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Wednesday was a good night for music in Knoxville, from Abigail Washburn wrapping up her residency at Relix to the Discordian Society's rollicking jams at Pres Pub and Liturgy's screeching, pummeling black metal at Pilot Light. Here's a little of what we saw.

Despite the downpours, a sizeable crowd turned out to Pilot Light on Saturday night for L.A.'s Best Coast and Brooklyn's Cults. (It was also Pilot Light owner Jason Boardman's birthday). Starting at around 9:30 p.m., a noticeably younger audience that included several out-of-towners (I met a couple from Michigan and a group from Kentucky) filed down Jackson Avenue and
quickly filled the club to capacity an hour before the show even got started. In an
effort to deal with the crowd, Cults took the stage at an uncharacteristically early 10:30 p.m. (for Pilot Light) and overshadow the "permanently chill" Best Coast; Cults lead singer Madeline Follin
energetically danced around the stage as she performed the group's happy-go-lucky pop.
--Carey Hodges

Place of Skulls is one of Knoxville's underappreciated bands. So the 20 or so people who stuck around for PoS's headlining set at the Longbranch Saloon on Saturday got front-row seats and national-class trad doom metal, all for just $5. (The highest price was having to wait through Ophiuchus, a thrash/death band from Nashville with great chops and one of the silliest frontmen I've ever seen.) PoS played for just under an hour, fitting in old songs, newer ones, and at least a handful of songs from frontman Victor Griffin's former band Pentagram and a surprisingly effective cover of "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood." The weird thing about the band? Their classic doom is informed by Griffin's Christianity, though PoS is nothing like what anybody would call Christian metal.

Even though the band's barely acknowledged in its hometown--Griffin thanked the small crowd at the end of the show for supporting the "struggling doom metal scene in Knoxville"--Place of Skulls has a distinguished underground lineage: Griffin played in the seminal D.C. doom group Pentagram's classic lineup from 1981 to 1996 and wrote or co-wrote some of that band's signature songs ("Death Row," "Relentless," "20 Buck Spin"), and Scott "Wino" Weinrich (St. Vitus, the Obsessed) played on PoS's 2003 album With Vision. (That album and the 2001 debut were released on Southern Lord, home to Sunn O))), Boris, and Earth.)

Griffin and his band have been busy lately, though, and hopefully that will raise the band's local profile. A new PoS album, As a Dog Returns, has been recorded and is due out this fall, and for the last few weeks Griffin's been pulling double duty with Pentagram, who have seen a swell of past-due recognition in the last few years.  

Wandered into the Preservation Pub sort of randomly late Friday and caught the latter chunk of a really good set by Asheville's Discordian Society. Yes they're a jam band or a groove band or whatever, but they actually really jam and groove. My problem with a lot of post-Dead groove stuff is that the noodliness tends to extend to the rhythm sections and the song structures generally. The great first-wave jam bands (thinking not just of the Dead, but Country Joe, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Fort Mudge Memorial Dump) were built on mad R&B vamps and tight turns that provided the fuel for the spaces in between, which could be filled in by guitars or organs or whatever. The Discordian guys are much more in the mold of those bands than they are like Widespread Panic or whatever jam band it was that made you decide you hate jam bands. They're deliberately silly in the manner of a lot of classic psychedelia, but the precision of their playing belies the good-time goofball vibe. These guys have practiced. And the bass/guitar/drums/keys/sax lineup gives them a lot of room to work with.

Knoxville has been getting a series of master classes lately in the art of aging ferociously. Last week, it was 64-year-old Neil Young storming the Civic Auditorium. Last night, it was 66-year-old Diana Ross bringing a packed Tennessee Theatre repeatedly to its feet with a sparkling set of indisputable classics that ran from her Supremes days to her disco diva era. (Stopping off along the way for songs from Lady Sings the Blues, Mahogany, and The Wiz.) She sounded terrific--her voice still has that keening, girlish edge, but she deploys it with a sort of knowing wink that you can't mistake for innocence. And she looked great too, leaving and then returning to the stage in a series of ever more extravagant costumes (the word "dresses" would not do justice to the yards of fabric involved).

