CELEBRATE THE NEW DARK AGE

North Carolina’s Polvo get their reformation on “I’d like to think I play more tastefully,” Polvo’s Ash Bowie told Pitchfork earlier this year, “but of course that’s a euphemism for becoming older and more boring.” As to older, there’s no doubt: Polvo, which formed in 1990 and first split in 1998, have reunited in 2008, nearly 20 years after frontmen Ash Bowie and Dave Brylawski first met in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. But boring? (Not coincidentally, the epithet most frequently lobbed at the scores of post-Slint, mostly instrumental indie-rock acts—Polvo, Mogwai, Trans Am, etc.—that ruled the second half of the ’90s.) My guess is not at all. Polvo, whose shellacked bursts of atonal guitars and drums were the thudding opposite of their peers’ glossy soundtracking, may look their age when they take the Bowery Ballroom’s stage tonight, but the band’s old off-kilter angles will almost certainly remain askew. Familiar material’s been promised, of course, but Bowie’s also hinted at an equally interesting possibility: something new. With Birds of Avalon and Artanker Convoy.

Sat., June 21, 8 p.m., 2008