Florence Welch she told me about growing up obsessed with Fairuza Balk and cult teen film witchcraft film The Craft, so I shouldn’t be surprised that Florence and the Machine’s Radio City gig Tuesday night came off like a wicken prom. It was a misty warm late spring evening, one of those nights that feels like a dream because you’re basically walking around in a cloud. Nothing seems real, which fits the mood of Florence’s ethereal, goth pop, and which creates a kind of alternate universe. If this is just a dream there are no consequences for those shots of vodka the gaggle of girls in torn up sequined dresses were doing pre-show, little glow stick/cocktail straws bouncing in their drinks. There’s no reason not to go home with that guy/girl you just met. There’s no reason not to take your heels off and dance with your eyes closed barefoot on the, let’s be honest, kind of rank venue carpeting all while surreptitiously swigging from a flask as the girls a few rows down did.

“The set was compact and tight but as we all filed out, dazed a bit from the transformative magic of what had happened inside, I too started to feel a weird energetic contact high.”

You might think from looking at her elegant frame and listening to her posh lilt that Florence wouldn’t approve of such debauchery. You’d be wrong. She’s a real broad, and proud of it. Her mom’s a New Yorker who used to party at Studio 54. And Florence once told me she only discovered she could sing in public after getting super hammered at a Mystery Jets afterparty in London years ago. Even though that was a long time ago, before she became the high priestess of modern British pop eccentricity, the girl still knows how to misbehave. “I’ve had some of my greatest ever hangovers here in New York,” she said between songs, her sheer seashell pink robe moving with every gesture. “I hope you find some of your own tonight.”

The crowd didn’t need the encouragement. They came to let loose. So many fans were decked out in deranged cocktail party attire, a reflection of Florence’s status as the rare fashion icon who actually inspires normal humans to take playful clothing risks. But even those regular rock show going folk — the dudes in t-shirts and jeans, the girls in ill-fitting post-work skirts and sensible shoes — seemed lit from within by Florence’s incantatory presence. “I feel like I’m on drugs,” whispered one pudgy blonde twenty-something to her friend as Florence skipped barefoot across the semi-dark stage, singing the chorus to “Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)” robe blowing in the mysterious late spring breeze she seemed to have imported from, like, the Yorkshire moors.

The set was compact and tight but as we all filed out, dazed a bit from the transformative magic of what had happened inside, I too started to feel a weird energetic contact high. “I’m not obsessed with death,” Florence once told me, after I brought up the morbid undertones of her lyrics and her interest in the occult. “It’s just fun to toy with those ideas. You’re letting a different part of yourself take over. It’s good for you.” It is. And it comes with no consequences. After all that ethereal misty, vodka-fueled celebrating, I didn’t even have a hangover in the morning.

MTV Hive