When you’re talking about one person’s musical sensibility running the show, the distinction between playing solo and playing with a group is generally meaningless, of course. Stiff, the first album from Sugar, Bob Mould’s new power trio, does seem to have focused the talents of the formidable thrash god. His two demanding solo albums were psychic roars of angst ameliorated only by a certain adventurous musical base. (Workbook included the work of a full-time cellist, for example.) With the soothingly named Sugar he may have found a happy home between the solo albums’ somewhat lugubrious concerns and the scorching force of the sainted Husker Du. His concerts are extremely loud, but clever and full of surprises: I left his last Riviera show early and missed a by all accounts transforming take on Cheap Trick’s “Surrender.” The Minneapolis trio Scrawl open. Wednesday, 8:30 PM, Cabaret Metro, 3730 N. Clark; 549-0203.
