Vic Chesnutt's death-obsessed folk cuts deep -- and personally

If you ever need a clear example of the institutionalized cruelty of the American healthcare system, ask Vic Chesnutt.

After a car crash left him a paraplegic as a teen, the Georgia singer-songwriter beat long odds to become one of the great wits of contemporary art-folk. He's lately ridden a fine streak of collaborative albums with members of the Canadian collective Godspeed You! Black Emperor, including his latest, the death-obsessed yet weirdly uplifting "At the Cut."

But there's an albatross that follows Chesnutt from the door of his home to every show he plays. Though he's currently insured, an accumulating stream of nearly $70,000 worth of unpaid hospital bills is threatening to swallow much of his livelihood as a songwriter. It's left him in an unprecedented condition --  one where he's at a loss for words.

"I'm not too eloquent talking about these things," Chesnutt said. "I was making payments, but I can't anymore and I really have no idea what I'm going to do. It seems absurd they can charge this much. When I think about all this, it gets me so furious. I could die tomorrow because of other operations I need that I can't afford. I could die any day now, but I don't want to pay them another nickel."

Album review: The Bravery's 'Stir the Blood'

"You can twist and scream into the air, no one can hear you here," warns the Bravery's singer Sam Endicott on an unprintably titled track about emotionless sex from the band's third album. The chorus hook approximates the feeling one takes from an hour mucking about in "Stir the Blood's" lustless, cynical dance-punk: "There will be no tenderness."

The Bravery joined the mid-aughts New Order pile-on with one truly witty single, "An Honest Mistake"; since then, they've sidled up to mainstream rock radio, as on the KROQ staple "Believe." On "Blood," the group pairs dated revivalist synths (on the unintentionally ironic "I Have Seen the Future") with frat-friendly lechery and an omnipresent gnarled vocal effect that makes Strokes' frontman and newly minted solo artist Julian Casablancas sound like Susan Boyle by comparison.

Except for the endearingly tossed-off, Velvet Underground-inspired closer "Sugar Pill," "Blood" would be passable dance-floor fodder were it not so lyrically creepy. On past albums, the Bravery tried funny, then tried earnestness -- now, it seems, they're at the angry point in their seduction routine where you start to reach for your pepper spray.

Endicott had a hand in penning the excellent title track from Shakira's new album "She Wolf." Perhaps he can preserve some of that creative spark for his own band's next endeavor.

-- August Brown

The Bravery
"Stir the Blood"
Island
One and a half stars (Out of four)

Lissie's alt-folk packs a bit of a fist

The young alt-folk singer Lissie Maurus might have recorded much of her debut EP,  "Why You Runnin'," at home on GarageBand, but that doesn't make the record any less rustic.

"It's funny, instead of it being like me and my horse, it's me and my laptop," Maurus said from her home in Ojai, where she decamped after a stint in L.A. to look for a quieter life. "I lived for five years in Beachwood Canyon, but I needed a yard and a house and space to do projects. Today, I'm drying pomegranates."

While fruit-craft is a perfectly adorable way to spend a weekend, don't dare mistake Maurus for domesticated. "Runnin'," now out on Fat Possum Records, is both as ethereal as a before-dawn walk up the canyons and as tough as old leather. 

Recorded with Band of Horses cohort Bill Reynolds, the EP opens with the jangly "Little Lovin'," before taking a sharp turn for the deliciously miserable on "Wedding Bells," a ballad of rueful singledom that nonetheless has a streak of resilience in it.

Slash brings his considerable Rolodex to LAYN benefit at Avalon

Onstage at the Avalon during Sunday night's benefit for the Los Angeles Youth Network, comedian George Lopez assured the audience that donations to the homeless-services organization worked promptly. "If you donate tonight, you can save Paula Abdul," Lopez said, to general snickering. "She was sleeping under the 101 last night."

The ex-"American Idol" host might be looking for work these days, but the real goal of the benefit -- a round-robin concert hosted by Slash with a bevy of classic-alt guests including Dave Navarro, Tom Morello, Chester Bennington and Billy Idol -- was to keep the organization's doors open in light of both tough financial straits and a big uptick in the need for its services.

The mix of a purposefully rowdy rock crowd (and open bar) with charitable impulses made for some unexpected moments of earnestness. At a rock-memorabilia auction in the adjoining Bardot nightclub, a young graduate of the program relayed how her life could have been derailed by drugs, prostitution or suicide, but that LAYN helped her pull though. A very blond woman in a clingy white ensemble adjacent to the stage offered encouragement- "But you did not commit suicide, and you are here tonight!"

A man donating $15,000 to fix the organization's roof earned respectful cheers, before he felt a need to clarify his bid to the crowd. "I'll fix the roof. I mean, not personally with a hammer," he said. "But I will pay for someone else to fix it."

Backstage, Slash held court among his assembled band mates, including former Guns N Roses players Duff McKagan and Steven Adler. Together, they know from the trials of youth homelessness -- Slash's self-titled biography offers plenty of firsthand detail on early GNR's world of squats, the temptations of drugs and alcohol, and the band befriending strippers to get cash for meals.

