Thanks to Taking Back Sunday frontman Adam Lazzara, everyone now knows the first rule of emo: don’t date your guitarist’s little sister. Or at least if you do, don’t break up with her. Because then guitarist and sis are apt to take off and form a really great band together. We can only imagine what intra-label politics are like over at Victory now that John and Michelle Nolan’s band Straylight Run are kicking up their own buzz, but after a year of drama, the new TBS line-up hit the ground running with Where You Want To Be, and thanks to Lou Giordano (whom emo kids know for producing Sunny Day Real Estate but whom Bostonians revere for punk records going back to the F.U.’s), the disc finds the band with a bit more grit in their teeth. TBS are on a tour with screamo fiends Atreyu, whose new The Curse follows Bleeding Through’s example by giving the kids what they want: metalcore, half-nekkid chicks, and vampires. Tonight (November 18), they play a sold-out WFNX-sponsored gig at Avalon (617-262-2424) in Boston; on Saturday they’re at the Webster Theater (860-525-5553) in Hartford.

Meanwhile, Giordano has just finished producing the new album by Ferret screamo kids A Static Lullaby; as yet untitled, the follow-up to the California outfit’s 2003 debut, . . And Don’t Forget To Breathe, is due early next year, but the band will test-drive new tunes on tour with Victory’s latest ascendent emo outfit, Hawthorne Heights. They’re at Axis (617-262-2437) in Boston on Monday, at Toad’s Place (203-624-TOAD) in New Haven on Tuesday, and at the Living Room (401-521-5200) in Providence on Wednesday.

Hatebreed’s multi-city Stillborn Records festival is coming up at Christmas time, but the band are touring right through the holiday season, kicking off their "Heavyweights of Hardcore" jaunt with a Thanksgiving-eve home-town gig (and food drive: bring cans) on Wednesday at the Webster Theater, with support from Terror, Full Blown Chaos, and No Warning. The show also serves as a Connecticut hardcore homecoming, with a second stage featuring Dead by Wednesday, the Risk Taken, Scurvy, the Kiss of Death, and more.

Hatebreed frontman Jamey Jasta debuted a new video for "All Against All" by Swede thrash titans the Haunted last weekend on Headbangers Ball; we’re not sure anything, though, can beat the world’s-heaviest-barbecue video for Shadows Fall’s "The Power of I and I." The two bands go head-to-head with Pantera survivors Dimebag Darrell and Vinnie Paul’s new outfit Damageplan on a tour that hits the Palladium (800-477-6849) in Worcester on Wednesday and the Webster Theater on December 3.

Also this week: grindcore grandaddies Napalm Death and Cannibal Corpse are at the Palladium this Friday and at the Webster next Sunday, November 28. Far more chilling than either of them, bluegrass grandaddy Ralph Stanley — who was begging death for mercy decades before the birth of rock and roll — is at the Iron Horse (413-584-0610) in Northampton on Friday.