Rock Picks: Antony & the Johnsons, Kings of Leon, Jay-Z

 
MONDAY, OCTOBER 13 

 
Jolie Holland at the Troubadour

Chico De Luigi

Antony Hegarty: In Another World

LEGO

Kings of Leon: I will Followill.

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• Mickey Hart
• Staples Center
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• Tina Turner
• Woody Jackson

Jolie Holland’s fourth album, The Living and the Dead (Anti- Records), is touted as one of the folk singer’s rare forays into rock music. “I love rock & roll, but I think it was hard for me to trust its motives till now,” she says playfully. Longtime fans shouldn’t worry that she’s ranging too far from the sweetly homespun roots-country tunes she’s written in the past; as a rock & roll exercise, The Living and the Dead is a very tentative testing of the waters, with only the low-key Stones-y riffs of “Your Big Hands” coming across as really rocking. With shimmering, shape-shifting guitars from M. Ward and the ace Tom Waits sideman Marc Ribot, much of the album swims in lulling balladry, especially “Fox in Its Hole,” whose spectral plucking and hazy droning are positively enchanting. Holland specializes in a form of folk-pop that sounds vaguely old-timey without really being chained to any one specific place or era. She revels in a timeless dreaminess that somehow ends up sounding brand new on shadowy interludes like “Love Henry,” where her hushed, confessional singing has a sensually morbid intimacy. Long live the dead. (Falling James)

 
Also playing Monday:

TINA TURNER at Staples Center; RADEMACHER, EXIT MUSIC, EAGLE & TALON, TRANSMISSION at the Echo; MIKE STINSON at Redwood Bar & Grill; MAIA SHARP at Room 5 Lounge.

 
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 14  

 
Antony & the Johnsons at Walt Disney Concert Hall

It’s been nearly four years since this New York–based avant-cabaret outfit released I Am a Bird Now, the Mercury Music Prize–winning album that took Antony & the Johnsons from local cult act to international art-scene sensation. Of course, given the epic scale that the group’s music works on, four years isn’t a terribly long time, especially when you consider all the extracurricular work Antony’s been doing lately: duetting with Björk on her Volta; touring a stage show called Turning with video artist Charles Atlas; pulling disco-diva duty on this year’s terrific debut by Hercules & Love Affair. That said, The Crying Light, Bird’s long-awaited follow-up, is finally due out in January on Secretly Canadian; this week, the label releases a fine teaser EP, Another World, featuring the album’s lead single and four other tracks (including “Shake That Devil,” a sax-equipped juke-joint jam). At Disney Hall, Antony and his band are joined by a 20-piece orchestra performing arrangements devised by Nico Muhly, the buzzed-about young classical composer. Another world awaits. (Mikael Wood)

 
Also playing Tuesday:

WEEZER, ANGELS & AIRWAVES, TOKYO POLICE CLUB at the Forum; THE TING TINGS, SANTOGOLD at the Wiltern; WIRE at the Echoplex (see Music feature); JOHNETTE NAPOLITANO at the Hotel Café (see Hoopla); JANEANE GAROFALO at Largo; DEVON WILLIAMS’ SOMETHING at the Smell.

 
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 15   

 
Kings of Leon at Nokia Theatre

We want rock bands to both beam us into larger-than-life, fantastic scenarios and to vividly articulate the closer-to-home, sometimes-cloudy sensations clogging our heads and hearts. Tennessee brothers (and a cousin) Kings of Leon artfully cover these disparate bases on their just-released fourth album, Only by the Night, a strapping-yet-sensitive, Southern- and sepia-toned road-trip rawk record that throbs with country music’s melancholic ache but not its weary Wal-Mart melodrama. It probably took weeks of tech-y tweaking to achieve the disc’s deliberately earthy, honest-to-goodness guitar and bass tones (and similar effort to bulk up the occasionally stadium-ready drums), but it’s Caleb Followill’s wrinkly, last-thing-I’ll-ever-say-to-you timbre that lends emotional weight to Only by the Night’s transporting songcraft. “Closer”’s moonlit guitars and head-in-hands vocal will be a soundtrack to so many chapters in so many lives, as will the lonesome backwoods U2-isms of “Use Somebody.” And that, my friends, is what this rock & roll thing is all about. (Paul Rogers)

 
Jay-Z at the Hollywood Palladium

It’s only been a year since Live Nation shuttered the Palladium last fall for renovations following a 10-night stand by Morrissey. But I suppose that when Jay-Z agrees to play your grand-reopening party, the wise move is to let him — even if the occasion isn’t exactly once in a lifetime. In any event, rocking the house that Frank Sinatra once rocked was probably an offer Jay couldn’t refuse: Though he stepped down after a successful run as president of Def Jam last year, Mr. Beyoncé Knowles is back in chairman-of-the-board mode, as reflected by the recent announcement of StarRoc, a new joint-venture label he’s forming with the dudes in the Norwegian production team StarGate. Tonight, the rapper will be backed by a 12-piece band; expect to hear all the hits, as well as a possible preview of stuff from The Blueprint 3, which Jay has reportedly promised he’ll have out by December. (Mikael Wood)

 
Earl Zero at the Echoplex

Veteran roots-reggae chanter Earl Zero brings both an impressive catalog of mid-1970s reggae classics (“None Shall Escape the Judgment,” “Shackles & Chains,” “Righteous Works”) and an insanely deep, fated personal pedigree. Born and raised in Kingston’s Greenwich Town, he grew up alongside close childhood friend Earl “Chinna” Smith — one of reggae’s most potent ax men — and, between the dozen or so Greenwich Sound Systems, a burgeoning Rastafarian faith and a natural gift for spiritually provocative music, Zero came to perfectly represent the abiding, quietly revolutionary stance of the Jamaican Rasta. In fact, Zero’s serene dignity led him to a particularly notable sideline, after Bob Marley personally selected the youth to serve as his herbsman, which entailed chopping and blending the ideal mixture of ganja to best serve the superstar’s head. Tonight, Zero will be working with a full, live band, and, with the King Tubby–groomed dub genius Scientist at the controls, it’s a damn near-perfect proposition. (Jonny Whiteside)