Considering that the guys in Ween, who are featured in Saturday's Times, built part of their legend on their alleged fondness for huffing household cleansers and the like, they have never been known for their grimly sober stage shows. In fact, one of the last times we saw Ween in concert some five or so years ago, a bottle of Jack barely left the vicinity of Dean Ween's puffy lips. But it didn't seem to negatively affect the proceedings -- Ween played for nearly three hours that night, including many sumptuous cuts off of "The Mollusk," one of their most accomplished works.

If only the crowd in Vancouver, Canada, had gotten so lucky the other night. According to several blog reports, their concert on Jan. 24 was a sorrowful catastrophe, with Gene Ween (nee Aaron Freeman) so wasted that the rest of the band eventually abandoned him on stage, but only after he interrupted songs with extraneous guitar tunings, botched lyrics and weird vocals, and sometimes simply staggered around amuck. There's video floating around but we don't want to be responsible for spreading it because we still smile (in spite of our blushing at some of the lyrics) when we hear the raunch country classic "... Up a Rope." Wait, actually, we don't have those kinds of scruples. What the hell, here's the video.

According to reports from the next nights in Seattle and Portland, Ore., Ween got its act together quick and turned in stellar shows that left the fans blissed out enough to flood the band's Facebook page with accolades. So what will we have in store for us Saturday when they come to the Wiltern? Let's hope the business side of Ween's righteous mullet-friendly party-rock. In the meantime, read our Saturday story on how a band with no new album but a devoted legion of fans manages to sell out the Wiltern.

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo credit: Jimmy McGinley

Vancouver, Canada’s Dan Bejar, the occasional member of the New Pornographers, has been crafting adventurous solo albums with various musicians under the heavy metal-like moniker  Destroyer since the '90s. On “Kaputt,” his ninth outing, Bejar has made one of his most unique documents yet, rifling through abandoned musical lexicons with the curiosity of a junk-shop dealer who believes that with the right arrangement, any beaten treasure can shine.

For “Kaputt,” Bejar has reclaimed a particularly maligned set of musical hallmarks from '80s soft rock and jazz pap, the kind that streamed out at the dentist’s office from speakers tucked near the Bob Ross-like painting. Think creamy synth settings plucked from New Age meditation tapes, squiggly saxophone lines floating high in the sky of Destroyer’s airy compositions, and Bejar’s own stumbling-around-the-kitchen vocals, at times poetic, at times reveling in the random. It’s as velvety as Roxy Music’s “Avalon” but made from scraps, a pop album for Ariel Pink fans and other radio vultures picking apart the carcass of rock and roll. But it's not zombie art; “Kaputt” has brains, as evidenced by the silken strut of “Suicide Demo for Kara Walker,” a cut-up built from text sent to him by the African American artist that touches on the same issues of race and feminism present in her visual work.

There are other influences on “Kaputt” -- some Cure-like cold bass on “Savage Night at the Opera,” the overheated backup singers on “Blue Eyes” and Spanish guitar from Nic Bragg on the refractive “Bay of Pigs” -- but it all melds together under the big tent of Bejar’s musical imagination. When there’s such a vast palette of noises represented, it questions the very ideas of good and bad, and how much they are tempered by context, trends and generational bias.

For those who were fully functioning adults in the '80s, some of these songs might bring back bad memories of Kenny G commercials on TV. For those who were still kids or barely in existence, these sounds still hold some sort of exotic quality, the lost, sentimental history of crappy radio. At their worst, the songs can suffer from a strange inertia, stillborn in their own lathery bath.

Either way, Bejar doesn’t want the listener to get too bothered by it. After all, he has said that he recorded some of these vocals while lying on the couch or preparing a sandwich. On “Bay of Pigs,” he bastardizes a Duke Ellington title, murmuring over Deep Thoughts synths, “It don’t mean a thing, it never means a thing, it’s called that swing.” “Kaputt” is hallucinatory and unstructured, grabbing for whatever it likes in the moment -- it’s the radio of Bejar’s mind, floating off to sleep.

