Just before his encore at the sold-out Troubadour on Monday night, U.K. singer-producer James Blake had someone to thank. Introducing his last song, a lonely and lilting solo piano cover, he first lauded its songwriter. “She’s been such an influence on my writing for the last year or so, and that she might be here to hear this is such a massive honor.”

Then he played Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You,” and at that the audience gasped a bit and searched around the room. Sure enough, in the upper VIP balcony, there was the Lady of the Canyon, watching over the proceedings.

The idea that Blake could get Mitchell out to an ostensible dubstep show is a testament to the power of his own vision. His sound draws from many contemporary sources -- beat music’s queasy bass and reverb-sodden percussion; the treated, pinging minimal synths of modernist composers; the androgynous croons of Antony Hegarty and Arthur Russell. But true to his praise for Mitchell, there was a songwriter’s heart to all of it in the way he recontextualized simple sonic ideas to reveal new truths.

Rammstein is not a band built for subtlety. It is tribal metal for your midnight ride to the Euro disco, a precise construction of Teutonic grunts, computers and electric guitars led by singer Till Lindemann, an ex-Olympics-level swimmer with the voice of Nosferatu. For non-German speakers, he might as well be singing of daisies and unicorns, except you know he isn’t.

Tours of the U.S. are rare for the Berlin industrial-metal act, so the Forum in Inglewood was packed Friday with fans ready for a brutal, action-packed pummeling. They were rewarded with thundering beats and guitars and pillars of fire right at the front of the stage — close enough to nearly scorch the first rows of fans surging forward.

Explosions and fireballs weren’t reserved only for peak moments but used for virtually every song. A growling “Wiener Blut” delivered exploding plastic babies with laser-beam eyes, and “Feuer Frei!” erupted with shouts of “bang, bang!” before band members put on facemasks with built-in flamethrowers.

 
The Malian singer-guitarist Vieux Farka Touré plays desert blues with a personal charisma and technical finesse that have led some reviewers to dub him the North African Jimi Hendrix.

It’s a useful, facile handle for Western listeners. But in his edgy, exploratory hourlong Thursday night set at the Satellite, Touré summoned the tender, reflective Hendrix of “Little Wing” and “The Wind Cries Mary” more than the raunchy, insinuating belter of “Foxy Lady.”

Touré’s musical bloodlines are impeccable. Born in 1981, he’s the son of the late guitar virtuoso Ali Farka Touré, who initially discouraged his offspring from adopting a musician’s nomadic life. But the younger Touré’s talents couldn’t be denied. Trained as a percussionist, he also apprenticed with Toumani Diabate, a wizard of the harp-like kora. Both influences color Touré’s guitar playing, which can be delicate and probing, then explode into ferocious rhythmic exchanges with his excellent drummer Tim Keiper.

With a pared-down three-man lineup that also included bassist Mamadou Sidibe, Touré began cautiously on Thursday with a calm, thoughtful trio of tunes, as if patiently waiting for bigger grooves to kick in. He followed “Touri” with two songs, “Ali” and “Amana Quai,” off his new album “The Secret,” which was produced by jazz futurist Eric Krasno and features contributions from Dave Matthews, Derek Trucks and Ivan Neville.

Using a slight, echo-y reverb, Touré’s Godin electric guitar chimes, shimmers and pulses, yielding mirage-like, minor-scale chords that mysteriously waver for an instant, then vanish. He rarely indulges in extended solos, and never in ostentatious riffing or aimless noodling. The title of his second album, “Fondo,” means The Road, and this is a musician who, in live performance, has clear ideas about where he’s going, and why.

His gently twisting melodic lines can acquire intensity with surprising speed, as they did on a brilliant version of “Lakkal” that left both band and audience momentarily breathless. “It’s good to see everybody moving,” Touré observed with a smile.

But the ambience, in sum, is of a fervent, sustained trance. Rather than building to theatrical pop-star crescendos, Touré generally eases his songs down gently at the end. His spare, double-tracked vocals, mainly in traditional Malian languages, occasionally in English, serve largely to frame the superb instrumentation, not the other way around.

Touré’s cosmopolitan tastes extend in many directions. At Thursday’s show the band unleashed the reggae-infused “Diaraby Magni,” from “Fondo,” and “Nama Mouna,” which sounds like a proto-ska tune smuggled into Kingston by way of Bamako.

