Editor’s Note: Welcome to V3 Weekend, Vanyaland‘s guide to help you sort out your weekend entertainment with curated selections and recommendations across our three pillars of Music, Comedy, and Film/TV. It’s what you should know about, where you need to be, and where you’ll be going, with us riding shotgun along the way.
Music: Somergloom at Crystal Ballroom
Heavy times call for heavy music, and Somergloom is once again answering the solemn bell ringing it loudly across the city. The enduring underground heavy music and arts festival returns this weekend, just when we need it most, kicking off last night at Deep Cuts in Medford and holding court tonight and Saturday at Crystal Ballroom in Somerville’s Davis Square with a lineup and sound that’s heavier than the guilt of our collective conscience. Taking part this year are bewitching Vanyaland faves Chainlacing (pictured above), as well as SUMAC, Body Void, The Keening, Morne, Chepang, Moths, Slow Quilt, Main Era, and others. “Unencumbered by genre, Somergloom showcases and celebrates the richness of today’s heavy music scene,” the fest writes, “centered around music that is introspective, creatively ambitious, evoking a melancholic quality that we like to call ‘gloom’.” It’s the sound of the times. Gloom is in the air, gloom is all around us, gloom is all-consuming; so it might as well start giving us something to do.
SOMERGLOOM :: Friday, August 8 and Saturday, August 9 at Crystal Ballroom, 55 Davis Square in Somerville, MA :: 7 p.m. on Friday and 5 p.m. on Saturday, $25 to $30 on Friday and $45 to $50 on Saturday :: Event info and advance tickets
Comedy: Nate Bargatze at TD Garden
The last time TD Garden held a comedy exhibition of this magnitude, the Bruins were wrapping up a playoff-less 2024-2025 season. But intentional laughter returns to North Station this weekend as Nate Bargatze swings back into town to give us a reason to smile. Mic’d Up put the biscuit in the basket: “Pulling up to Causeway Street for a three-peat weekend starting on Saturday (August 9) as part of his Big Dumb Eyes world tour, Bargatze brings a brand new hour of his critically-acclaimed storytelling comedy to the round. Still touting a clean-yet-potent approach to his craft, Bargatze is only continuing his current ascension in the comedy game that has come as a result of multiple stand-up specials in recent years, including 2024’s Your Friend, Nate Bargatze, as well as a successful CBS Christmas variety special to coincide with that special, and his first book, Big Dumb Eyes, which hit shelves earlier this year… The Tennessee kid has come a long way from killing on the Boston Comedy Festival stage all those years ago, and from what we can see, it’s only going to get bigger from here.”
NATE BARGATZE: BIG DUMB EYES WORLD TOUR :: Saturday, August 9 & Sunday, August 10 at TD Garden, 100 Legends Way in Boston, MA :: Times vary, $40 to $133 :: Advance tickets
Film: ‘AngelHeaded Hipster’ at Regent Theatre
We very rarely, if ever, play “what if” with musicians that died before their time, but holy motherfucking shit, the world was robbed of something special when Marc Bolan tragically died at the age of 29 from a car accident in September 1977. The mind races over what the English musician, glam rock pioneer, and T. Rex frontman could have done artistically in the years that followed, especially across the ’80s, and it’s something that we’ll just never know. But we are left with a remarkable body of work that still sounds revolutionary nearly 50 years later, and Bolan’s impact is explored through his music and lyrics in a new documentary called AngelHeaded Hipster, which premieres at The Regent Theatre in Arlington this evening. The special opening-night event features an “audience Q&A” hosted by veteran Boston writer and journalist Jim Sullivan, and the doc uses archival footage plus interviews with Bolan, Elton John and Ringo Starr, plus filmed musical interpretations by Nick Cave, John Cameron Mitchell, Joan Jett, and others, to bring Bolan’s legacy back to the big screen. He’s a 20th-century boy who deserves a voice here in the 21st.
ANGELHEADED HIPSTER :: Opening Friday, August 8 at The Regent Theatre, 7 Medford St. in Arlington, MA :: 7:30 p.m., $25 :: Event info and tickets