Rock Picks: Iron & Wine, Mika Miko, the Vaselines, Extra Golden

JENNY OWEN YOUNGS AT THE HOTEL CAFÉ

The Vaselines

Related Content

• The Best Concerts in L.A. This Week
  March 4, 2013
• FYF Fest - Los Angeles State Historic Park - September 1, 2012
  September 2, 2012
• Yes, Jennifer and Jessica Clavin Used to Be in Mika Miko, But Now They're Bleached
  May 1, 2013
• Kurt Vile, Santigold, Rusko
  May 31, 2012
• Music Picks: Rusko, HARD Summer, SMOD
  August 2, 2012

More About

• Carrie Rodriguez
• Jenny Owen Youngs
• Hollywood
• Foods
• Food and Cooking

Brooklyn singer-songwriter Jenny Owen Youngs may have a mainstream, potentially commercial pop style, but she’s not another dumb pop diva. On her 2005 debut CD, Batten the Hatches, a collection of sweetly melodic tunes, she revealed an unexpectedly wicked sense of humor on the antilove song “Fuck Was I” (as in “What the fuck was I thinking?”). She’s up to more clever tricks on her upcoming Nettwerk CD, Transmitter Failure (due later this month), which ranges from the Old World folk of “Clean Break” to the romantic rocker “Last Person.” She’s charming on the soap-bubble-popping lullaby “Nighty Night,” crooning with a languidly confident sensuality. Again, we’re not talking about anything musically radical, but Youngs has that rare ability to write romantic songs that are both sentimental and smart. (Falling James)

THE AVETT BROTHERS, MAGNOLIA ELECTRIC CO. AT THE HENRY FONDA

The latest roots-music outfit to capture the attention of bushy-bearded superproducer Rick Rubin, North Carolina’s Avett Brothers play a ragtag brand of back-porch folk-rock that sounds like the fruit of a more bright-eyed Bright Eyes: Unless you only listen to the Misfits, you’re unlikely to hear songs about death fuller with life than “Die, Die, Die” (from 2007’s Emotionalism) or “Murder in the City” (from last year’s The Gleam II EP). Rubin produced the Avetts’ upcoming major-label debut, I and Love and You, and they’re spending the months till its August release laying some serious groundwork on the road (including a just-wrapped stint opening outdoor-shed shows for the Dave Matthews Band). Openers Magnolia Electric Co. are headed up by veteran indie-folk singer-songwriter Jason Molina, who’s perhaps best known for his late-’90s stuff as Songs: Ohia. (Mikael Wood)

SUNDAY, MAY 10

THE VASELINES, THE TYDE AT EL REY THEATRE

After not having played together since 1990, when they opened a Nirvana show in Edinburgh at Kurt Cobain’s request, Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee re-formed their seminal Glasgow indie-pop outfit the Vaselines last year for a handful of gigs, including their first-ever U.S. shows in New York and Seattle (the latter as part of Sub Pop’s 20th-anniversary festival). Now, in support of Sub Pop’s brand-new double-disc Enter the Vaselines retrospective, Kelly and McKee (along with Michael McGaughrin of 1990s and Bob Kildea and Stevie Jackson of Belle and Sebastian) are headed to our shores once again, kicking off a weeklong North American tour with an El Rey concert sure to attract a preponderance of people (like me!) who weren’t hip to their fuzz-drenched sex jams the first time around. Don’t miss ’em again. With local guitar-pop purveyors the Tyde. (Mikael Wood)

AZITA, DESTROYER, DEVON WILLIAMS AT THE ECHOPLEX

Azita’s newish album, How Will You?, is on the high-standard Drag City label, which gives it a kind of cachet, of course, but bringing expectations of the left-field, kranky and experimental, which the Iranian-born singer’s music/performance art/punk-noise has been in prior incarnations. The new one, however, boasts a full brace of beautifully spare, not-so-ironic, piano-driven paeans to her friends, lovers, time, life and nothing in particular, given the odd little late-Beatles or ’70s lite-jazz shades here and there. Very simple, but not simplistic, the album pays big dividends by third listen or so. Destroyer in tonight’s presentation comes in the solo form of the Vancouver band’s leader guy, Dan Bejar, the New Pornographers/Frog Eyes/Wolf Parade collaborator who’s going to be his usual cryptic chameleon self and will make you laugh and cry and be glad for unclassifiable artists such as himself. Devon Williams is a stylishly facile singer-composer who’s played with Lavender Diamond, Osker, Champagne Socialists and his very own fabulous Makeout Party; he’s got a fine line in melodically superior ’60s pop-type effluvia, and he’s a rippingly good guitar player. What else do you need to know? (John Payne)

TUESDAY, MAY 12

THERESA ANDERSSON AT LARGO AT THE CORONET

Talk about Northern Soul: Swedish-born, NOLA-based Theresa Andersson has a voice and a sound that would wow them in Detroit or Manchester. But as doe-eyed and fragile as she may appear with her Kirsten Dunst looks, she doesn’t need a team of writers and producers to make her a star; she’s a one-woman show. With a little technology, little by little she builds her tracks before our eyes: a little drum beat, a little acoustic guitar, a little violin and some back-up singers (actually, it’s just more live loops of her), and we get one huge sound worthy of the giants at Motown or the Wall of Sound himself, Phil Spector. A complete chanteuse, yet she’s rootsy and eclectic enough to fit right in on Bourbon Street with homemade instruments and bucket-beats. She’s on the road supporting Hummingbird, Go! (Basin Street Records), whose single, “Birds Fly Away,” has been getting some extra love on KCRW, where Andersson appeared live just yesterday. (Daniel Siwek)