-- Margaret Wappler

Destroyer
'Kaputt'
Merge
Three and a half stars

Here it is, just a regular old Thursday. What could punch it up? A new video and song from Lady Gaga -- featuring some German monotone lyrics, a guy named Zombie Boy from Montreal, wind-machine trickery and lots of super-serious catwalking. Not since the days of Right Said Fred have we seen a runway get this sexy!

Yes, this video is sort of eyeroll-inducing, but we don't watch Gaga for subtlety, and we'll admit that it's also strangely addictive, in that mysterious way that all Gaga things are. According to stylelist.com, Lady Gaga cooked up this remix (this is the first time, it should be noted, that she's ever released a song in remix form first) for the Mugler fashion show Wednesday in Paris. Mugler and the New York University alum are tight -- creative director Nicola Formichetti is also Gaga's personal stylist.

Shot by fashion photographer Mariano Vivanco, the video focuses on Zombie Boy and is interspersed with scenes from the Mugler fashion show. A little Internet sleuthing (a.k.a. Google) tells us that Zombie Boy is model Rico Genest. Formichetti found him through his Facebook page -- très moderne! Genest told a website called Bizarre that part of what inspired him to cover his entire body and face in tattoos was his childhood love for the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles." Good enough for us!

The song from the video is a track off "Born This Way," Gaga's new album, set for release in May. 

-- Margaret Wappler

On “The Hazards of Love,” the 2009 album from the Decemberists, frontman Colin Meloy and his merry band of Pacific Northwest hucksters created a medieval rock opera. The band’s latest album, “The King Is Dead,” takes the opposite tack, exploring Americana, a much more simple, rustic format.

Problem is, you can take the man out of the opera but you can’t take the opera out of the man. Too much of “The King Is Dead” sounds like the showy wunderkind in theater class earnestly laboring through an Arthur Miller monologue when all he wants to do is stand up and trill at the top of his lungs.

“The King Is Dead” clings so closely to formula that it doesn’t sound like homage or even truth; it sounds like the studious but unconvincing work of an extremely gifted mimic. The right players are on the stage with Meloy — R.E.M.’s Peter Buck contributes guitar and mandolin, and Gillian Welch provides vocals that go a long way in establishing some measure of restraint here — but the songwriting never heads in a direction that can’t be predicted from the outset, a choice brave enough to inch the genre a little further along or afield.

One of the tracks that Buck contributes to, “Calamity Song,” is designed as a tribute to R.E.M., so much so that it almost steals the riff from “Talk About the Passion” note for note. Buck’s cooperation with such a stunt would seemingly remove possibility for a copyright lawsuit, but it only underscores what’s missing on the album — the shadowy, idiosyncratic depths of Americana that R.E.M.’s classic debut, “Murmur,” captured so brilliantly.

—Margaret Wappler

The Decemberists
“The King Is Dead”
(Capitol)
Two stars (Out of four) 

Broadcast, the British band that specializes in lovely and textured electronic pop, has lost their singer, Trish Keenan, who died Friday due to complications from pneumonia at age 42. Warp Records, the band's label, announced that Keenan, a native of Birmingham, England, died in a hospital after battling the illness for two weeks. Other news outlets have reported that Keenan was suffering from a strain of the H1N1 flu.

When Broadcast debuted in the mid-'90s with a handful of singles (that Warp eventually gathered together for their 1997 release, "Work and Non Work"), the buzz was that they were something like a moodier Stereolab. Indeed, Keenan's voice was a sultry anchor for transcendent atmospheric burbles that were inspired by '60s psychedelic music, film scores and dissonant experimental music.

The art-pop group never had too much success in the mainstream -- despite "The Book Lovers" making an unlikely appearance on the "Austin Powers" soundtrack -- and Broadcast saw significant changes in personnel over the course of their four LPs, but they had a devoted following that kept the packed house rapt at their last appearance in Los Angeles, at the Troubadour in November 2009. At the end of Broadcast's set, Keenan performed a song with a fellow cultivator of the dark and mysterious, Vincent Gallo.

Warp's statement said that "this is an untimely tragic loss and we will miss Trish dearly -- a unique voice, an extraordinary talent and a beautiful human being. Rest in Peace."

Above is a video for "Winter Now," a track from Broadcast's 2003 album, "Ha Ha Sound." The band's most recent album was 2009's "Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age."

