Anger Management

It’s been nearly two decades since the formation of the original Angry Johnny and the Killbillies, who seem to have had more members over the years than AA and the Oprah Book Club put together. John’s tireless, seemingly limitless excretion of creativity in the forms of music and visual art have kept him one of the purest artists in the Valley, displaying a consistent message, style and purpose that have produced several albums as well as album artwork for other area musicians.
For the uninitiated, the constantly touring Killbillies lay down a sludgy, toxic layer of gravelly vocals over a steam-powered rockabilly groove, telling stories of murder and lost loves and weaving other soul-sucking themes into their post-apocalyptic redneck milieu. The result is a whiskey-fueled, nicotine-stained opus that celebrates pain, poison and anything else that might stand a chance of bringing feeling to the numb daily existence that we all seem to accept as life; such prescriptions for spiritual death are not in Angry Johnny’s pharmacopoeia.

March 3, 9 p.m., with Hot Black, Finn MacCool’s, 154 Elm St., Westfield, (413) 562-0306.
—Tom Sturm
-Valley Advocate