Rock Picks: Ice Cube, Bob Dylan, Dog and Pony Show

Also playing Monday:

BIG SANDY AND HIS FLY RIGHT BOYSUES at Safari Sam’s.

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2

 
Sons and Daughters and Birdmonster at the Troubadour

Sons and Daughters were once a glaring example of the transatlantic pop shuffle between Britain and America you only saw in the late ’50s (think Pete Best–era Beatles). At a Spaceland performance a few years ago, the Glasgow band’s unironic homage to early rock & roll was lost on the hipster masses, and yet a grudging respect was palpable, no doubt because front woman Adele Bethel — she of the penetrating coal-black eyes — dared Silver Lakians to find something quaint in her band’s Scots-a-billy. Thanks (no thanks?) to producer Bernard Butler, This Gift has fewer echoes of the road house, but the ex-Suede man can’t smooth over Bethel’s voice, which tends to stretch single vowels into triphthongs while toggling between clotted-cream purr and piercing keen. Even at their hookiest, a fatalistic melancholy hounds S&D like the firth-borne fog of their native city. Best taken with a Dewar’s on the rocks. Tonight is also the record release party for San Francisco’s Birdmonster. (Andrew Lentz)

 
Paul Weller at the Wiltern

It’s a little bit strange to hear ex-Jam man Paul Weller broaden his musical palette so much on his new 22 Dreams (Yep Roc). But that’s just the old perception — that Weller’s a punk, man, or a nu-Mod, an angry young man who hates hippies and plays clean-lined, foursquare music that splashes you in the face with its cold, unambiguous reality. Never the most good-humored person to walk the planet, Weller — albeit incorporating an increasing mix of stylistic gambits including soul, jazz and folk strains — has produced sporadically great moments in song that have been stifled by a hovering lecturing tone. I’m happy to say, however, that all of my above reservations about Weller have been assuaged with this new album, where his sternness has been revealed as earnestness in his forays through a very wide-ranging and generously numbered set of tunes that revel in his fascination for rock’s links with classical strains, R&B, English folk, free jazz, electronic dance and progressive-rock textural ambitions, even. He’s just grown up, I guess. Or maybe I have. (John Payne)

Also playing Tuesday:

THE WOMBATS at the Echoplex; CENTROMATIC at Spaceland.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3

 
Bob Dylan at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium

Most performers from his generation are currently out on the links playing golf or hawking their precious Summer of Love memories on infomercials, but Bob Dylan has been thriving creatively in recent years. With a wide-ranging satellite radio show (Theme Time Radio Hour) and a personable, myth-debunking autobiography (Chronicles, Volume 1), the notoriously erratic and reclusive singer seems engaged with the world again. It just goes to show that Dylan is human, the kind of emotional ballplayer who has taken his lumps yet still manages to get up for the big games. On his most recent CD, 2006’s widely (and justifiably) praised Modern Times, he contrasts his apocalyptic foreboding with lustful shout-outs to Alicia Keys, buttressed by an intuitively flexible country-blues band. Their sinuous beats and shadowy atmospherics instill a sense of genuine mystery in songs like “Ain’t Talkin’” and “Thunder on the Mountain.” Dylan’s not likely to coddle the crowd tonight with between-song pleasantries, and his radical rearrangements of prized classics don’t always work, but his constant risk-taking fends off the paralysis of nostalgia. (Falling James)

 
Loudon Wainwright III at Largo

Loudon Wainwright III’s name has gotten the most play lately in connection with his kids Rufus and Martha, both of whom joined the family songwriting business and command the devoted followings to prove it. (Rufus and Martha’s mom — and Loudon’s ex-wife — is Canadian folkie Kate McGarrigle.) But this month, the L.A.-based artist has a fine new album out that should remind listeners of where his offspring got their genes — literally: On Recovery, the follow-up to last year’s Knocked Up soundtrack album Strange Weirdos, Wainwright revisits material from the early portion of his career, leading a band that includes keyboardist Patrick Warren, guitarist Greg Leisz and producer Joe Henry through fleshed-out arrangements of alternately tender and acerbic ditties like “Saw Your Name in the Paper,” “School Days” and “Motel Blues.” (Alas, no “Dead Skunk.”) Expect the VH1 Storytellers treatment tonight. (Mikael Wood)

Also playing Wednesday:

LEE “SCRATCH” PERRY at the El Rey; THE NIGHT MARCHERS at the Echo; THREE 6 MAFIA at House of Blues.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4

 
Why? at the Echoplex

It’s hard to imagine a better cross-section of this city’s young and restless than a Why? gig. They all turn out in droves: the lovelorn Romeos and diary Don Juans, the scenester kids in American Apparel monochromes, the hip-hop fans with bouncing hands, the vegan folksters, the slick rockers, the mixtape traders and the occasional goth too — and it’s no wonder. When the Oakland crew’s third LP, Alopecia, dropped this March to rave reviews, it was plenty clear that Why? are the sole owners of their sound, a kaleidoscopic fruit roll-up of Pavement shambolics, Dylanesque imagery, Lil Wayne-y warped rap and Arthur Russell experimentalism (and then some). But this ain’t no po-mo car crash. Experienced in person, the winsome Yoni Wolf and his multi-instrumentalist ’mates become modern art-pop masters — as likely to inspire a sing-along as an impromptu poem scribbled on a ticket stub. (Chris Martins)

Also playing Thursday:

THE BAD PLUS at the Catalina Bar & Grill; TOM BROSSEAU at the Smell.