Cheap Eats
By Dan Leone

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WHAT'S THERE TO hate? The Delgados' fourth album, Hate (Mantra), may have polarized their followers into that old love-loath dichotomy, as the legendary Scottish collective ventures further from the wistful tunefulness of 2000's amazing The Great Eastern (Chemikal Underground) and toward a more asymmetrical, still lovely yet altogether more unsettling union. Here the band and producer Dave Fridmann have welded Emma Pollock's and Alun Woodward's fragile voices, chamber pop strings, and winsome melodies to a factory's worth of noisome beats and abrasive, fashionably crappy-sounding sonics and a church bus of angelic choirs – the album's opening tracks, "The Light before We Land" and "All You Need Is Hate," are case studies of Hate's ill symphonics. Just picture George Harrison and Scott Walker bickering over the bombast levels on a lost ELO album fronted by the sweet, damp-looking Scots of the Delgados, Belle and Sebastian, and the communards of their Chemikal Underground label (which includes the openers, the Pixies-ish big-rock-revivalists Aereogramme), and you get the picture. Yet regardless of how you feel about the hotly anticipated Hate, you can depend on the Delgados to step up live, as they did at their overstuffed, sweltering, sold-out Great Eastern stop at Bottom of the Hill several years back. 8 p.m., 1025 Columbus, S.F. $15. (415) 474-0365. (Kimberly Chun)