So the verdict on Thursday night's Neil Young show at the Civic Auditorium is: Dude rocks. In a relatively brief but still generous-seeming 17-song solo performance, the 64-year-old hippie/sage/ecofreak/grungefather hit on a bunch of obvious career highlights ("Helpless," "Down by the River," "Ohio," "After the Gold Rush"). But nearly half the set list was unreleased, much of it apparently slated for his forthcoming album. The unfamiliar tunes weren't for the most part up to the level of the classics--because, c'mon, not many songs by anyone are up to the level of Young's best work--but his engagement with both the old and new material was forceful and, for the most part, compelling. Switching between acoustic and electric guitars, piano, and (for "After the Gold Rush") a pump organ, Young barely spoke to the crowd but seemed fully immersed in the songs. And, especially on the electric numbers, he immersed the crowd in them, too. He finished the set with back to back renditions of "Cortez the Killer" and "Cinnamon Girl" that filled the auditorium with giant waves of gorgeous fuzz guitar. Then, after a one-song encore (the plaintive "Walk With Me"), he tipped his hat and waved goodbye. 

Everything was going swell during the Drunk Uncles' late-night set at the Bijou Saturday: the band was honky-tonkin' away through a set of classic country gems and classic-sounding originals, the small but free-spirited crowd was whooping it up, and Uncle Mike McGill had just finished his impression of Ralph Stanley singing "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?" There was just one problem with the performance, which was booked as a nightcap to Saturday's Rhythm 'N Blooms festival schedule: the band was slated to start at 10:45 p.m., and the Bijou's lobby bar shut down around 11. A Drunk Uncles show without drinking? Eventually, in the between-song banter with the crowd, word of this travesty reached the stage. So Uncle Jeff Barbra and his fellows did the only decent thing: They reached into their own onstage cooler and began tossing cans of PBR and Miller Lite into the outstretched hands of grateful fans. (Before anybody gets all het up, and without putting too fine a point on it, the Uncles' demographic is not one that really requires a close check of IDs.)

Ben Ratliff writes about Big Ears in The New York Times. Some choice bits:

• "The producers displayed no pretension or hand-wringing -- no stated rubric of avant-gardism and no rhetoric about how it's our responsibility to support experimental composers as a cause. Instead the experience was more like a string of mind-blowing midnight movies."

• "Since last year I'd been looking forward to revisiting the Bijou, a perfectly configured 700-seat historic theater with balconies. ... But the 1,500-seat Tennessee Theater, a Moorish Revival movie house a few blocks from the Bijou and also recently renovated, was dreamier still: a palace as big as an ocean liner, where sound reveals itself naturally and precisely, in what Wallace Stevens called its "spontaneous particulars.""

• And a shot-out for locals Argentinum Astrum: "Minimalism, which is Mr. Riley's ballpark, can be expressed through many musical languages. After getting a headful of Ms. Newsom, I went to the Pilot Light, a tiny bar, to hear Argentinum Astrum, a fantastic doom-metal band from Knoxville. Repeated riffs so fat, loud, slow and heavy that the individual notes are nearly disconnected: what's more minimal than that? Nothing. Consider yourself informed."

Pitchfork delivered its report yesterday afternoon, describing the weekend as "a long weekend of paradise-- and again a still must-attend, if very different than before, music festival."

SPIN magazine has a new photo gallery of its staffers picks for the Nine Best Moments of the Big Ears Festival.

Some good lines in the accompanying text: "A roomful of Tennessee teens singing along to a New York band's song about vacationing on effing Cape Cod bordered on the surreal," about Vampire Weekend. They stick to the Bijou and Tennessee theaters for each one except the last, which I can't possibly argue with. 

There's a weekend recap coming, but for now here's a round-up of what other people are saying about Big Ears:

• Brooklyn Vegan's reports

• The L.A. Times' Ann Powers on the xx

• The Wigsphere

• The News Sentinel's Randall Brown

• Knox Blab

• The Milk Carton

There should be more to come this week from the New York Times, Pitchfork, and Tiny Mix Tapes.