"When I was a kid, no adults knew how bad life was on the streets of Hollywood. Since I've gotten involved with LAYN, I've really related to the kids," Slash said. "They want to write and make music and be trapeze artists. Who else is going to give them a chance to do that?"

Slash came into the program through his wife, Perla, who is on LAYN's board. Introducing the show at the Avalon with her son Cash, she was far afield of a typically austere non-profit director, peppering her pleas for donations with endearingly salty language. She didn't so much as blush when her son chastised the audience -- "If you took a picture of my mom tonight, frickin' delete it!" 

The show opened with an appropriate cover of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song," with Slash backed by, among others, Navarro and Travis Barker. Throughout the cover-centric night, singers and instrumentalists rotated on and off stage -- one minute, Andrew Stockdale of Wolfmother was plowing through "Woman," then Idol would earn an unexpectedly rapturous response to "Rebel Yell." Bennington served as the de facto Axl for a take on "Paradise City," and by the time Ozzy Osbourne came out for the set's close, the show had become a perpetually giddy tour through the classic rock heyday by artists who, in the eyes many of the kids they were helping that night, might have to soon claim that genre for themselves. 

-- August Brown

Photo of Slash and host George Lopez, albeit at a recent Lakers game, by Lori Shepler / Associated Press

Live review: High on Fire, Converge, Mastodon and Dethklok

The most animated act (think: Adult Swim) grabs the spotlight at a metal mash.

It's telling that the most orthodox act on one of the season's most anticipated metal package tours was the one composed of cartoon characters. The sprawling quadruple bill of High on Fire, Converge, Mastodon and Dethklok -- the last a Gorillaz-like animated band project for self-aware Hessians -- proved Thursday night at the Hollywood Palladium that while the heaviest strains of rock music are very much thriving, the rule book for what constitutes metal today has been burned at the stake.

Booked at the distinctly un-metal hour of 6:30 p.m., High on Fire's druggy, swaggering and dread-laden metal had to compete with the brutal reality of playing a dinner-time set prefacing a very long night of difficult music. No matter the strength of their bleak grooves and tooth-cracking clatter -- and they're strong indeed -- that's a tall order.

The wonkish post-hardcore act Converge had a slightly easier time of it. The Massachusetts-based band was one of the early adopters of the metalcore genre, in which the speed and ferocity of '80s American punk gets applied to the precision-cut riffs and polyrhythms of thrash. Converge's new album, "Axe to Fall," expertly refuses to put more than one foot in any camp of heavy music -- guitarist Kurt Ballou is equally at home squealing off pinch harmonics in a throwback solo or a sub-sonic churn of contemporary white noise. At times the restless pummel of drums even leans toward something Sun Ra could nod to.

Live Review: The Big Pink at the El Rey Theater

 Of all the instruments and sounds in a rock band's arsenal, the most difficult one to use well might be sheer noise. For a band like The Big Pink -- a UK duo that brilliantly grafts the synth textures of Underworld and old rave to druggy, unshowered shoegaze -- the tension between the loveliness of its melodies and its nastier sonic impulses needs a sure pair of studio hands to keep the peace. On the band's debut album "A Brief History of Love," they pull it off gracefully. But at their L.A. debut at the El Rey last night, things got a little overheated.

A four-piece touring concern, Milo Cordell and Robbie Furze's project had plenty of options for making sense of the many ephemeral, textured elements of "History" onstage. But they need a certain fidelity to make it all translate, and for whatever the reason -- the in-house mixer, the band's live arrangements -- clarity just wasn't there at the El Rey. I tried standing in every corner of the room: two feet from the stage, in front of the central mixing board, the very back of the theater, but the mix kept me wondering if this is what an errant seagull last hears before it gets sucked into a passing jet engine.

That's not necessarily a bad thing -- I'm a glutton for punishment when the right situation arises -- but The Big Pink's pleasures aren't in volume and tumult alone. They have a soft touch on their record, and as it turns out, it's what makes the whole thing work.

Furze has a marvelous voice for this band -- a leering disaffection tempered by the occasional real sweetness of his lyrics. But it just couldn't compete with the redlining gain of just about everything else around him. Pairing the low-end gut punch of techno with the mids and highs of a rock band is never easy, but save for all but the quietest moments, Cordell's noise gadgets and samples were just filetted into hisses and grumbles.

Deftones, Slash, Pablove lead a weekend of worthy benefit shows

If concert-going is on your docket this weekend, consider steering your ticket budget toward any of three exceedingly worthwhile special fund-raising shows, all of which happen to be at the Avalon in Hollywood. On Thursday and Friday, Deftones will play two shows to raise money for bassist Chi Cheng, who's still in a semiconscious state after a 2008 car crash that left him with huge (and accumulating) medical bills. On Saturday, Band of Horses, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Sea Wolf, Shirley Manson and many others play one-off sets to benefit the Pablove Foundation, the childhood cancer research fund of Dangerbird Records founder Jeff Castelaz and his wife, Jo Ann Thrailkill. And on Sunday, Slash joins Ozzy Osbourne, Chester Bennington, Perry Farrell and a motley crew of other hard rockers for a set to fund the Los Angeles Youth Network, a homeless-services charity. Any one of them will be worth your time, money and eardrums this weekend.

