Roadtrips

Educated rappers have been skulking around hip-hop since, well, UTFO's Educated Rapper struck out with Roxanne. But the Brown-educated, white, Jewish Prince Paul protégé Paul Barman has become a poster boy for the MC as a wiseass cum laude-mouth -- and his association with the Matador label is more proof that indie hip-hop occupies the same psychic space as indie rock did a dozen years ago. Barman's on a tour with another Matador hip-hop act, Dälek, which brings both to the Met Café (401-861-2142) in Providence this Thursday, February 15; to Pearl Street (413-584-0610) in Northampton -- with illbient techno egghead DJ Spooky -- on Friday; to the Oxfam Café at Tufts University (617-628-5000) on Saturday; and to Toad's Place (203-624-8623) in New Haven, Connecticut, on Sunday. No less schooled in the lessons of rhyme and reason are Mobb Deep, who join Capone-N-Noreaga and 12 Inch Assassins in the unlikely suburban confines of Fitchburg's Wallace Civic Center (978-345-7300) on Friday.

In metal: on Friday, Hydrahead avant-doom lords Isis join Easthampton's Flywheel Arts Collective (413-527-9800) with Delvic, Harmatia, Thirteenmiledrive, and Erebus -- a contingent of troops from some strange Western Mass parallel universe where speed metal tag-teams with emo. Isis themselves are a wholly different beast, or maybe two beasts: depending on their mood, slow, gargantuan, devastatingly heavy maul rats or surgical, introspectively sinister black-lab chemists. You can also catch Isis on Sunday with As the Sun Sets, Backstabbers Inc., and August Prophecy at the Living Room (401-521-5200) in Providence. You could give props to Downset for having kept rap-metal on life-support during the lean years between Judgment Night and Limp Bizkit, but then you'd be obscuring one painful fact: Downset really weren't very good. Perhaps they've gotten better, or maybe expectations have simply decreased, because they're still alive and gigging at the Palladium (508-797-9696) in Worcester on Saturday and at Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel (401-272-5876) on Sunday, both nights with Factory 81 and Relative Ash.

Honky-tonk showman Deke Dickerson, in town to join his protégés the Raging Teens for their record-release party extravaganza at the Middle East (617-864-EAST) on Saturday, stops by the Green Room (401-351-7665) in Providence on Sunday. The Detroit punk-blues duo White Stripes join the junked-up Lower East Side no-wave/country-punk supergroup Knoxville Girls for gigs at the Met Café on Wednesday and at the Middle East next Thursday, February 22. Across town on the 22nd, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones play Lupo's.

From north of the border: the quiet and shadowy Canadian instrumental group White Star Line -- more Black Heart Procession than Godspeed You Black Emperor -- are at Flywheel with Tiger Saw and 27 on February 18 and at the Fishtown Artspace (978-283-1381) in Gloucester with Tiger Saw, Brian King, and Buxton on February 19. Meanwhile, the estimable Canadian folk-pop duo Kate & Anna McGarrigle hit the Iron Horse Music Hall (413-584-0610) in Northampton this Thursday, February 15, and Harvard University's Sanders Theatre (617-876-4275) on Friday the 16th.

-- Carly Carioli