Local duo Abigail und Hansel looks nothing like fairy tale duo Hansel and Gretel, though they certainly could melt your face, sans oven. ST 37 guitarist Joel Crutcher and his wife Michelle make up the drone-psych group, and they veer between folky excursions and guitar spaceouts. Catch them tonight at Chain Drive with Triple Wide and Seven Inch Stitch.

Another arm of the ST 37 family drones on Saturday at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre's Church of the Friendly Ghost night. Book of Shadows, featuring former ST member Carlton Crutcher, plays first at 8pm, filled out by local experimental guitarists Jonathan Horne and Douglas Ferguson, plus Ralph White on whatever he damn well pleases. ST 37 plays last at midnight.

Next Tuesday, Black Angels side project the Viet Minh headlines the Winter Full Moon Party at Emo's Lounge, and they'll be interviewed by ME Television at 10am. Tune in for a chance to win free entry to the show that night.

White Denim’s debut EP, Let’s Talk About It, has proved a self-fulfilling prophecy. Last week, Pitchforkmedia.com rated the peppermint-colored 7-inch a solid 7.3, dubbing it “the Music Machine's hip grandson, all grimy, convulsive rawk with a heavy dollop of Texas scuzz and cocksure spaz.”

Along with a few dates with the Walkmen and White Rabbits, the local trio has been added to San Francisco’s Noise Pop 2008, and debuted its second downloadable single, “Paint Silver Gold,” on the ad-generated RCRD LBL. A vinyl full-length is expected in late February.

Ghostland Observatory, meanwhile, is confirmed for Langerado Music Festival in March, and has finished mastering its self-recorded third album, Robotique Majestique, with Nilesh Patel (Daft Punk, Justice) at London’s Exchange. The duo’s CD release extravaganza is confirmed for Feb. 29 at the Austin Music Hall. Presale tickets (password: Ghost) are currently available through gettix.net for $30, which includes a copy of the album. Hey, those lasers aren’t cheap.

Friday, Jan. 28, 2005: My flu was coming on. Fever, cold sweats, caving joints – the bitter wind whipping the flags outside the Frank Erwin Center wasn’t helping matters.

Inside, whipped up a scene straight out When We Were Kings, the James Brown-soundtracked Muhammad Ali documentary immortalizing 1974’s Rumble in the Jungle. Last night, as events unfolded in similar fashion – 16,746 blood-hungry ticket holders engulfing the sold-out UT drum – Thrilla in Manilla, Ali and Joe Frazier’s heavyweight sequel in the Philippines the following year, pingponged through my much clearer head. The four-corner stage standing in the middle of Austin’s biggest concert venue focused all adulation to the center. When George Strait walked out onto it at 9:25pm – Jan. 10, 2008 – in his starched white shirt, not one hollering Texan doubted his championship form for one minute. If “Bob Wills Is Still the King” of the Lone Star State, then Strait’s commander-in-chief.

The sudden passing of Drew Glackin has been met with shock, anger, and sorrow. Glackin was best known as the bass player for the seemingly star-crossed NYC trio the Silos, but he also lent his talents to a truckload of other bands and artists, Graham Parker, the Willard Grant Conspiracy, and Tandy among them.

According to the Silos website, the 44-year-old multi-instrumentalist unknowingly suffered from a thyroid condition that led to severe heart damage. He hadn’t seen a doctor about the condition due to lack of health insurance. Glackin entered a hospital in New York City late last week, feeling weak and dehydrated. His heart stopped, and it took 35 minutes to revive him, but the effort left him in a vegetative state. His family decided to remove life support on Saturday.

Any interaction I’ve had with Glackin always left me in a good mood. He was one of those people who lived life the way he wanted. He lived to play, but his demeanor was relentlessly upbeat. At last year’s South by Southwest, I asked how many times he was planning to play that week and the answer was 10 to 15, at least. He’d back a singer-songwriter with his lap steel, join the Silos for one of their many appearances, then could be found with one of the many other ensembles that were glad to have him. Glackin possessed an aura of kindness that was rare, not just in musicians, but in people. His unassuming smile and monstrous musical talents will be missed by all that knew him and this year’s SXSW leaves a gigantic hole only his presence could fill.

Other memories can be shared here.

The best reason to see Robbie Taylor at any or all of his three shows this week is that in 1982, he serenaded me with Buddy Holly songs while standing in the middle of a deserted Hill Country road at 5am outside Junction.

OK, that story isn’t so compelling but I left out a LOT of damning details and Taylor really is something to watch. The Louisiana native is based in Lafayette (where, between him and C.C. Adcock, they must drive the law and women crazy), but in the Eighties he did his time around Austin. Often, he worked as a waiter at places like Xalapeno Charlie’s and was known for his whip-smart sense of humor and a wicked ability to mimic accents. Somewhere along the way, he migrated back to Louisiana and turned into a world-class singer-songwriter.

His is a folksy kind of set, ripe with the kind of humor that makes you wonder if Mark Twain is in his gene pool. Taylor’s forte is roots twang, incorporating big, influential doses of Johnny Cash country, Elvis rockabilly, and, naturally, Buddy Holly rock. If you didn’t recognize the covers as they came along, you’d think them part of his classic-sounding originals, which you can hear here.

