There’s a crowd lingering on the sidewalk in Somerville’s Union Square. Here’s “Ziggy Stardust”-era David Bowie smoking cigarettes with “Aladdin Sane” Bowie. There’s a girl with a feathered and fluorescent up-do wearing a leotard; and nearby, “Labyrinth” Bowie is queuing up to get inside the club.

This isn’t just a recurring dream I’ve been having lately, it’s the scene outside Radio for a David Bowie party thrown by Videodrome Discothèque earlier this month. Inside it’s even more colorful. The bar is crammed with revelers tossing back sugary-sweet cocktails with names like “Up the Hill Backwards” and “Blue Jean.” Dancers in costumes are swaying arm-in-arm on a stage beneath the flickering visage of Bowie himself, while “Panic in Detroit” plays. Overseeing it all from the DJ booth is Craig MacNeil...more

Well that’s all changing, as the shoe-makers Keep, who we all definitely knew existed before a minute ago, have announced the limited edition Bon Iver shoe. “Designed by Justin Vernon and using our trademark Ramos silhouette, the Keep + Bon Iver shoe features herringbone accents, a black fishbone detail across the toe, and a canvas upper custom dyed to a perfect pale salmon.” That perfect pale salmon, by the way, is well suited for color coordination with the audiences at the band’s shows...more

The Red Hot Chili Peppers released their tenth album I’m With You last summer, and ever since then, we’ve all been thinking the same thing: “Yeah, that was a good album by that one band the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, with the California and the ‘zabba doo bop,’ but what about all the songs that didn’t make the cut for the album? Where are those gems?”

“Yeah, dude, I wonder that too sometimes,” our friend would say before hurling himself out the window face first into a pit of spiders...more

Then I started thinking about ways to push that recipe even further and make an amusing parody of a cocktail nerd’s order. (Think of it as “Shit Bartenders Say: The Cocktail!”) So together with Temple Bar’s Sam Gabrielli, we created a drink called Bartender Bingo. It’s made with 1.5 ounces of Old Overholt rye and .5 ounces each of Fernet, Maraschino, Yellow Chartreuse, lime, and lemon, plus a dash each of orange, Peychaud’s, and Angostura bitters, all in a glass rinsed with mezcal. It was surprisingly not disgusting and, more important, made me look like a super-pompous dickhead every time I ordered it somewhere else that week.

But maybe we weren’t maximizing the potential of all those much-hyped ingredients? So I turned to some fellow cocktail nerds, challenging them to create a drink that used as many selections as possible from an ingredient list that would make any bar geek pop a boner. Incidentally, there are no losers. But the winner? That’s you — because now you get to go out and order all of these. You’re welcome...more

A band’s bio shouldn’t color one’s reception of the music too much, but you’ll be forgiven for grinning ear to ear while listening to the Bleu-produced second record from this Boston six-piece, imagining songwriter Dave Munro working in the US Navy as an actual air traffic controller and dreaming up brilliant little pop ditties while trying to land planes. It’s a more interesting back story than a dusty bibliophile trying to affix fiddle to fiction like, say, Colin Meloy, whose vocals, and songwriting in the Decemberists this record calls to mind. “Hurry Hurry” would be the most immediately engaging song in that more famous band’s recent catalog. It’s a skipping lark of martial snares and lyrical storytelling prowess. “If You Build It” is another instantly likable run through the bucolic fields of indie chamber-pop. On “You Know Me,” bass and banjo player Casey Sullivan shares lead duty for a mid-tempo hand-clap spin on a brightly glowing Ferris wheel of musical romance. For the gently ascending “Blame,” the band enlists a 40-piece orchestra with triumphant brass. It’s a lot of pieces to keep in the air, but Munro and company are in control...more

ERIN BALDASSARI/METRO

Donoghue, 24, and McGregor, 25, of Boston, are cofounders of the multimedia collaborative Eye Design, the goal of which, the filmmaker and photographer explain, is to reach across artistic genres and expose undiscovered local talent through documentaries, and their popular music and art and networking event Treat Yo Self, the third installment of which takes place on June 27 at Great Scott in Allston.

Q. Explain what the idea behind Treat Yo Self is. When did you start throwing these events?

Donoghue: We’ve done two so far, the first one was on April 24. We pick out three bands [like Color Channel and Summer of Aden] — we try to get them all in the same genre. Then we bring in featured art galleries and magazines and turn the whole venue into an art gallery. We’ve had Boston Art Underground, Lilt Magazine, Larynx Magazine, and local artists like Laura Sau, Tim Moores, and Ashley Jessome. We try to find up-and-coming things that people don’t know about yet... more