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.

Live review: Chris Brown at the Avalon

A little singing, a little dancing from the performer in his first local show since his sentencing.

Chris Brown had already pleaded guilty to assaulting his then-girlfriend Rihanna earlier this year. But Wednesday night at the Avalon, in his first local performance since being sentenced to probation and community service in the February altercation in L.A., Brown still seemed to be offering up character witnesses in an attempt to prove, as he insists in a widely circulated YouTube video, that he's no monster.

First up was Keri Hilson, who appeared not long into Brown's hourlong set and sang her hit "Turnin' Me On." Hilson was followed by Ester Dean, whose song "Drop It Low" features a cameo from Brown. Later, the singer introduced a medley of Michael Jackson covers as a homage to his "homie, friend and loved one." And near the end of the show, during "No Air," Brown even pressed squeaky-clean "American Idol" winner Jordin Sparks into service, trading verses with Sparks' recorded voice in a duet that has surely taken on new meaning in Brown's mind over the last nine months of smothering media scrutiny.

If the female-heavy crowd at the Avalon was serving as Brown's jury, the testimonials had their desired effect: This was precisely the sort of adoring audience Brown presumably intended to draw by calling his current trek, which launched last week in Houston, the Fan Appreciation Tour. The singer made no mention of the Rihanna incident; instead, he repeatedly announced that he was in the mood to party.

Live review: Charlie Haden Family & Friends at Disney Hall

Jazz luminary Charlie Haden took no small amount of perverse joy Tuesday night in bringing the old-time country music with which he started his musical career in the Midwest seven decades ago into the tony surroundings of Walt Disney Concert Hall.

“Man, oh, man,” the 72-year-old bassist said upon taking the stage. “Who would have thought we’d have a country audience at Disney Hall?”

And that’s not the half of it. In less than three weeks, the hall has hosted Steve Martin’s mostly serious-minded venture into bluegrass music, Kris Kristofferson’s solo show and now Haden and a group of stellar Nashville singers and instrumentalists playing what once upon a time was referred to as “hillbilly music.” If this keeps up, people are going to start confusing Disney Hall with Disneyland’s Country Bear Jamboree.

But while this tour takes him back to the music he played with his parents and siblings through the Ozarks and elsewhere before he fell in love with jazz, flew the coop for Los Angeles, met Ornette Coleman and signed on with the saxophonists groundbreaking Liberation Music Orchestra, Haden’s hardly slumming.

The band members he brought with him to Disney Hall, most of whom also played on his inspired 2008 “Rambling Boy” album that spawned the tour, has as much in common with the stereotype of primitive hillbilly music as a $400,000 International Harvester Axial-Flow Combine has with a cast-iron plow.

Live review: Them Crooked Vultures at the Roxy

 

On Monday night, the new hard-rock supergroup Them Crooked Vultures played the coziest room of its very young career, charging through a semi-surprising 90-minute set at West Hollywood’s Roxy, roughly 24 hours before the band was set to appear at the much larger Wiltern for a sold-out performance.

Yet if a 500-capacity club seems like a strange domain for these A-list heavy hitters — Vultures consists of Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones on bass, Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl on drums and, as frontman, Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age — they handily resolved the disconnect by treating the Roxy as they would a sports arena: At several points, it was hard to hear the music over the groan of a sound system pushed well beyond its limits.

On its self-titled debut, in stores this week, Them Crooked Vultures brandishes its muscular low end like a weapon; rhythm sections don’t come much dream-teamier than Jones and Grohl, so the band’s decision to build its songs around fat bass-and-drum grooves was a wise one.

Or at least a clever one: Nothing about the infectiously slapdash “Them Crooked Vultures” speaks especially of wisdom, least of all Homme’s goofy lyrics, which gravitate toward stoner-dude wordplay like that in “Mind Eraser, No Chaser” and “Interlude With Ludes.” That’s a pleasant surprise on an album that might have bogged down with the collective weight of these players’ impressive pedigrees.

Live review: Ray Davies at the Orpheum Theatre

The Kinks frontman reinterprets his life's work, with the help of the Vox Society Choir, in an engaging two-hour show.

Ray Davies has learned to embrace his long season of reinvention. In recent years, the Kinks frontman has lamented the indefinite hiatus of the band he led for decades, but as of late he's responded with renewed energy and ambition unknown to many of his surviving contemporaries from rock's original British Invasion. 

In 2008, he released a moving and at times autobiographical solo album, "Working Man's Café"; this year, he began reinterpreting his life's work with a large choir on the just-released "The Kinks Choral Collection." He brought all that to the Orpheum Theatre on Saturday, equally engaged when singing of dreams and regret to acoustic guitar as he was while soaring with a band and the 29-voice Vox Society Choir. 

