The Purrs’ latest effort, Tearing Down Paisley Garden, is a fantastic piece of mellow rock and roll replete with disaffected cynicism and judiciously distorted guitar solos in which each note melts into the next. The dejected lyrics flirt with hopelessness, but the album is buoyed by pop hooks and self-aware sparks of deliberately hyperbolic humor that culminates with album closer “Always Something in my Way”: “Please send all my mail to outer space/That’s my new place…Everything I loved turned to dust.” It’s the kind of album that will speak most keenly to people experiencing existential crises, emotional fallout, or loss of ambition. With Brent Amaker and the Rodeo, Battle Hymns. SARA BRICKNER

Thu., June 24, 8 p.m., 2010