Music Picks: Dublab Anniversary, Ladyhawke, Flying Lotus

Ladyhawke

THE ECHOPLEX

PHOTO BY SMALLZ AND RASKIND

Delta Rae: See Saturday.

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More About

• Mike Miller
• Delta Rae
• Brian Charette
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media
• Metal and Hardcore

New Zealand–born multi-instrumentalist Pip Brown takes her stage name, Ladyhawke, from the 1985 fantasy film. Before taking that moniker, Brown was part of a band named after the 1971 classic Two-Lane Blacktop. Both of these nods to film are perfectly fitting, as Brown's music creates lucid visuals, from soft-focus fantasy to roadside stands flying by in a reckless, late-night drive. To craft her songs, the Kiwi uses signature sounds from a vast array of genres, incorporating crunched guitars, fuzzy synths, super-clean precision bass lines, wah effects and more. She blends these effects and styles so that her sound rarely embraces a single one, yet each is always present — like a delicious smoothie studded with pieces of fruit. Her synth-driven mix of pop and rock walks a line between the very latest in pop music and memory-invoking vintage sounds. —Diamond Bodine-Fischer

tue 9/25

Beach House, Dustin Wong

THE WILTERN

Dream-pop indie heroes Beach House are back with their third release,  Bloom (Sub Pop), with which they officially quantum-jump into the indie-rock stratosphere, should they care to reside there. This Baltimore duo, featuring singer Victoria Legrand and guitarist Alex Scally, has labored long and hard to refine the hazy charms of its teenage pop symphonies/anthems. Bloom, aided immensely by higher production standards, echoes with elegance and superior songwriting craft; the non-ironic intensity of the band's passion shines. Ex–Ponytail/Ecstatic Sunshine guitar seeker Dustin Wong's second solo record, Dreams Say, View, Create, Shadow Leads, loops out sound through a mini-mountain of digital octave-splitters, distorters and other toodlebugs; when he filigrees and layers melodic leads atop it all, it's aural ecstasy, like hearing light through a kaleidoscope. —John Payne

Ferraby Lionheart

BOOTLEG BAR

Gentle but firm, Ferraby Lionheart strikes with a focused intelligence underlying his down-to-earth, laid-back persona and his engrossing story-songs. He's a real musician with superior technical craft: His acoustic guitar- and piano-accompanied pieces take their cues from Dylan's '60s folk and, a bit strangely, what sounds like Elton John channeling Cole Porter. Ferraby's love-and-loss-and-love-again subject matter often is paired with bubbly, bouncy music, giving his songs a resonant ambiguity and highly visual impact. With eyes shut and a slight grimace, he'll deliver a lyrically involving and musically deep set from his Catch the  Brass Ring EP and Jack of Hearts full-length, and a few new tunes to boot. —John Payne

wed 9/26

Taken by Trees

BOOTLEG THEATER

When Victoria Bergsman was still the leader of mellow Swedish pop band The Concretes, she memorably turned the old Rolling Stones warhorse "Miss You" inside out by taking away the disco groove and Mick Jagger's fey-macho swagger, replacing them with a softly whispered intimacy and a haunting sparseness that really brought out the poignant loneliness of the melody. Now with her solo project Taken by Trees, Bergsman continues to defy expectations with subtle transformations of such hard-rock anthems as Guns N' Roses' "Sweet Child o' Mine." But she's much more engaging when she plumbs the watery depths of her own original songs on Trees' new album, Other Worlds. Washes of synthesized strings and percolating electronics illuminate Bergsman's gentle cooing on "Large," while her airy vocals float lightly over the gauzy landscape of the aptly titled serenade "Dreams." —Falling James

Accept, Kreator

AVALON

While Accept's brand of metal is more grounded in hard rock than the punishing thrash executed by fellow German natives Kreator, both groups have joined the growing club of heavy-metal acts that are aging gracefully. Accept's new album, Stalingrad, is a bruising ripper that stands strong alongside their classic '80s material. Though he doesn't make longtime fans forget the rasp of original vocalist Udo Dirkschneider, new screamer Mark Tornillo leaves an impressive mark on Accept's metallic blueprint. Our favorite German metal record this year, though, is Kreator's Phantom Antichrist. The band has completed its return to the ruthlessly efficient thrash that made fans mosh worldwide three decades ago. Kreator have one simple purpose with their music: brute force. Together, Accept and Kreator lead a German invasion that we welcome. —Jason Roche

thu 9/27

Brian Charette Organ Sextette

BLUE WHALE

This fabulous NYC organist sports a wide-ranging résumé, having played with everyone from Joni Mitchell to Max Weinberg, and his inspiration comes from an equally diverse subset, from kung-fu to Olivier Messiaen. Imagine an austere French composer chasing birds while leaping from tree to tree in a yellow Bruce Lee jumpsuit, and you'll have an idea of what this music is about. Charette's arrangements draw upon Messiaen's harmonic innovations, but while Messiaen was ever in pursuit of the sublime, Charette manages to keep things grounded, even earthy. A faithful lifetime church organist, Messiaen might raise an eyebrow over titles like "Computer God" or "Prayer for an Agnostic," but were he to meet Charette, they might have a nice time, comparing scale modes and White Crane to Wing Chun. —Gary Fukushima

Obituary

KEY CLUB

It's easy to paint death-metal bands as just twisted kids who replaced pulling wings off insects with abusing funny-shaped guitars and scribbling slasher-flick lyrics. But Obituary, which helped define their genre with 1989's head-shakingly heavy yet boldly diverse debut Slowly We Rot and continue to command rabid crowds worldwide, clearly have more to offer than just perma-pubescent spite. At a time when Metallica were going (relatively) soft, these Floridian heshers were still seeking sonically violent, fanatical escapism. They've been exploring the extremes of an intrinsically extreme genre ever since, delivering both blur-speed belligerence and wallowing sludge. This might seem passé in the context of contemporary metalcore, but Obituary were buckling metal's edges back when few dared do so, and their brutal honesty still rings (loudly) true. —Paul Rogers