Music Picks: California Lions, Efterklang, Lucy Rose

sun 3/10

An Evening of Space Ritual Featuring Nik Turner

PHOTO BY LUIS AGUIRRE

Naama Kates: See Wednesday.

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• Naama Kates
• Rachelle Ferrell
• Lucy Rose
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THE ECHOPLEX

Nik Turner is the sax player, flutist, sometime singer and co-founder of legendary space-rock band Hawkwind. The group took music to a truly extraterrestrial level in the mid-'70s, and its echoed-to-infinity live album, Space Ritual, remains a mind-melting classic even today. (You can hear Turner honking mightily on songs like "Time We Left This World Today" and "Orgone Accumulator.") After the various personal and legal crises that followed Turner's eventual, final split from Hawkwind, he orchestrated his own Hawkwindian outfit (named after Space Ritual) and committed to the same kind of screaming, sci-fi insanity. Tonight, he'll play Hawkwind's Space Ritual album in full at the Echoplex. As the song warns, be prepared for sonic attack! —Chris Ziegler

D.R.I.

HOUSE OF BLUES

In the early 1980s, as metal bands like Venom and Metallica were hijacking punk's pummeling pace to birth the thrash genre, Houston's Dirty Rotten Imbeciles were arriving at a "crossover" sound from the opposite direction. Borderline obsessed with uniting long-haired and short-haired fans of aggressive guitar music (their 1987 third album was even titled Crossover), D.R.I. increasingly infused their street-level, pit-provoking hardcore with metal's fizzy riffing, technical dexterity and dramatic dynamics. But with song titles like "Soup Kitchen" and "Capitalist Suck," the quartet railed against Reaganism and preached a beer-fueled good time rather than embracing the escapist, often violent imagery of many a thrash act. The group is getting back up to speed after founding guitarist Spike Cassidy's recent battle with cancer, and the scene still holds a place for D.R.I.'s thoughtful party ethos. —Paul Rogers

mon 3/11

Lucy Rose

HOTEL CAFÉ

English singer Lucy Rose escaped rural Warwickshire and made a name for herself in London after finding success through YouTube videos rather than major-label connections (at least at first). She gained further attention via collaborations with Bombay Bicycle Club, but she's at her most arresting on her 2012 solo album, Like I Used to, where her pure, airy vocals are sweet but not sugary. "Middle of the Bed" and the strangely surreal video for "Bikes" (in which Rose improbably takes on a gang of desert bikers) show that soft pop music can still be intelligent, while the somber ballad "Shiver" needs little more than chimes, a faraway guitar and her languidly drifting vocals to completely enchant. —Falling James

tue 3/12

Oz Noy

CATALINA JAZZ CLUB

Israeli-born Oz Noy is one of the East Coast's leading exponents of fusion guitar, mixing elements of rock, jazz, blues and funk. Noy's work is diverse enough to have gained him recording gigs and live dates with the likes of Toni Braxton and Chris Botti, all while developing his own bands. This evening, he begins a two-night run at Catalina in Hollywood with a trio including heavyweights Anthony Jackson (Chaka Khan, Paul Simon, Donald Fagen) on bass and master drummer Dave Weckl (Chick Corea Elektric Band, Madonna, Robert Plant and Mike Stern). Weckl and Jackson have been working together off and on since the 1980s, and their pairing with Noy likely will bring his signature tunes like "Schizophrenic" to their utmost potential. —Tom Meek

Deceased

THE JOINT

Virginia death-thrashers Deceased made their mark in the early '90s by shaping their lyrical aesthetic around zombies, the supernatural and other horror stories. Album titles like Fearless Undead Machines tell you what you need to know about their obsessions. Don't be too scared, though. Deceased doesn't get gory in the way that more extreme bands like Cannibal Corpse are known to. Instead, band leader King Fowley pens odes to the creepy and the crawly, which combine the tongue-in-cheek with genuine spookiness, for a sound that amounts to the metal version of an old E.C. Comics book. Vocally, Fowley's rasp has the urgency of a man who has survived these horrors and is always prepared for the next undead obstacle in his path. Plenty of other bands have mined this territory since this group's formation, but Deceased still do it best. —Jason Roche

wed 3/13

Naama Kates

SILVERLAKE LOUNGE

"Alternative" is such a nebulous term, but it might still best describe singer, composer and actress Naama Kates. Her just-out King for the Day LP follows up last year's critical fave The Unexamined Life. The sound here is an ever-deeper plunge down a rabbit hole of poetical pop, playing out in moody, brooding and bracingly curious-minded lyrics and slightly skewed musical planes. Kates delivers her disarmingly self-revelatory observations in a blessedly uncontrived vocal style, and her often structurally complex pieces benefit big-time from a new band that includes drummer Rich West, trombone ace Mike Richardson and bassist John Carfi. Whatever "alternative" may or may not denote, Kates' highly accessible brand of pop cabaret ultimately is music of insight, surprise and pure delight. —John Payne