The encore, “Dounia,” from his first album, supplied a final, gentle grace note to the evening, before the band brought it down to a conclusive hush. Indeed, there was nothing left to say.

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-- Reed Johnson

Photo: Vieux Farka Toure performs at the Satellite in Silver Lake. Credit: Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times

Rarely has a band played with so much joy after such a blindsiding heartbreak as TV on the Radio did on Wednesday night at the Music Box. Less than a month after the post-punk crooners unexpectedly lost bassist Gerard Smith to lung cancer at 36 (and postponed this round of touring), the band paid him what must have been the most fitting tribute possible -– with a set underlining the vitality and humanity behind one of the most interesting guitar-based bands in America.

After early albums of minimalist tone-poems, a stab at more accessible rock (“Return To Cookie Mountain”) and an ambitious disco deconstruction (“Dear Science”), its new album “Nine Types of Light” turns their digital chilliness inside-out. It abides by the famous James Brown ethic that every instrument should be played like interlocking drums, but it has a grown-man confidence in pleasure as a better goal for music than pure confrontation.

Wednesday’s set used that sentiment as a starting point. Rather than take the occasion as a somber, austere memorial to Smith, the band wore some inspired Devo-ish hats and cracked wise onstage; the magnificently bearded guitarist Kyp Malone teasingly introduced singer Tunde Adebimpe with a string of unpronounceable nonsense.

Long before the word “interactive” became an entertainment-industry mantra, Elvis Costello was there with his fabled “Spinning Songbook.”

A quarter century after he first cooked up the idea that exponentially amped up the practice of taking requests from the audience, Costello and his band the Imposters have resurrected the concept for a new generation, although the sold-out crowd on hand Wednesday for the first of two nights at the Wiltern Theatre clearly included a good number of those who’d been following him since his first go-round.

The new Revolver tour sees music as a thing of joy -- something of a revolutionary statement in and of itself in these days, when another of big buzzwords in the music business is monetization. This isn’t the garden-variety promotional tour designed primarily to build familiarity with -- and sales of -- an artist’s latest product, although he did manage to cleverly work in a couple of numbers from his most recent release, “National Ransom,” during an extended round of encores after a 2½-hour set.

Rather, Costello, keyboardist Steve Nieve, bassist-vocalist Davey Farragher and drummer Pete Thomas played like guests of honor at the most invigorating kind of living room party where attendees challenge one another in a combination of “Name That Tune” and “Top That!”

As far as pop music insurrections go, the recent success of such dewy folk acts as England's Mumford & Sons, L.A.'s Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros and the sylvan Seattle combo Fleet Foxes, which performed to a sold-out crowd at the Hollywood Palladium on Saturday, is a pretty mild-mannered one. But the huge sales figures and over-capacity theaters each have earned in the last two years suggest an interesting question -- what's making hundreds of thousands of fans turn to some of the most traditional and comforting sounds in popular music in the last 40 years?

The band's 2008 debut of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young-style harmonies and acoustic madrigals sold around 400,000 copies in America. Its album "Helplessness Blues" came out May 2. Given that the beard-nuzzling on Foxes' albums is practically audible, frontman Robin Pecknold is an unlikely star. His lyrics make those by the Decemberists' Colin Meloy seem dangerous -- collies are petted, woodland cabins are built by loving grandfathers, Pecknold laments, "Oh, man, what I used to be" at 25.

Sex became an act of protest in Ricky Martin's concert Friday night at the Nokia Theatre, where every hip thrust carried the charge of this Puerto Rican pop star's latest message. "All I want is equality," he said near the end of the show. "The same for everybody."

Martin's freedom-fighter guise signaled an unlikely shift from the fun-loving hedonist he portrayed in glossy late-'90s hits such as "Livin' la Vida Loca" and "Shake Your Bon-Bon." It's a turn toward politics rooted in the personal: Last year the singer, 39, came out proudly as "a fortunate homosexual man" (as he put it in an announcement on his website), and Friday's show -- the first of two L.A. dates on his world tour -- seemed to reflect years of pent-up frustration.

[This post has been corrected. See note below.]

Opting to cover a Patsy Cline song is like deciding to hit a drive like Tiger Woods, nail a scene like Meryl Streep or make a meatball like Mario Batali. It’s easy enough to declare, but all the heart in the world will get you only part of the way there.

