A few weeks ago, some wily YouTube denizen took a track by the cryptic Canadian noise-rock ensemble Godspeed You! Black Emperor and spliced it with a breathless male voice ranting about an impending Islamic caliphate overtaking the Middle East and Europe. It made perfect sense in context -- on the group's four proper records from the late ’90s to early ’00s, Godspeed used found-sound warnings from street preachers to steep its droning feedback, creaking chamber strings and bleary guitars in sadness and dread.

But this video’s screed came from a cable news host who today boasts an audience of millions on Fox News -- Glenn Beck. Cheekily titled “Glennspeed You! Beck Emperor,” the clip was a rare moment of humor in Godspeed’s universe.

But in the lead-up to its 2½-hour sold-out returning set Wednesday night at the Music Box -- the band broke up in 2008 after, as its members put it, an emotional crisis over the ongoing Iraq war -- it underscored how the world has changed since its 1997 release, “F#A# Infinity,” and its last L.A. show in 2001. Back then, the band's end-of-days predictions came from anonymous, damaged souls. Now they might come from talk-show hosts who hold rallies on the National Mall.

In a singles-obsessed, everybody-dance moment in music, it’s astonishing that this bleak instrumental collective with songs stretching well into double-digits and no obvious frontperson still commands such devotion.

But for fans, many of whom discovered the band during the years of night-vision bombing footage from the Iraq war, Godspeed offered a kind of solace in a difficult political moment. And from the set’s opening movements, off the band's standout 2000 album, “Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven,” it was clear why Godspeed resonated. There’s simply no other band whose members play desolation and joy off each other like they do.

Takes on the band’s early work, such as “East Hastings,” simmered with sawing strings and martial drumming, and showcased the creeping tension that made its 20-minute songs feel as if they were just ramping up. Later songs, such as “Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls,” from its 2002 full-length, “Yanqui U.X.O.,” drew from helpless fury and almost Sabbath-worthy rock crunch.

The band makes a kind of anti-performance out of its reserve, turning the visual spectacle over to projections of medieval woodcuts and haunting scenes of industrial repetition. Two-and-a-half hours is an awful long time for anyone not named Springsteen to ask from an audience, and many in the crowd seemed physically exhausted at points.

But that’s a different sensation than boredom. Godspeed demands a lot from its listeners, in body and attention. The sense of being wholly overcome felt true to the band’s ambitions -- and still does today.

-- August Brown

Last year Mavis Staples cut a great new album, "You Are Not Alone," for Silver Lake's Anti-Records (produced by her new label-mate Jeff Tweedy). Next month she's going to further cement her local bona fides with an insanely rare and just-booked-today early club show at the Satellite on March 3. Doors open at 7 p.m. and Staples and her band will play about a 90-minute set at 8 p.m. Tickets are $25 and should be on sale Wednesday night, if you want to get closer than her Conan performance the same week will surely allow.

On a totally different front, a pretty great installment of Entrance Band's residency with Sun Araw as an opener will follow her up that night -- and if you come to Mavis, you can stick around for the latter set for free.

-- August Brown

Photo: Matt Sayles / Associated Press

Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie xx make music about seemingly opposite subjects. Scott-Heron's long career in spoken word and proto-rap anticipated hip-hop's rage, and his exquisitely bedraggled tone is its own evidence for the toll of urban decay. Jamie xx, the very young beatsmith for the experimental trio the xx, helms that band's hormonal, minimalist suites about teen lust. But they both ask one big question in their music: What happens when you lose control? On "We're New Here," a full-album remix of Scott-Heron's 2010 record, "I'm New Here," the duo lends each other gravitas and levity on this very curious but ultimately immersive LP.

Scott-Heron's brutal, searing original record was rooted in guttural blues and creaking electronica (courtesy of XL founder Richard Russell), but on "We're New Here" Jamie xx lets some fresh air in. "My Cloud" is a sample-damaged bit of Sunday morning soul, and a looped Scott-Heron makes the house-infused dubstep track "Ur Soul & Mine" feel deliciously stalkerish. The beats are enticingly broken and reggae-indebted, but the best move on "We're New Here" is to underline Scott-Heron's humor -- the title track and "Piano Player" catch him chuckling at baser pursuits like picking up girls at bars. Scott-Heron may have lent Jamie xx his most charged vocal material yet, but the young producer in turn finally gets him to loosen up.

