Concert Previews

There's a topflight quadruple bill of local bands playing at Johnny Brenda's on Friday, with three of the acts celebrating new album releases. The headliners, Josh Olmstead Band, offer the jammy

Purple Mountain Majesty in the Antlers Hotel.

Fiddler Joseph Arnold, an act on the undercard, along with Swimmers singers Steve & Krista, has just put out his instrumental effort,

Discomedusae.

The band we come to praise, though, is North Lawrence Midnight Singers, the rootsy quintet fronted by singer Jamie Olson (and featuring Arnold), whose sharply and smartly written

Last Great Saturday Night

is an impressive set of welcoming and warm melancholic tunes that evoke

Nashville Skyline

-era Bob Dylan and the easygoing, country-leaning Grateful Dead. And that's a good thing.

- Dan DeLuca

The post-Sinatra barroom belter Michael Bublé found no love with this writer until 2009's

Crazy Love.

Until then, the Canadian vocalist-songwriter whose choice of standards covered the waterfront of old saloon songs and newer contemporary pop and soul hits had no truly identifiable qualities to his voice other than enthusiastic brio. Zip. He just sounded like a big kid in a jazzy candy store. Then

Crazy Love

hit and Bublé's voice got its chops. He found theatricality to spare in order to sing "Cry Me a River," the zestful heft to duet with barnstorming Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings on "Baby (You've Got What It Takes)," the lonely nuances necessary for the Hoagy Carmichael standards "Stardust" and "Georgia on My Mind" - to say nothing of taking on songwriter Ron Sexsmith's "Whatever It Takes" with Sexsmith in the room. Bublé even managed to cowrite a jumpy '70s-ish pop hit, "Haven't Met You Yet." Swell. In October, he managed to follow up that modern classic with a new EP,

Hollywood

(alone or as part of a

Crazy Love

Deluxe Hollywood edition), which finds Bublé tackling live versions of some of his catalog's biggest hits and a few newer studio songs, such as the piano-and-violin-heavy "End of May" and the guitar-soaked title track. Color me enthusiastic.

- A.D. Amorosi

You may know Aloe Blacc from "I Need a Dollar," which HBO uses as the theme to

How to Make It in America.

That song is insistent, catchy, and persuasive, but there's more depth to Blacc than it demonstrates. Part of the new soul renaissance that includes Eli "Paperboy" Reed and Mayer Hawthorne, Blacc builds on the socially conscious explorations of Marvin Gaye, Bill Withers, and Stevie Wonder. Neither slavishly retro nor self-consciously innovative, Blacc stands on the shoulders of giants with humble sincerity but without apology. He can slip easily from the hard funk of "Hey Brother" to the moody preaching of "Life So Hard" to the light-footed optimism of "Good Things," the apt title track to his recent album. Saturday's late show upstairs at World Cafe Live should be an uplifting soul party.

- Steve Klinge