LA Weekly preview for The Dagons concert on Friday Oct. 26

This is the time of year when rock bands slather on face paint and cover themselves in fake blood and cobwebs, but when it comes to the Dagons, every day is already Halloween. The Atwater duo’s unsettling folk-punk chansons are creepy enough to appeal to goths, but their darkly poetic lyrics and weirdly exotic music, which fuse singer Karie Jacobson’s fuzz guitar with drummer/producer Drew Kowalski’s bleary sitar, are too restlessly strange to fit neatly into some obvious retro genre trap. The 15 tracks on their recent album, Upon This Dull Earth, roam from uptempo garage punk (“I Am Not Nice”) and jangling, doom-ridden balladry (“The Switch”) to eerily convulsive psychedelic trances (“Rose-Patterned Walls” and “The Party”). You can get the usual drenching of blood and guts from practically every death-metal band in town this week, but the Dagons practice that fine lost art of cracking open skulls and letting the gauziest and softest dreams flutter forth like drunken moths. — By Falling James

Price: $5