-- Margaret Wappler

Only Cake’s John McCrea could coax a song with the fuddy-duddy title “Federal Funding” into such witty existence. The opening track to their sixth studio album starts with some crud-covered guitar and the deadpan lyric, “You’ll receive the federal funding; you can add another wing.” It’s a cocky strut made for those thankless academics lobbying for grant money. University proles, congrats! Cake has elevated your career to the same status as the swaggering pimp in gangsta rap.

Its first album since 2004, “Showroom of Compassion” finds the Northern Californian outfit in toned condition, turning out polished compositions that could fit in with its classic catalog (strong with hits like “Short Skirt Long Jacket”) but updated with a few new twists. Also, the same notion of edginess that blessed and cursed other ‘90s bands like Soul Coughing (ahem: the semi-spoken vocals thing) has been nicely mellowed out. As ever before, Cake romps with whatever genre — pickled ska, roughshod country, even a rare snippet of Chopin-like classical piano — in its indie folk mash.

Recorded in the band’s own solar-powered studio in Sacramento over a period of some two years, each song on “Showroom of Compassion” sounds nurtured into its ideal state. The positive-minded “What’s Now Is Now,” with its chirping birds, strings and synth burbles, has almost a utopian, ‘70s AM rock glisten to it. Could a song developed off the city’s energy grid, literally soaked in sunshine, sound any other way?

Cake 
“Showroom of Compassion”
Upbeat Records
Three stars (Out of four)

So, a friend visited L.A. over the holidays and he'd just moved to Portland, Ore., two weeks ago from New York, where he'd been living for the last three years. He showed me pictures of his multi-bedroom house that he's renting for a song. He told me of his illustrious job at a fancy advertising company. And he told me about some cool bar called the Woods that used to be a former funeral parlor.

This is probably the sixth or so good friend in recent years that I've lost to Portland. The truth is that the sweet little city that loves roses and rain has turned into a hipster mecca, an empire of crafty stores and crafty beers and bicycles everywhere and oh, cheap record stores and bars. There might be only one job for every seven hipsters, but that's hardly a reason to worry. According to this music video/trailer for the upcoming show from "Saturday Night Live" comedian Fred Armisen and former blogger/Sleater-Kinney rocker Carrie Brownstein, Portland is where young people go to retire!

In his last movie, “Slumdog Millionaire,” director Danny Boyle showed a sophisticated sense of how music and image can intertwine and intensify each other. With his latest, “127 Hours,” he proves his skill again, reenlisting composer A.R. Rahman, who won two Academy Awards for his racing, kinetic score to Boyle’s violent fairy tale set in Mumbai, India.

The majority of “127 Hours” takes place in a claustrophobic canyon in Utah, where James Franco’s character, mountain climber Aron Ralston, is trapped with a boulder pinned on his arm, left to little devices but to examine his life. The music reflects the dual notions of the movie: an introspective mood fraught with anxiety and the same high-energy lust for experience that fired the engine of “Slumdog Millionaire.”

About half of the soundtrack is devoted to original music from Rahman, especially his three “Liberation” explorations — at turns tense, wondrous and hallucinatory with parched guitars. But the secondary music beautifully captures the tone too. Sigur Ros’ “Festival” is a nine-minute flight that starts as a hushed prayer and builds to an exalted soar.

— Margaret Wappler

A.R. Rahman
“127 Hours”
Interscope Records
Three and a half stars (Out of four)

The L.A. band has had trouble getting local bookings in wake of a shooting outside a show at the Echo six months ago. The police say the band has no connection to the alleged gunman.

Maybe more than any other local band, the Warlocks will be glad to see 2010 gone.

On June 20, the psychedelic outfit played a show at the Echo as part of a night booked by the Eastside DJ crew, the Part Time Punks. Around 2 in the morning, as Warlocks frontman Bobby Hecksher was packing up his gear onstage, he heard gunshots outside.

“It wasn’t one bullet, it was a full-on onslaught,” he recalled, speaking six months later in a coffee shop near his apartment in Northeast Los Angeles. “I heard people screaming and yelling, and then everyone ran inside.”

