After seemingly disappearing, Ghostland Observatory is back with another dance party

Ghostland Observatory/Gibbz

9 p.m. Nov. 4 at The Burl, 375 Thompson Rd. $30, $35. theburlky.com, trashymoped.com.

It was getting to where Ghostland Observatory had quietly faded into pop history. Eight years had passed since the release of a full-length album. Aside from the occasional one-off concert, the Austin, Texas electronica duo of Aaron Behrens and Thomas Turner, had vanished, leaving only a vague Facebook message stating their band was on hiatus. More specifically, the post stated the two were “bathing and relaxing in the cosmos, rejuvenating our spirits and soaking in the cosmic rays.”

In September, Behrens and Turner beamed themselves back to earth, reopened Ghostland Observatory and started another dance party with a new recording.

Titled “See You Later Simulator,” the duo modestly updated the musical design it has adopted since forming in 2003. Behrens remains the primary focus with vocals stratospheric and durable enough to give ‘80s arena rock bands a solid challenge. He adds guitar, as well, but his singing remains at the forefront of the Ghostland Observatory sound both on record and onstage. Turner, perhaps the most acclaimed caped keyboardist since Rick Wakeman, still doubles on synthesizers and percussion, creating soundscapes that are as spaciously ambient as they are elementally dance-savvy.

Behrens and Turner bring Ghostland Observatory’s cosmic dance music to The Burl on Sunday. Gibbz, the nom de plume of New York synth-pop stylist and producer Mike Gibney, will open.

Cedric Burnside Project

9:30 p.m. Nov. 2 at Willie’s Locally Known, 286 Southland Dr. Free. 859-281-1116. willieslocallyknown.com, cedricburnside.net.

From outer space dance-pop, we go to the blues — the ragged, sparse, electric and immensely rocking blues of the Mississippi hill country. That’s the region Cedric Burnside has long called home as well as his homegrown music conservatory. There he carries on a rural blues tradition heralded by college age crowds beginning in the 1990s thanks to the renaissance of hill country bluesmen R.L. Burnside (Cedric’s grandfather) and Junior Kimbrough. Not coincidentally, those artists became mentoring figures for the young drummer, guitarist and vocalist who has since become the prime torchbearer for the Burnside legacy.

Cedric Burnside’s new album “Benton County Relic” favors guitar work in the massive riffs that propel tunes like “Typical Day,” “Get Your Groove On” (which sounds surprisingly like Neil Young’s electric music with Crazy Horse) and “Please Tell Me Baby.” A particular highlight is “Death Bell Blues,” a tune dating back to Tom Dickson in the late 1920s and more recently popularized through acoustic as well as electric versions by R.L. Burnside. Vocally, though, the new Cedric Burnside take on the tune recalls the Chicago inflections of Muddy Waters.

Friday, all of that hill country blues and soul comes to town via a performance at Willie’s Locally Known by the Cedric Burnside Project, an ongoing duo band the younger Burnside leads with drummer and slide guitarist Brian Jay. The concert is the latest in an expanded offering of free live shows presented at the Southland Drive barbeque palace and music venue.

No Bunny for Rupp

Scratch one show from the massive fall concert calendar. Following an initial postponement, the Nov. 11 performance at Rupp Arena by Latin rapper Bad Bunny has been canceled. A post on the Rupp website stated the date was scrubbed due to “scheduling conflicts.”

The Puerto Rican born artist was originally scheduled to bring his “La Nueva Religion Tour” to the arena on Sept. 22, but the date was postponed, according to another Rupp post, because of “complex travel logistics.”

The timing of the cancellation is unfortunate. Bad Bunny is currently enjoying a massive hit via a collaborative single with Drake called “MIA.” It sits this week at No. 5 on Billboard’s all-genre Hot 100.

Ticket refunds are available at point of purchase. All phone and online orders made through TicketMaster will be automatically canceled and refunded.

The week that was

+ The Wood Brothers and Nicole Atkins at the Kentucky Theatre: After nearly an hour’s worth of tunes that began as a rootsy acoustic incantation and ended with a rhythm-savvy charge worthy of a New Orleans street parade, the Wood Brothers all but shut this show down. With the trio huddled around a single microphone, the music was pared down to an almost primordial level of folk aesthetics.

There, vocalist Oliver Wood, sibling bassist Chris Wood and percussionist Jano Rix (doubling, at this moment, on melodica) stood playing the faintest of music in the faintest of light. Specifically, what was summoned was the title tune to the 2013 album “The Muse.” The overall feel, though, was that of a decades-old séance, a mood Chris Wood dubbed “O, Wood Brothers, Where Art Thou?”

The song also served as the eye in a hurricane, one that merrily slapped together sleekly executed blues (a high spirited cover of “Big Boss Man”), roots driven rock ‘n’ roll (“Sparkling Wine”) and grove-centric pop (“The Shore”) for a sound that rolled with the assuredness of a freight train for just under two hours. Not coincidentally, a cover of the 60-plus year old Elizabeth Cotton folk gem “Freight Train” was later served as a lullaby-like encore before a barnstorming blues-rock mash-up of “Honey Jar” closed the performance for real.

The trio’s pilot was clearly Chris Wood. Playing the first half of the program by applying an atypical jazzy dexterity to the upright bass and then adding thunderous leads and grooves to the second half on an electric Hofner bass, Chris underscored the show’s rhythmic and stylistic dexterity. He also delivered an absorbing vocal lead on “The Shore,” a groove parade built from a bass/harmonica framework that remained spacious enough for a few shades of guitar psychedelia to shine through.

An especially nice bonus to the performance was a 35 minute opening set by Nashville-by-way-of-New Jersey songstress Nicole Atkins. An artist with an almost cinematic feel for pop tradition, as well as a voice capable of showing off numerous shades from such a scope, Atkins worked her way into a sense of pop grandeur with “Cry, Cry, Cry,” sang with the reach and aim of Roy Orbison on “A Little Crazy” and echoed numerous girl group sensibilities from the 1960s on the set-closing “Listen Up.”