On Saturday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall, a collection of singers headed by Los Angeles vocal quartet the Living Sisters and including actor-singers Zooey Deschanel and John C. Reilly, Los Angeles punk and roots luminary John Doe, Scottish vocalist Shirley Manson of the band Garbage and statuesque country singer Charlie Wadhams attempted just that, taking on one of the great American song stylists with two hours of heartbreak and beauty.

 
Thom Yorke crept into the Low End Theory shortly after 11 p.m. on Wednesday, a few months after he did it the first time. For this sequel, the lines around the Airliner weren't infinite. Nor was the Internet aflame. Until one of the bouncers blew the whistle, no one knew aside from Flying Lotus and the inner sanctum of the Wednesday night weekly.

This translated into practically a private DJ show starring Yorke and Lotus, the chief of the Los Angeles beat scene. If tickets were left to auction online, they'd bring in enough to fund a state Senate campaign. Instead, it was $10 for anyone with the foresight to make it to 2419 North Broadway by 10 p.m.

"Thom Yorke is in the building. Nigel Godrich is in the building. Flying Lotus is in the building. If I were you, I'd move up close," said Daddy Kev, employing unimpeachable logic.

"I don’t know what's about to go on, but I know it's about to go down," said Nocando, rattling off a 64-bar freestyle, eliciting Yorke's applause.

Explosions in the Sky’s music has always seemed drawn to death. Its breakthrough album, “Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever” was released on Aug. 27, 2001, with inauspicious artwork of an aircraft with a caption reading “This plane will crash tomorrow.” Subsequent records had such titles as “The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place” and “All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone,” and the band’s pop culture breakthrough came from contributions to the “Friday Night Lights” film and television show, about a withering Texas town that displaces its economic terror onto high school football.

So a Saturday night show atop the graves at the Hollywood Forever cemetery seemed apropos for the Texas instrumental quartet. “I can’t see any of you out there, so everyone make spooky noises for the living and the dead,” one of the band’s guitarists requested, prompting a collective haunted-house moan from the crowd. But the most interesting moments of the long, sometimes muddled but often overwhelming set in the heart of old (dead) Hollywood came from material off the inventive new album “Take Care, Take Care, Take Care.” The new material sounds more alive than anything in its catalog.

Explosions in the Sky’s songs are often two to three times longer than most pop singles, and generally behave like this: Ethereal interlocking guitars set a mood and melody, drums and bass add direction and heft, and a hailstorm of distortion effects finishes off a denouement. For most of the band’s career, that’s been enough. Its unerring talent for prettiness and pacing keep its songs inviting even when they clear the 10-minute mark, and it’s no coincidence that it’s had wide success in film placements — this is music built for dramatic interludes.

“All I Ever Wanted,” the best song from the Airborne Toxic Event’s forthcoming album, “All at Once,” starts in the same way that many of the band's songs do. A man is lying awake in bed, perhaps with a woman or a stiff drink next to him, and he is worrying about the future. “I can feel myself turning into my father,” singer Mikel Jollett says over a high-neck guitar figure and spacious bassline. Then his troubles turn existential -- “I shudder when I think I might not be here forever.”

These are elemental fears from a songwriter known for wringing four verses and choruses from a split-second sight of an old flame across a barroom. But they’re apt fears. After the band's white-hot rise through the L.A. eastside indie demimonde on the strength of its Smiths-y romantic rock, its 2008 self-titled debut was picked up by Island Records. The album went on to sell a few hundred thousand copies and made the band mainstream stars in Europe and America.

Hand it to Robert Plant: The man knows how to pick a band.

Right now it’s the Band of Joy, the rootsy ensemble led by Americana music hero Buddy Miller that largely lived up to its name at the first stop of its maiden tour Saturday at the Greek Theatre.

Miller is the one carryover from the Band of Joy’s extraordinary predecessor that Plant and collaborator Alison Krauss and producer T Bone Burnett cooked up for the multiple Grammy-winning album “Raising Sand,” whose Greek tour stop in 2008 was one of the most scintillating concerts in recent years.

Then there was Plant’s '80s outfit the Honeydrippers, an early excursion into roots rock and R&B that allowed the curly-locked singer to delve into the music of his youth.

And, for all we know, there may have been another of note along the way.

OK, OK, so Led Zeppelin does cast a rather large shadow, but Plant has shown no qualms about either stepping away from it, or from occasionally traipsing back through it when the mood strikes.