-- August Brown

All shows at the Avalon, 1735 Vine St. Tickets available at avalonhollywood.net.

Deftones photo by Stephen Osman / Los Angeles Times

Album review: OneRepublic's 'Waking Up'

A muscular, Timbaland-shaped shadow loomed over the unlikely success of OneRepublic's debut album "Dreaming Out Loud." His inescapable remix of the band's single, "Apologize," vaulted the group to multi-platinum sales and took frontman Ryan Tedder into the upper ranks of songwriting pens-for-hire in pop for Leona Lewis, Rihanna, Beyoncé and many others.

Much of that record and Tedder's outside writing were a weak broth of dorm-room-canoodling ballads and R&B with very little rhythm or blues. Fortunately, on OneRepublic's second album "Waking Up," they've internalized a lot of the things that made Timbaland such a compelling producer -- that good sounds are paramount, songs should move in odd directions and many different ideas can constitute a hook.

That's not to say "Waking Up" sounds anything like Aaliyah or Missy Elliott. But the filtered dubstep drum loops and the Afro-pop marimba of "Missing Persons 1 & 2" have a real playfulness missing from the ceaseless Cinemascope of Tedder's older efforts. "Marchin' On" takes a backing vocal hook and writes a whole song around it, earning the bigness of its flags-and-fighting imagery. Even the overreaching piano musings like "All This Time" have a solo-McCartney goofy sweetness about them.

The band needs to stop mistaking the cello as an inherently "meaningful" instrument -- it's too often deployed for maximum syrupiness. But Timbaland should be proud; OneRepublic is using his old tricks even better than he is lately.

-- August Brown

OneRepublic
"Waking Up"
Mosley Music/Interscope
Three stars (Out of four)

Wim's feathery glam-folk makes the '70s seem OK after all

One of the best things about L.A. is the sheer aggregate amount of interesting music you can stumble into on any given night -- and not just on stages.

On Saturday night I'd ambled over to Bardot (its Saturday night Lo Hi Fi series is sneakily becoming a supremely fun live engagement every week) to catch the disco-revivalist quartet Love Grenades, whom I've somehow never seen before. Given how just about every popular varietal of dance-based music is getting constantly updated in the pop, R&B and indie worlds today, it was kind of refreshing to see a band play the earlier eras so straight. There was ESG, there was Moroder, there was Blondie, and the band's severe singer Liz Wight just dares you to look away from her.

But the even better surprise was a chance conversation with a virtuosically bedraggled quintet of Australians in town making their first full-length album. They're called Wim, "as in Wim Wenders," they said, which might make it the most pretentious three-letter band name in music history. But their sound is a fantastic revision of the meandering, sylvan folk of Grizzly Bear with the bleary tenor of Scott Walker and four-part harmonies tight enough to hang your laundry on. I feel like I need to go fall in love and then get unceremoniously dumped this weekend just so I can have the proper setting to listen to their spooky torch ballad "John" while plowing through a bottle of Macallan. And good lord, do they look the part too -- singer Martin Solomon probably doesn't get up for breakfast without first putting on a half-dozen fur and feather accouterments and eye glitter.

They're really young and have some filling out to do arrangement-wise, but if they stick around in L.A. they should make fast friends with Entrance, Hecuba and Devendra Banhart. I heartily propose they do so, if only for my own selfish motives of wanting to see them live many, many times in the near future. 

-- August Brown

Photo via wimtheband.com

Live review: Paramore at the Hollywood Palladium

The young pop-punk band looks at the world through brand new eyes in a moody and yes, edgy, makeup show.

Toward the end of Paramore’s Wednesday night set at the Hollywood Palladium, singer Hayley Williams swiped a pair of black plastic-frame eyeglasses from someone in the front row and put them on. "Do these make me look edgy?" she asked, cheekily, as the effect -- coupled with her newly platinum tresses -- was much more freshman art-school crush than anything especially dangerous.

But the question of edginess is one Paramore's been asking lately. Its latest album, "Brand New Eyes," has vaulted the very young band off the pop-punk axis and into the ever-thinner ranks of top-selling mainstream rock acts in America, one of even fewer that is fronted by a young woman. It's not a dark album, but it is a serious one, as Williams' gym-class sass and her band's expert, straightforward emo have grown into moody musings about post-breakup abandonment, the trials of modern religious faith and the fraught band dynamics that almost split Paramore up.

In that sense, simultaneously gunning for the upper reaches of Billboard with "Eyes" might have been the edgiest thing Paramore's done yet.