Dawes The popularity of acts like this L.A. quartet — who just signed to Dave Matthews’ ATO label — is a head-scratcher to me. It’s the sort of middle-of-the-road AOR whose primary trait is inoffensiveness. Yet remarkably, this band gets compared to The Band, and recently collaborated with that band’s Robbie Robertson. That only muddies the waters because, to paraphrase something once said about Dan Quayle (look him up, kids), I knew The Band and you, Dawes, are no The Band. The lyrics are clichéd Dear Diary entries, the melodies and dynamics paint-by-numbers twang. “Anyone that’s making anything new only breaks something else,” the singer emotes, and if only they’d apply that to their music-making instead of sounding like a re-hash of the Counting Crows or Wallflowers. Super “meh.” With Girls Guns and Glory. $12-$14. Visulite Theatre. www.visulite.com. (John Schacht)

The Flaming Lips Maybe in the not-too-distant future, after some religion-inspired cataclysm culls the herd, our descendents will rhetorically wonder via bumper sticker: What Would Wayne Do? Wayne would be Wayne Coyne, front man and high shaman for The Flaming Lips, whose concerts have become secular tent revivals where substance-enhanced good vibes rain down with the confetti and balloons. (Coyne can apparently perform miracles because his guitar’s rarely plugged in). The Lips’ LPs have been uneven as hell since seminal releases The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, but when you’re all singing along to “Waiting for Superman” or “Do You Realize” in some beautiful primal moment of tribal togetherness, you will not care a whit about that. With The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger. $52. The Fillmore Charlotte. www.livenation.com. (Schacht)