Record releases may slow to a trickle between Christmas and New Year’s, but bands use the dead time to attract fans who are too busy to see them the rest of the year. For those who want to ring in the new year with music ringing in their ears, here are the best of the best in the coming days:

WILCO, THE FLAMING LIPS & SLEATER-KINNEY
Madison Square Garden, December 31

Wilco are avant-gardists with a foot planted firmly in America’s past. The Flaming Lips are acid-tripping ambassadors from a possible future. Yet somehow, the two couldn’t be a better fit. Jeff Tweedy and company are fresh off the triumph of their sold-out Radio City shows this fall, which demonstrated an impressive ability to expand – in sound and confidence – to fill most any space. Madison Square Garden may test their limits. For the Flaming Lips, however, bigger is often better. Their costumes, sci-fi props, and inflatable/inhabitable plastic balls should play well in the enormous space. It’s five years late, but this show promises to be millennial.

PATTI SMITH
Bowery Ballroom, December 29-31

Patti Smith may never reclaim the white-hot intensity of her haymaking pre-punk heyday, but her latest album, “Trampin’,” shows her to be as brash and eloquent as ever. Her unspooling beat poetry winds itself here around themes of protest, war, and healing, but the most memorable moment is the soulful calm and easy grace she achieves on the title track, an old spiritual sung with real delicacy, honesty, and yearning. After all these years, she’s still “trampin’, trampin’/trying to make heaven my home.”

GOGOL BORDELLO, NORTHSIX
December 31

Gogol Bordello started out playing accordion-and-violin music at weddings for New York’s Russian immigrant community, but found their true calling marrying elements of gypsy folk, cabaret, and punk in New York’s music underground. Ukrainian-born singer Eugene Hutz is an uncanny combination of Iggy Pop and Bertolt Brecht, and he could carry the show off all by himself, but chooses instead to turn it into a madcap burlesque that might include any or all of the following elements: belly dancers, cheerleaders, super-powered Ukranian vampires.

!!!
Mercury Lounge, December 30

This will be an intimate show of necessity: Just to fit all the band’s reflective-armor-clad members on stage brings the tiny club to near-capacity. Like fellow travelers Radio 4, !!!’s (pronounced chk chk chk) sound is less horn-infused post-punk these days and more Ibiza-disco-beat. And while they never did manage to deliver on the promise of their first single, “Me and Giuliani Down by the School Yard (A True Story),” there’s still plenty here to keep the blood moving and champagne flowing.

MIKE PATTON, JOHN ZORN & TRANS AM
The Knitting Factory, December 31

Mike Patton is perhaps rock ‘n’ roll’s most talented journeyman. Few know him at all, but those that do regularly proclaim him rock’s most talented vocalist. Patton is best remembered for his operatic crooning on the Faith No More hits “Epic” and “Falling to Pieces,” but he spent the bulk of his time and creative energy of that period with the willfully inaccessible band Mr. Bungle. (Surely one of the strangest major-label signings in history, their sound ranged from sunny Beach Boys harmonies to death metal and spaghetti western.) Today Patton continues to chart his own erratic course, collaborating with the likes of Dillinger Escape Plan, Dan the Automator, and the other members of his own cinematic heavy-metal super group Fantomas. Patton is joined at the Knitting Factory by equally adventurous jazz improviser and sometimes collaborator John Zorn as well as electro-rockers Trans Am.

LUNA
Southpaw, December 31

After soldiering on for several bewildering years in an unfamiliar indie-rock landscape, one of the most beloved underground bands of the 1990s is calling it a career. But not before mounting a long farewell tour. For casual fans who’ve lost track of Luna, the tour for “Rendezvous,” their seventh studio album, has the same air of nostalgia and belated appreciation that surrounds the Pixies and Mission of Burma reunion shows. New Year’s will be one of New York’s last opportunities to experience the band’s hyper-literate references and soothing dream-pop guitar lines in person – until the inevitable reunion tour, that is.