Musical Puke

Boston’s Ezra Furman & the Harpoons mark their first anniversary with a summer tour that stops at Wilbert’s tonight. The 20-year-old frontman says it all started when his parents gave him a guitar as a bar mitzvah gift seven years ago. He taught himself a few chords so he could play along with his favorite Green Day, Clash, and Ramones CDs. But Furman credits his mom’s worn copy of Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde for shaping the bulk of his songwriting. “It blew my mind,” he says. “It’s got nuance. There’s personality in each of the notes.”

Carrying a suitcase stuffed with original tunes about teenage angst, Furman left his native Chicago three years ago to major in English at Boston’s Tufts University. He took along copies of short stories by Jack Kerouac and Flannery O’Connor for inspiration. Last year, he and three dorm-mates played their first gig at a Boston club -- where Furman unleashed a fresh set of Dylan-inspired tunes that offer blistering critiques of an unstable world. They form the core of the band’s debut album, Banging Down the Doors. “I ran away from home in a metaphorical kind of way,” he says. “I realized how sick and fucked-up things were. I guess I’m protesting a jadedness and a hardness in people. There’s too much ugliness, and it makes me nauseous. The songs are the vomit.”
Fri., July 13, 9:30 p.m.