2007 Houston Press Music Awards Showcase

O Pioneers!!! Nominated in: Best Hardcore www.opioneers.com; www.myspace.com/opioneers 8 p.m. Great guitar sounds and vaguely roots-rock structures underscore the invariably screamed vocals in this Spring "smegacore" duo. With many post-hardcore/screamo bands, you get the idea they are loud because they don't have anything else in their arsenal. Not these guys, not exactly; as a guitarist, the single-monikered Eric can swing a little and shows no fear of hooks or moments of real beauty on his whacked-out axe. If Two Gallants sounds like Maroon 5 to you, here's your new favorite band. Now if only Eric could sing, even a little bitÉ

Bring Back the Guns Nominated in: Best Indie Rock www.bringbacktheguns.com 9 p.m. Bring Back the Guns has been channeling their harrowing experiences riding bicycles in Houston's notorious traffic into some of the city's most interesting indie rock since 1998, though they think their music has become "more complicated and less popular." Even so, they've shared the stage with the Toadies and Peelander-Z, and dirtied up a hotel conference room at SXSW last year. "There was a mustard slip-and-slide, among other things." Hoping to release their album Dry Futures before the end of the year, the one thing Bring Back the Guns hopes Houston knows about them, they say, is "that we exist."

Hard Rock Café 502 Texas 713-227-1392

The Jonx Nominated in: Best Punk www.myspace.com/thejonx 5 p.m. "Frashitic," "risquous," "aeliaer" and "smabtabulatial" are just a few of the adjectives this madcap trio has minted to apply to themselves. (Drummer Daniel Mee is a Press contributor.) Mining the rich vein of jazzy modern rock Television unearthed, the Jonx claim to have been born as purveyors of "punk rock with some jammy stuff" that "one day woke up as a prog band." When not gracing the stage or greasing the barstools at fave hang Rudyard's, the band enjoys singing the praises of other prominent stars in their constellation: Really Red, Sharks and Sailors, God's Temple of Family Deliverance, Minutemen, NoMeansNo, Wire and the Jesus Lizard. Looks pretty "goobulist" to us.

Katie Stuckey and the Swagger Nominated in: Best New Act; Best C&W; Best Female Vocalist; Best Folk/Acoustic www.katiestuckey.com; www.myspace.com/katiestuckey 6 p.m. Conservatory-trained chanteuse Stuckey doesn't care what you call her twangy acoustic music, so long as you don't label her a "hard-core rapper — not that I'm opposed to it!" And in fact, the redhead has much more in common with heroes like Carole King and Patty Griffin, which is to say the best kind of Americana — that stuff that edges toward darkness and never goes treacly.

Miss Leslie & Her Juke-Jointers Nominated in: Best C&W, Best Female Vocalist (Miss Leslie) www.missleslie.com 7 p.m. "I've played my best to a crowd of 12," says Leslie Lindley, Miss Leslie to her many fans at the Continental Club and other honky-tonks around the Lone Star State. "And I've played and sounded my worst to a crowd of 2,000 that couldn't tell." Her gig at a retirement community where everyone line-danced to the waltzes falls somewhere in between. "Something's just wrong about line-dancing to a waltz." Preserving the pristine sounds of George Jones, Connie Smith, Wynn Stewart, Ray Price and so many others for today's audiences, the Juke-Jointers recently pared down to four members from seven and aspire, Leslie says, "to have more fans in Houston than the UK."

D.R.U.M. Nominated in: Best Reggae/ World Music www.myspace.com/drumtheband 8 p.m. The next two bands combine to form an inspired bit of sequential booking. As the Sideshow Tramps are to European-based sounds (see below), so the global visionaries in D.R.U.M. are to the music of the African diaspora. The band's shows feature everything from the gumbo funk of the Wild Magnolias to the tightly wound grooves of Fela Kuti to the breezy riddims of Dennis Brown's roots-reggae, sometimes all in the same song. Since they are mainstays of this shindig, and multiple winners to boot, not to mention quite eloquent, we'll let them take it from here, at some length: "Funkier than a cane cutter's armpits, hard enough to cut titanium, hot enough to melt tungsten, cool enough to make the devil go home, saying he might catch a cold, sweet enough to make you need some insulin, smooth enough to put colicky babies to sleep, taking troubled minds and spirits to the light from the deep."