A gunman had fired about eight rounds from a semiautomatic pistol into the small crowd leaving the Echo, injuring three people, and then quickly escaped.

“One guy came and sat down to the left of the stage,” Hecksher said. “He was holding his head in his hands. And there are people around him and he says, ‘A bullet just grazed my head.’ … He had a gash there. It looked like it had just nicked him.”

About a month later, the police arrested an alleged member of the Mongols biker gang, Jose Luis Sanchez, in connection with the shooting, which the police established as targeting a member of the rival Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang who had been inside the Sunset Boulevard rock club.

All three victims have recovered, including a man who sustained the most critical injury, a gunshot to the torso. However, Hecksher says his band’s reputation is still hurting, and he has been having a hard time getting L.A. bookings in the wake of the shootings.

According to LAPD Lt. Wes Buhrmester, a watch commander with the Rampart station, “the band's involvement, or lack of same, was investigated pursuant to the overall investigation of how this incident occurred, and no link to the suspect was found.” The case will be going to jury trial in early 2011.

The feathery tones of Haroula Rose’s debut album, “These Open Roads,” are pretty enough to cause suspicion. Underneath her gentle finger-picked guitar and girlish but graceful voice, does this L.A.-based singer-songwriter, originally from Chicago, provide the song structure to support all this loveliness?

She does — and each listen to her 11 songs (and one Mason Jennings cover) reveals a new melodic turn that the ear didn’t pick up on before. Recruiting a stable of musicians, including Drive-By Truckers’ John Neff on pedal steel, Orenda Fink from Azure Ray on vocals and producer Andy LeMaster (Bright Eyes, R.E.M.) on slide guitar and a slew of other instruments, Rose picked the right company to realize this highly textured collection that explores a few different moods, though always at a tender remove.

On “Simple Time,” with its peals of mandolin and plinking toy piano, Rose wishes to go back to a time that’s still ripe with hope. Over the playfully cantering rhythms of “Another Breakup Ballad,” she kicks a dodgy lover to the curb. But the fragmentary “Lavender Moon” is the standout, a spooked love song kissed with atmospherics that would give Tom Waits the shivers.

—Margaret Wappler

Haroula Rose
“These Open Roads”
Self-released
Three stars out of four

Haroula Rose will perform Jan. 18 and Feb. 1 (album release party) at the Hotel Café, 16231/2 N. Cahuenga Blvd., L.A.

While constructing my Top 10 List of Best Albums for 2010, I couldn’t help but think about all the psychological factors that go into such an exercise. I’m not saying my Top 10 Motives exactly mirror my real music Top Ten, but it’s an example of some of the identity-building, bet-hedging criteria I use to make my list every year. So here's a companion Top 10 to go along with my Top 10 albums list.

Top 10  Motives at Work in Constructing My Top 10 of Any Given Year:

1. Album that I listened to all the time that might define me as a traditionalist on some level (which feels weird because that’s not how I think of myself -- but oh well, what can I say?).

2. Album that I didn’t listen to nearly as much but I deeply respect.

3. Some kind of wild-card pick, big and bold. I’m no chicken, people!

4. The album that might be closest to my heart, the one I listen to in my car on repeat when I’m crying about, you know, stuff.

5. Album that will show the obscurists that I, too, troll the underground with unremitting fine taste. “Dude, this really cool DJ I know sent me this download and it totally blew my mind! You’ve never heard of it? Oh.” Cue internal self-satisfied smirk.

If you grew up in the '80s, these guys soundtracked your slumber parties, the ones where you tried to paint your nails black only to get nail polish remover all over your mom's comforter. Now they've returned with the album "All You Need Is Now," out today on iTunes (physical drops in February) and produced by Mark Ronson, who connected with Duran Duran in 2008 in Paris, soon after they became the first band to perform at the Louvre Museum.

Duran Duran and its four original members -- John Taylor, Roger Taylor, Nick Rhodes and Simon Le Bon, the latter sporting one of the best rock names in the business -- haven't been wanting for exposure. In addition to playing near the "Mona Lisa," the four gents who once looked like walking advertisements for Vidal Sassoon have been playing festivals around the world the last couple of years.