Rock Picks: Thurston Moore, James Blackshaw, Lisa Hannigan, Modest Mouse

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 20

Thurston Moore, the Haters, Dead Machines, Hive Mind
and others at the Smell

Broken Spindles: Joel Petersen of the Faint

Twelve strings that draw blood: James Blackshaw

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More About

• Henry Fonda
• A.C. Newman
• Thurston Moore
• Broken Spindles
• Schuyler Fisk

Still cherubic at 50, Thurston Moore has never been one to show his age — neither on his face nor in his music. Certain things have changed: Last year the counterculture icon recorded a song for Gossip Girl, and Sonic Youth released a Starbucks-exclusive compilation — but these are hardly the symptoms of a man out of touch (to wit, the ’Bucks comp was curated by the likes of Gus Van Sant and David Cross). Sonic Youth’s most recent album, 2006’s Rather Ripped, reasserted that band’s relevance with a chiseled set of tuneful art-pop, and Moore’s 2007 solo offering, Trees Outside the Academy, explored a folky minimalism entirely new to this man’s repertoire. Here, Moore makes his second trip to the Smell in three months, presumably to take another draught from the fountain of youth. (Chris Martins)

Broken Spindles at the Echo

Broken Spindles is one Joel Petersen of the Faint, a prodigiously talented fella who of late has gotten major backslaps for his sterling remixes of Of Montreal and AFI tracks. Petersen has this thing out called Kiss/Kick, the most cohesively impactful of his four Broken Spindles albums, loaded with short, smart, shocky-punky art that keeps the toes a-tapping as you gaze off across yonder meadow, fleecy clouds rolling by. In the artfully musical way he’s programmed his bass sequences alongside live drums, then slathered the lot with tastefully terse drops of keyboard texture and twittering synths, Petersen makes Kiss/Kick’s new-wavey ambitions come off as a seamless stitching of the best of the pointy-headed Euro punk that graced the waves circa 1979-’81, say, where the melodious Stranglers hump Plastique Bertrand and no-nonsense Gang of Four guitars slash the crackling air. Tuff pop! (John Payne)

Also playing Friday:

SPLIT LIP RAYFIELD at Spaceland; FISCHERSPOONER at Avalon Hollywood; THE GAME at Club Nokia; BLUE RODEO at McCabe’s; DONOVAN FRANKENHEITER at the Roxy; MURDER BY DEATH at the Troubadour; JON BRION AND FRIENDS at Largo at the Coronet.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21

James Blackshaw, Grails at Spaceland

That more people don’t know about 12-string guitarist James Blackshaw is one of the great failures of the Information Age. Hyperbole, sure, considering he’s only 28. Still, over the course of six albums of solo instrumental recordings, the British-born Blackshaw has crafted some of the deepest, most durable acoustic music since John Fahey and Sandy Bull. Like those twin giants of late-20th-century instrumental guitar, Blackshaw’s fingers contain multitudes. Melody lines swirl as the 12 strings create chiming overtones that Blackshaw seems to bend and twist as they float through the air; it’s hard to believe it’s all happening simultaneously, this gilded palace of notes. But the best thing about Blackshaw’s work — besides its simple beauty, of course — is that the artist isn’t stuck in some sort of traditionalist muck. He brings in synthetic tones from time to time, is cool with creepy drones weaving through his finger runs, and somehow manages to recall in all of this not only Fahey and the Tacoma Records school but also Kraftwerk and the Cologne school, Stereolab and the Too Pure school, and Reich and the minimalist school. Blackshaw got his start stateside on the estimable Tompkins Square imprint, but his forthcoming album, The Glass Bead Game, will arrive on Michael Gira’s Young God Records. Opening will be Portland, Oregon, psychedelic instrumental band Grails, also from the Fahey wellspring, but with more sitar and overall Indian vibe. This should be a mystical night overall, in fact. (Randall Roberts)

Lisa Hannigan at the Troubadour

This Dublin-based singer-songwriter is best known for her work in the studio and onstage with Damien Rice, the very earnest Irish folkie who began turning American heads when his tune “The Blower’s Daughter” was featured prominently in the 2004 Julia Roberts/Jude Law flick Closer. (It’s the one where Rice goes on about how he can’t take his eyes off you.) Dave Matthews’ label, ATO, just released an American edition of Hannigan’s lovely solo debut, Sea Sew, on which she demonstrates all she’s learned by backing Rice up — namely, that singing softly (and occasionally loudly) over delicate arrangements dominated by moaning strings and strummed acoustic guitar is a great way of making yourself look like you experience emotions extremely deeply. Now that I think about it, this is a lesson Hannigan probably could’ve learned just as easily by staying home and watching Once. Oh, well! (Mikael Wood)

Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) Reunion at Otis College of Art and Design

The secret life of a dead tactic: The telethon, that tradition so endlessly emblematic of the ’70s, gets inverted and ass-kicked by way of “Telethon Revisited,” a restaging of the 1977 performance “Telethon Returns,” masterminded by LAFMS co-founder Joe Potts. The weekend marathon does, however, have one thing in common with a normal telethon: action-packed entertainment value, even if no money rolls in. More stars than there are in Heaven: Airway, in their first performance in more than a decade; Los Angeles expatriates Smegma, Solid Eye, Le Forte Four and Extended Organ. Throughout the weekend, itinerant noisy maniacs will perform alongside the marquee-value names affiliated with the influential experimental-music collective LAFMS. They’ll be improvising with friends, students and whoever happens to drop in, including stalwarts of the Los Angeles art and experimental-music scenes, such as Liz Young, Mike Kelley, Mitchell Brown and Albert Ortega. It’s streamed live online and broadcast on a giant television set in the Lounge, a phenomenal collection of minds and sounds that have been the secret soundtrack to new ways of expression for 40 years. The program goes from noon on Saturday, February 21 to noon on Sunday, February 22. Wait, no tote bag? (David Cotner)