Now that Spin scribe Andy Greenwald’s swell new tome Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers and Emo (St. Martin’s Griffin) is out, we’ve finally got the scorecard to tell the players apart — and just in time, since this is the Emo Week from Hell. Saves the Day are the dudes who achieved emo apotheosis back in ’99 when singer Chris Conley declared in song that he missed his mom; if you can get past the sappy lyrics, the band’s first disc for DreamWorks, In Reverie, is an enlightened power-pop treat, with energetic waltzes that wouldn’t feel out of place on a Weezer disc or the Promise Ring’s Very Emergency. Thanks to MTV2 rotation for "Great Romances of the 20th Century," Taking Back Sunday have moved a quarter of a million copies of last year’s sprightly and winsome Tell All Your Friends (Victory); singer Adam Lazzara is the guy who declared that if you were to slit his throat, he’d apologize for bleeding on your shirt. We don’t have word on plans for the next TBS album, but thanks to some weird cell-phone-endorsement deal, you can call them at (214) 263-6208 and ask ’em yourself. Both bands hit the Palladium (800-477-6849) in Worcester tonight (November 20) and Avalon (617-423-NEXT) in Boston on Friday.

After you’ve read Sean Richardson’s review (it’s on page 17 of the Arts section) of the darker, heavier emo contingent — Thursday, Thrice, and the sci-fi prog-metal outfit Coheed and Cambria — you can catch them all at Avalon on Saturday and at the Webster Theater (860-525-5553) in Hartford on Sunday.

Something Corporate’s 2002 disc Leaving Through the Window (Drive-Thru/MCA) took all of two lines to allude to TRL punks New Found Glory by name, and in less time than you could sing the title of that first song — "I Want To Save You" — they’d established themselves as emo’s piano men, gunning hard for those teenage girls for whom Saves the Day were just a bit too, like, y’know, alternative? Out behind their new North (Geffen), they’re at the Palladium on Sunday. And taking a break from the Get Up Kids — the band who placed Vagrant Records on the map as neo-emo’s ground zero — singer/guitarist Matt Pryor has been focusing on his solo band, the New Amsterdams. Just off a tour with the TBS splinter group Straylight Run, the Amsterdams are at the Middle East (617-864-EAST) in Cambridge on Tuesday.

New-metal goons Korn and Limp Bizkit team up for a quickie club tour that hits a sold-out Palladium on Tuesday. And speaking of tools: Maynard James Keenan has been running his don’t-call-it-a-side-project A Perfect Circle as if it were a halfway house for unemployable metal sidemen, so it’s fitting that they’ve turned the volume knob on their 12-step theatrics up to 11 with their latest, Thirteenth Step (Virgin). Out with ex-Failure dude Ken Andrews’s Year of the Rabbit, they’re at the Whittemore Center (603-868-7300) at UNH on Friday, the Providence Performing Arts Center (401-421-2997) on Monday, and the Oakdale Theatre (203-265-1501) in Wallingford, Connecticut, on Tuesday.