The two-hour concert opened with an acoustic set performed by Davies and guitarist Bill Shanley, an intimate format suited to the emotional twists and literary turns of the Kinks singer-songwriter. His voice was in exceptional shape, wailing and wondering from quiet passages to bursts of anger, passing through the Kinks' "Apeman" and the life experiences recalled on last year's "In a Moment." 

Davies playfully introduced the Kinks classic "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" as an "English folk song." When the fan singalong was not as energetic as he'd like, Davies smiled and urged them on: "This is Ray. I'm your friend!"

Live review: Loudon Wainwright III and Richard Thompson at UCLA

Loudon Wainwright III and Richard Thompson wrapped up their five-week tour as a duo, under the fittingly ironic title “Loud & Rich,” with a sterling display of songwriting acumen and musicianship Friday at UCLA, but one that wasn’t particularly loud or likely to make anybody rich.

Not in the filthy lucre sense, anyway. These two folk-rock veterans appeared long ago to have achieved peace in the knowledge that their astute brand of music fills clubs and theaters, not arenas and stadiums. They’ve been pals at least since the days when Thompson produced a couple of Wainwright’s standout albums in the '80s, and used the occasion of their stop at Royce Hall as part of UCLA Live’s eclectic music series to revel in the richness of words skillfully strung together and married to music that carries those words straight to the heart. And, on more than once occasion, to the funny bone.

In fact, many times during the evening Elvis Costello’s famous pronouncement -- “I used to be disgusted, but now I try to be amused” -- seemed to be play, but it was often hard to tell who was on which side of that equation.

Wainwright, perhaps the most adroit humorist in pop music of the last 40 years, opened the three-hour performance with a set heavy on recent-vintage material, including three from his ambitious double album “High Wide & Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project.” That set showcases the music of the influential but largely forgotten early country singer from Spray, N.C., a freewheeling, wisecracking, hard-drinking, banjo-playing troubadour for whom Wainwright, also born in North Carolina, obviously holds an affinity.

The solo format left him without the deft instrumental and vocal support he gets on the album from a broad swath of family members (including his kids Rufus, Martha and Lucy) ex-family members and friends. But Thompson jumped in to add color on "If I Lose," bending and sliding steely notes and making his acoustic guitar sound like a dobro.

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.

Live review: Marc Anthony at the Gibson Amphitheatre

The singer celebrates his Latino heritage while his adoring fans celebrate his music.

Not long into Marc Anthony's show Wednesday night at Gibson Amphitheatre, the swivel-hipped singer-actor was checking off a list of job titles that demonstrated his pronouncement that 2009 "is a great time to be a Latino." Normally he doesn't get into politics, he admitted, but he'd been inspired by George Lopez, who drew huge cheers in a surprise appearance before Anthony's set with a shout-out to Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Anthony couldn't help adding one occupation -- NFL owner -- that he recently entered into when he bought a stake in the Miami Dolphins. But 2009 was already a great time to be Marc Anthony before that purchase: In spite of his inability to crack the mainstream American market that seemed a decade ago to glimmer with possibility, Anthony currently commands one of the most adoring audiences in all of pop.

At the Gibson, where he sauntered onstage in his usual uniform of slim-fitting suit and sunglasses, Anthony was greeted like a returning hero, then showered with roses and "I love yous" for the duration of his 90-minute set. Nobody in the building appeared to mind that to many U.S. listeners Anthony is best known as Mr. Jennifer Lopez.

Live review: Jay-Z at UCLA's Pauley Pavilion

The rap superstar is generous with sharing the spotlight -- OMG, was that Rihanna? -- in a show that also included sets by N.E.R.D., J.Cole and Wale.

It's not easy to upstage Jay-Z, especially at his own show. But during a performance Sunday at UCLA's Pauley Pavilion, one special guest managed to do just that -- and it wasn't the rap superstar's wife, Beyoncé.

Not quite midway through the show, Rihanna, draped in black and standing on an elevated riser, emerged from underneath the stage to sing her vocal on Jay-Z's summer hit, "Run This Town," from his 11th studio album, “The Blueprint 3.”

Young women in the audience jumped onto their chairs, camera phones in hand, for a better glimpse, their screams ringing out in near unison over the arena. One fan nearby turned to her friend and screamed, "Oh my God, is that really her?"

It was the first time the pop star had performed since breaking her nearly nine month silence last week about being assaulted by former boyfriend Chris Brown in February.