-- August Brown

Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie xx
"We're New Here"
XL
Three stars (Out of four)

Though Panda Bear's solo set at last year's FYF Fest got some mixed reviews, the flintiest quarter of Animal Collective has a new solo record, "Tomboy," coming out on April 12. We hear you kids have quite a shine for him, so if you want to hear a first pass through "Tomboy," there are two new listening parties -- one all-ages, the other 21+ -- on Feb. 28 at Malo's upstairs lounge at 6 and 7:30 p.m. RSVP to tomboyallageslisteningparty@gmail.com or tomboy21overlisteningparty@gmail.com accordingly, but a public service note first -- tacos and psychedelics do not mix well.

-- August Brown    

Photo: Brian DeRan /ForceField PR

Tyler the Creator, of the sprawling and self-mythologizing L.A. crew Odd Future, just inked an enviable deal with the indie-vanguard label XL, and this feral performance on Wednesday night's episode of "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon" shows what teenage rap fans in town have insisted on for months. Namely, that Odd Future is absolutely insane and the unchallenged heirs to SoCal's mantle of menacing wierdo rap. This take on "Sandwitches," the B-side to Tyler the Creator's new single "Yonkers," gets a full band assist from Odd Future cohort Hodgy Beats as well as the Roots. Tyler mounts Fallon at the credits and leaves a dumbstruck Mos Def screaming, "Swag!" into the camera for no reason other than total joy. This video pushes Odd Future to the top of any Coachella-goer's must-see list.

-- August Brown

A list of upcoming concerts across the Southland, with on-sale dates in parentheses.

Honda Center
Glee Live! In Concert, May 27; Lil Wayne, April 23 (Sat.)

Staples Center
Glee Live! In Concert, May 28 (Sat.)

San Manuel Amphitheater
Tim McGraw, June 4 (Fri.)

On his jaunty new single “Shell Games,” Conor Oberst takes a jab at one of his favorite targets in the Bright Eyes catalog — himself. “Death-obsessed, like a teenager. I sold my tortured youth, piss and vinegar,” he sings, with irony quotes around “tortured.” “I’m still angry with no reason to be.”

It’s a funny acknowledgement of the criticism that’s chased Oberst ever since he was heralded as Dylan’s teen descendant — namely, that’s he’s one of the most melodramatic and self-mythologizing songwriters in recent pop. But he’s always wrung something universal from that stylized self-reflection with his gift for subtle melody. The problem with much of “The People’s Key,” his first album in four years as Bright Eyes, is that it gets his nuanced formula backward. This album’s spiritual vagaries and self-conscious sound experiments feel unexpectedly impersonal.

No one can expect him to burn through post-adolescent angst forever, and after the orchestral grandeur of 2007’s “Cassadaga,” the Guided by Voices guitar scuzz of “Triple Spiral” and the speed-metal burn of “Jejune Stars” are muscular in ways he hasn’t tried since the punkish fury of his Desaparecidos project. But the underbaked minimalism of “Approximate Sunlight” and lyrical association games of “Haile Selassie” feel like Oberst is hiding from something. “Key” may still sound angry, but Oberst’s wrong on one point — he’s always found true reasons to be before.

— August Brown

Bright Eyes
“The People’s Key”
Saddle Creek
Two and a half stars (Out of four)

“It was 40-below when we left Montreal to come here,” Win Butler said during a break in Friday night’s Arcade Fire show at the Ukrainian Cultural Center, simultaneously L.A.’s best- and worst-kept musical secret of the weekend. “So L.A., let me tell you that we are really, really happy to be here.”

Weather aside, it’s weird to think of Arcade Fire needing a reprieve, 48 hours before the most high-profile set they’ve ever played, performing in a prime slot on the 2011 Grammy Awards. But while the band has always aimed huge -- dozen-strong harmonies, choruses that feel like hymns, headlining major festivals the world over –- its heart is loyal to the small things -- the tiny terrors of suburban blight and tunnels carved in snowfalls. So on the eve of the most scripted, self-laudatory night in popular music, Arcade Fire got out of Dodge and threw a punk show.

