With Fugazi on "family leave," Ian MacKaye has been casting about for new ways to make music for the kids. No, really, for the kids — his latest work skews to the pre-school set. Point your browser to www.pancakemountain.com and you can see MacKaye’s new acoustic duo, the Evens (with the Warmers’ Amy Farina on drums), performing their soon-to-be-smash "Vowel Movement" — imagine a cross between "Waiting Room" and "C Is for Cookie" — complete with dancing toddlers in alphabet shirts! It’s part of the DC-based Internet-only children’s show Pancake Mountain, which also features a cameo by Bob Mould and a themesong composed by Fugazi/Rites of Spring dude Brendan Canty with former Bikini Kill gal Kathy Wilcox. You can ask Ian all about it when he conducts a Q&A session to benefit the fabulous Flywheel Arts Center at the White Brook Middle School (413-527-9800) in Easthampton on Sunday afternoon.

Amy isn’t making the trip with Ian, but her brother, Karate frontman Geoff Farina, is on a solo tour with former Spinanes frontwoman Rebecca Gates. They’ll play Friday at the Space Gallery (207-828-5600) in Portland; Saturday at Evos Arts (978-441-1063) in Lowell; Wednesday at AS220 (401-831-9327) in Providence; and next Thursday, April 1, at the Middle East (617-864-EAST) in Cambridge. Meanwhile, the Butchershop Quartet (featuring members of Songs: Ohia and Nad Navillus) perform their rock-band arrangement of Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps, a feat that even Rites of Spring never attempted (Mike Miliard’s review is in "Off the Record"), at the Space Gallery on Saturday, at Zeitgeist Gallery (617-876-6060) in Cambridge on Sunday, and at AS220 on Monday.

Providence has produced scathing avant-metal (see Lightning Bolt) and scurrilous frag-punk (see Arab on Radar), but it took the RI quintet Daughters to combine the two; their recent Canada Songs (Robotic Empire) sounds like a Converge-ian quagmire in a Locust-ridden minefield. Daughters play the Palladium (800-477-6849) in Worcester on Saturday and AS220 on Sunday. They’re not to be confused with Sons and Daughters, a Glaswegian group featuring former Arab Strap members Adele Bethel and David Gow whose new Love the Cup (Ba Da Bing), a loosely themed concept album about Johnny Cash, is a gristled folk-rock disc with hints of Zeppelin (but only the Zep songs with mandolin). Sons and Daughters play the Loft (802-254-5832) in Brattleboro, Vermont, on Saturday and the Middle East on Monday. And speaking of Arab Strap: current member Malcolm Middleton does a solo set at the Paradise (617-423-NEXT) in Boston on Sunday opening for the Delgados.

In what you can think of as a tune-up for the New England Metal and Hardcore Festival, Providence’s Living Room (617-521-5200) hosts a metalcore rampage on Tuesday with Scarlet — whose new Cult Classic (Ferret) rages against the machine with unrelenting, Dillinger Escape Plan–ish thrash and macabre, Trent Reznor–like melody — along with the advanced-placement-Pantera riffs of Every Time I Die.