✦Weekender✦ Yay crime | Alien wreck | Plant bingo | Sunflower chill | Hella Legos | Loud stoners | Vintage bikes 🏍️

FROM Y2K ROCK revivals to palate-piquing wine flights to spooky alien crash-landings, here's what made The List this weekend. Cheers! – Andrew Kiraly 🤍

🎸 Friday May 16

• So last week I had dinner at the surprisingly good Mexican restaurant Alebrijes in – stay with me here – Neonopolis. (Try the grasshoppers, seriously; they're like giant savory sunflower seeds!) Afterwards, wandered around the troubled old layer-cake quasi-mall that is Neonopolis, soaking in grimy Cyberpunk 2077 vibes. Drawn to mysterious blacked-out storefront, labeled SUBSTANCE, with door invitingly ajar. Tugged on handle; hm, chained from inside. Momentarily daydreamed that it was a cryptic rock club that comes alive at untold hours. Which, turns out, it is! And a pretty hyped grunge cover band Nirvanamania is playing there tonight. 7p, Substance
• I'm hearing rave reviews of this verz of Hamlet that liquors up Shakespeare's sullen sizzler with Southern-fried roadhouse mayhem and, even more provocatively, line dancing. (Saturday show too.) 730p, Cornerstone Park
• It is a truism born of our endlessly wheeling totalized entertainment machinery that there is no such thing as the past anymore – it's just continuously repackaged as part of our boundlessly distracting present. Okay, deep thought for the day disgorged! Anyhoo, The Millennium All-Stars isn't just a tribute act; it comprises actual back-in-the-day band members from OneRepublic, Matchbox Twenty, Smash Mouth, Puddle of Mudd, and Third Eye Blind kicking up classic Y2K-straddling hits. 8p, Area 15
• Las Vegas rock show promoter Brian Moy is the king of noise – he's carved out a (loud) niche focused on bringing amazing psychedelic/sludge/stoner/ desert rock to town under the banner of Maximum Doom. This weekend it's the aptly named Volume from 29 Palms thundering down slabs of bong-ripping heavy. 8p, Dive Bar
• Beilstein meets Rammstein at this improbable happening: Obsidian is a gothy darkwave dance night at that quaint German club on Lake Mead. 930p, German-American Social Club

Also Friday ➤

What with all the newish spots open in and around the Arts Factory (Craft Creamery Speakeasy, The Doberman, Nocturno), Vintage Bike Night can kick off a nice Friday cocktail crawl ✦ Green thumbs daub for petaled prizes at Plant Bingo at Spilled Milk ✦ Bouff those bangs and inflate those shoulder pads for '80s bash Back to Prom at The Composers Room ✦ Gauzily intriguing neo-soft rock duo Tennis serves up a farewell performance at Swan Dive.

👾 Saturday May 17

• You don't have to be curious kid to gawp all agog at the educational science sculptures in Brick Planet – they're sure to inspire youthful wonder no matter your age. That's because these painstaking plastic artworks aren't snapped together by any old assembler; they're made by renowned LEGO sculptor Sean Kenney. 9a, Springs Preserve
• Biblioholics should get crackin' on this sweet Summer Book Sale featuring tomes as cheap as 25 cents. Seriously, you can score some legit gems at the library book shops. 10a, Sahara West Library
• If your wine vocab typically orbits around the adjective "grapey," What Am I Tasting? is for you. Sip a flight of five wines under the guidance of a seasoned sommelier, who'll help train your palate to better discern qualities such as balance, structure, sweetness, and fruitiness, or as I like to call them, "phantasmal dimensions of the Flavor Zone." 330p, Crush Pad
• Oooh, kinda excited for the Alien: Earth TV series in August. Looks gritty, slimy, viscous. Meantime, FX is poppin' up an experiential promo attraction you can check out for free: Alien: Earth “The Wreckage," with giveaways and lots of chest-bursty selfie opps. 6p, Area 15
• Since 2019, the City of Las Vegas has been low-key cranking out a Las Vegas history series that's pretty info-licious. Lint-roll your corduroy blazer for the latest installment, "The City of Las Vegas: The 1970s," which premieres tonight on, uh, whatever "Cable Channel 2" is. For the rest of us born after World War I, it'll also post on YouTube. 7p, Cable Channel 2/YouTube

Also Saturday ➤

You had me at Magic Mindwarp Pizza Party, Double Down ✦ Chicago's dark ethereal synth-slingers Blood Club pulses through Backstage Bar & Billiards ✦ The live show of Crime Junkie podcast at Resorts World Theatre sounds arresting ✦ Horse Trailer Hideout yeehaws four years with circus acts, midway snacks, and a mechanical bull ✦ The mutual aid community comes together for benefit bash Their Home Too Market at Starboard Tack.

✊ Sunday May 18

• Wellness group Rooted n Flo is bringing the weekend recharge at The Power of Rituals with some breathwork, meditation, yoga, and, nice, Afro-drum somatic dance. Note: Ten31 Alley is across the street from Fergusons, bookending 11th Street Records. 11a, Ten31 Alley
• The best endorsement I can give for anti-fascist writer and professor Josh Fernandez is that he's listed as lol as a "radical" on punchably button-faced Charlie Kirk's ooga-booga red-scare Professor Watchlist website. Fernandez speaks at Action Emergency: A Progressive Gathering Against Fascism. Somewhere, a Mom for Liberty's hair highlights are burning. 6p, SPCKRFT
• There's just something about drinking rum out of an ornate, unwieldy, big-ass ceramic Easter Island head that gives tiki cocktails that extra kick. You're in luck: big-ass ceramic mug purveyor Geeki Tikis is taking over Chinatown's fave grog spot with special drinks and limited-edition swag. 730p, Golden Tiki

Also Sunday ➤

Holistic health and natural healing are the Rx for Asian Culture Day at the Gold Coast ✦ Canvas catharsis makes for a messy mindfulness practice at Art Rage ✦ The 17 wildly different fonts on this flyer for Battle of the Bands at The Bonfire reflect a dizzying musical bandwidth.

🙏 Hope you have the raddest weekend. Thanks for your support! – Andrew Kiraly 🤍