This year Taylor is celebrating his 50th birthday with a one-city tour. That means he’s taking time from his regularly appointed duties leading guided fishing tours from his pirate camp off the southern tip of Bayou Lafourche, not far from the notorious Redneck Rivera of Grand Isle, for this little jaunt that includes a solo happy hour show at Patsy’s Thursday and the industrial strength version with his monster band the Roebucks Friday. Robbie & the Roebucks greet the midnight hour at Ego’s Saturday.

If we’re lucky, someone will hand him an apron and some cornmeal because he does fry up the best dang catfish around. Then you can ask him about that moonlit night in the Hill Country.

Muted guitar beat and Matrix synthesizer drop into Buck Dharma’s methodical saw-the-girl-in-half riff, “Les Invisibles” marching through Haiti’s dark “waters of amnesia” with Terminator determination. A metronomic drone: “Seven, seven, seven, seven…” Imaginos blasts 1988 Blue Öyster Cult into infinity.

“In the saga of Imaginos, between the extremes of the beginning (Les Invisibles) and the end (Magna of Illusion), everything happens all at once. Without a sequence of events, there is a rush of events.”

Time tsunamis, the blur of events ticking off digital time at millennial rates.

“The rush of events is a horror. This is the key. Ultimately, rhythm is image and image is rhythm. Ultimately, this myth is random access.”

In an Audubon desk calendar from 1,000 years ago – 2007 – seven last lists of everything happening all at once, seven entries each. 50 musical signs of the Rapture not including the scrivener ’s personal earshot into the Divine: a violin/organ duo rehearsal at San Francisco monolith/cathedral St. Mary’s of the Assumption, Friday afternoon, 3pm, May 25, 2007.

In terms of music, 2007 was kind of like bowling with a child. It kept throwing gutter balls, and sometimes those balls even leapt into the next lane with a dull thud. But every once in a while the ball miraculously veered right or left and knocked down some pins, and it felt like maybe this year wouldn’t be eclipsed by the skin-numbing feel-goodness of that fucking Feist song.

Of course there were gender-specific exceptions. Nick Cave returned with a new (sort of) band, Grinderman, and album of the same name, a sucker punch of lusty, feral noise and tales of blue-balled middle-aged angst. Philly's Pissed Jeans hurled a debut, Hope for Men, onto our shoes, screaming about pizza, ice cream, Ford Explorers, and musing on what it is to be an adult male. Battles emerged a well-oiled machine and gave adult males between the ages of 25-35 a collective gearhead boner with Mirrored.

Alternately, Nick Cave's old flame PJ Harvey released her best album in years, White Chalk, by taking up with the piano, haunting her own skin, and creeping us all out with her ethered tales of loneliness and longing, often not for good things. Dallas songstress St. Vincent's debut, Marry Me, was a beautifully crafted Dear John letter that simply disappeared at the end of its 11 pop-noir songs, and M.I.A. managed to grind boys, guns, and bird flu into one of the year's most transcendent albums, Kala.

Recapping the year in music for this week’s column proved to be more difficult than expected. Here are a few of the more notable local events worth revisiting one last time.

Half a century after prophesizing The Shape of Jazz to Come, the rest of the world finally caught up with Ft. Worth-born trumpeter Ornette Coleman. Along with reissuing the 1975 Japanese-only LP To Whom Who Keeps a Record (Water), the improv icon received Lifetime Achievement Awards from both the Grammys and the Texas Medal of Arts Awards, and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Music for 2006’s splendid Sound Grammar.

In 2006, Patrice Pike launched herself into the Austin Music Hall of Fame after appearing on the TV show Rock Star Supernova. This year, reality struck even closer to home. Chuggin' Monkey and Uncle Flirty's owner Brad Womack starred in the latest season of ABC's The Bachelor, while the Chronicle, in turn, held its inaugural Bacheloser competition (Winner Chris McMinn is still holding out for a Natty Lite commercial) ME Television, meanwhile, hosted The Next Veejay, resulting in two new television personalities. Austin’s Pushmonkey, Wendy Colonna, and Boombox ATX all took home first place in different categories as part of FameCast, a locally based online competition, which recently completed its third season.

I bought Quanah Parker at the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar.

Probably shouldn’t say how many greenbacks changed hands, but it was both more and less than you’d think. Pretty good deal for a Comanche bigwig:

“Born to Cynthia Parker, an abducted settler white woman, and Chief Noconas, the young warrior led the Kwahadi Comanche in treacherous attacks against ‘white’ intruders. After the surrender in 1875, Quanah became a shrewd, dynamic leader of the reservation. He died in 1911 and was buried next to his mother.”

Scoped him out during Ponty Bone & the Squeezetones’ glowing set on Sunday, and plunked down some Hamiltons towards the end of the Texana Dames typically miracle (and annual) Christmas Eve performance. He could be the brother of my Los Lonely Boys gold record hanging a few inches away. On the other side, a naked sprite clutching the candle of a tongue-shaped, Plexiglas Rolling Stones 45, “She Was Hot,” keeps Parker burning the midnight oil.