Music Picks: Smokeout Festival, Mike Miller Group, Zola Jesus, Saul Williams

wed 3/7

PHOTO BY SCOTT IRVINE

Jolie Holland: See Sunday.

PHOTO BY RYAN MANNING

Cloud Nothings: See Friday.

Location Info

Map

Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

900 Exposition Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90007

Category: Museums

Region: USC to South L.A.

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New Multitudes

MAYAN THEATER

Like a next-gen follow-up to Wilco and Billy Bragg's Mermaid Avenue collections, the just-released album New Multitudes finds four monsters of folk setting a clutch of previously unrecorded Woody Guthrie lyrics to fresh music. Those monsters, in descending order of interest to people who don't own either Mermaid Avenue: Yim Yames of My Morning Jacket, Jay Farrar of Son Volt, Will Johnson of Centro-matic and Anders Parker of Varnaline. (Sorry, bro.) FYI, the record's pretty dull, with little of the crispness Bragg and Wilco brought to their thing. But between them these dudes have written plenty of great tunes, including Yames' "Dear God," which even the Roots had to sample, so with any luck they'll veer off-message tonight. With Texas-based singer-songwriter Sarah Jaffe. —Mikael Wood

Alpha & Omega

COBALT CAFÉ

When Alpha & Omega vocalist Luis Hernandez greeted the crowd at last summer's Sound and Fury fest with "I have nothing fucking positive to say today. I don't give a fuck!" he neatly encapsulated his band's attitude to date. These Angelenos apparently don't give a fuck if anyone cares about their metal-edged, mid-'90s East Coast–y hardcore; don't give a fuck if they draw constant comparisons to Cro-Mags (whose third album was titled Alpha Omega); and don't give a fuck if people (including themselves) get hurt in the flailing pits provoked by their spiteful sets. But bored, disillusioned kids will always gravitate to aggressive, negative music, so Alpha & Omega's belligerence serves them well in a genre where the music may have become harder, but the core message has grown increasingly demure. —Paul Rogers

Also playing:

KRISTIN KORB TRIO at Vitello's.

thu 3/8

Saul Williams

EL REY THEATRE

"The truth is changing lanes as I'm crossing the street," Saul Williams announces on "Explain My Heart," from his 2011 album, Volcanic Sunlight. The poet-actor-singer has always divined the truth and explained his heart with a series of provocative slogans, raps and truly free verse. Whether he's taking on the gods of war in "Not in My Name" and the minions of injustice in "List of Demands (Reparations)" or examining this nation's history of oppression through Bowie-tinted glasses on the 2007 opus The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust!, Williams casts his words out like a caustic laser. But on his new album, the Paris-based performer expands his focus and lets in a little light (literally, on "Look to the Sun") while he examines the puzzling laws of attraction (via the funky electronic jam "Girls on Saturn"). —Falling James

Cool Moms

THE SMELL

Local band Cool Moms are fronted by Allison Wolfe, who formerly starred in the Olympia, Wash., riot-grrl iconoclasts Bratmobile. If anything, her new songs with Cool Moms are even brattier, as she rants and chants crude garage-punk bursts like "Fuck You, Dude" and the sarcastic "You're So Pretty." Guitarist Grace Hall's and bassist Mary Jane's spidery riffs crawl atop the wreckage of drummer Shelina Louise's beats with a primitive lo-fi charm. Even better, their songs are so short, they rarely exceed a minute and a half in length. Nonetheless, the charismatic Wolfe is able to cram plenty of sassy and arty attitude into these curt blasts. —Falling James

Crystal Antlers, Feeding People

ECHO

Crystal Antlers are less a band than a geological process. Bassist and bandleader Jonny Bell's disciplined crew of hard-charging psychonauts can take any old thing you might spot on the wall at the record store — Hawkwind, Beefheart, Les Rallizes Denudes, Funkadelic, the Mothers of Invention, Roky Erickson — and crush it into a chunk of rock so dense it'll grow its own gravitational field. Starting with a 7-inch financed by a bank robber, this Long Beach band has DIY-ed its way into last year's full-length–plus-bonus–10-inch Two Way Mirror, the most focused and powerful expression yet of a sound demanding complete commitment to both the joys of noise and the art of melody. With Feeding People, an equally potent psych band that would have fit nicely between Blue Cheer and Fifty Foot Hose. —Chris Ziegler

Also playing:

MOBB DEEP at Key Club; MAMAK KHADEM at the Skirball; HENRY WOLFE, RACHEL GOODRICH, HAROULA ROSE at Bootleg Bar; CEREMONY at Center for the Arts, Eagle Rock; ANDREW W.K. at Avalon; JORDAN KNIGHT at House of Blues; KORALLREVEN at the Echoplex; HOWLIN RAIN at Fingerprints; LA SERA and COLD SHOWERS at the Satellite.