Free Week Highlight: The Laughing, Cartright, Headdress, more at The Mohawk

Yes, it’s still Free Week, and it’s still freaking cold out there! Drown your Longhorn-related sorrows at the Mohawk tonight, as a whole mess of local bands once again swarm the venue’s indoor and outdoor stages. As before, the lineups on each stage are loosely connected by genre—inside tonight we’re greeted with four groups taking vastly different approaches to playing music in the Americana tradition. Let’s start with Headdress, an Austin band that may have escaped your attention despite a pair of excellent releases on the Mexican Summer and No Quarter labels. As only a guitar/organ duo that describes its members as “part heshers, part American nomads” could, Headdress crafts austere, long-form psychedelic blues drone pieces that feel much larger than the sum of their component parts.

Headlining the inside stage is Cartright, an off-kilter folk-punk ensemble fond of suspenders and top hats. Gravel-throated singer/frontman Ben Cartright fronts the quintet; his songs are as dusty as his voice, and his stage presence makes the band’s shows feel more like tent revivals than rock shows, with a healthy quantity of whiskey in place of holy water.

While the inside of The Mohawk gets all cozy and old-timey, the outside stage will feature three decidedly more modern bands who take most of their cues from New Wave and post-punk. The Laughing top the bill on the strength of their recently-released debut LP Fever, a collection of propulsive, energetic indie rock, which makes good use of some unexpected instrumentation to keep things interesting. The full lineups for both stages after the jump.