The firewall blocking information leading up to the show could have repelled Julian Assange, so the genial non-chaos of the show’s logistics came as a welcome surprise. Lines moved quickly, sodas and cotton candy were free, the all-ages vibe befitting Arcade Fire’s “us kids know” youth-noir, and credit goes to promoters Goldenvoice and FYF’s Sean Carlson for not overselling the show. If someone hasn’t reclaimed the Ukrainian Cultural Center as a full-time concert venue (hmm?), they need to do so soon.

 
The weeklong roll-out for the Arcade Fire's secret show in L.A.finally has some answers about when and where the Grammy-nominated and Coachella-headlining act will play tonight. They're playing the Ukranian Cultural Center at 4315 Melrose Ave. at 9 p.m. Doors open at 7:30 and the street art gadfly Shepard Fairey will be DJ'ing at 8 p.m. Buy the staffs of Origami Vinyl and Fingerprints and the El Rey door folks a drink afterward; they'll need one after handling the ticket sales today.

-August Brown

Photo credit: Cory Schwartz/Getty Images

Nicole Atkins is the kind of classic pop singer who could have been a megastar at any point except the last five years. She has a huge, rangy voice flecked with soul that sounds great atop broken-bottle slide blues (“My Baby Don’t Lie”), wine-sloppy piano ballads (“Hotel Plaster”) and even an unexpected stab at X-inspired surf punk (“You Come to Me”).

Maybe the handmade breadth and skill of “Mondo Amore” can catch a commercial slow burn like that of her onetime tourmates the Black Keys. But it’s rough out there for a firecracker female singer for whom Auto-Tune is merely what you do to your pink Cadillac every 3,000 miles.

Neko Case is probably the best reference point here, and Atkins’ band nails the same kind of grain-silo reverb and guitar tremolo that give tunes such as “This Is for Love” their weight. But she’s at her best atop the tear-blotted strings of “War Is Hell,” which give her room to sing for the rafters and bend the song into unexpected chord changes. There isn’t a clear standout single, but “Mondo” is sturdy, well-arranged pop that old crooners and hipster blues brothers alike can claim as theirs.

-- August Brown

Nicole Atkins
"Mondo Amore"
Razor & Tie
Two and a half stars (out of four)

A list of upcoming concerts across the Southland, with on-sale dates in parentheses.

Wiltern
Elvis Costello & the Imposters, May 11; Adele, June 9 (Fri.)

Hollywood Palladium
Deftones, June 10 (Fri.)

The Orpheum
Brett Dennen, June 18 (Fri.)

El Rey Theater
Bell'Aria, April 25 (now); Xavier Rudd, May 2 (Fri.); Khaira Arby, March 8 (Sat.)

Nokia Theatre
Espinoza Paz, March 19 (Sat.)

Club Nokia
Stryper, March 9; KEM, March 30 (Fri.)

Royce Hall
Bryan Adams, April 9 (Sat.)

Santa Barbara Bowl
Janet Jackson, April 10 (Sat.)

City National Grove of Anaheim
Merle Haggard, May 12; Gipsy Kings, May 18 (Sat.)

Troubadour
Civil Twilight, March 3; the Concretes, March 4; Baths, March 5; Yemen Blues, March 6; Asobi Seksu, March 9; Toro y Moi, March 23 (now)

The Echo
Amanda Jo Williams, Feb. 8; Barb Wires, March 2; Johnossi, March 8; Seasons, March 9; Joey Cape, March 12; Incan Abraham, March 29; the Baseball Project, March 31; PVT, April 14; Subhumans, April 20 (now)

Echoplex
Leftover Crack, Feb. 27; Rainbow Arabia, March 25; the Chris Robinson Brotherhood, March 28, April 11, April 25, May 9 and May 23; Jamaica, April 23 (now)

Photo by Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times

The L.A. production duo and walking typo-bait Nguzunguzu has been cranking out a string of increasingly ambitious remixes and mixtapes of late. A typical track makes a mangle of tribal drums and bleary synths and stretches it out into a crescendo that flails at the ledge of danceable but doesn't fall over.

And lo, does the newly Kompakt-approved local duo Rainbow Arabia get the treament here. Nguzunguzu, which has served as M.I.A.'s tour DJs, takes the drum-patter heart of "Without You" and splays it out with house-inspired vocal echoes, more drums, a madcap marimba, more drums, pitch-shifted vocals and, yep, even more drums. You know some scientists want to combat global warming with artificial robot trees? This sounds like a jungle of them.

Rainbowarabia_withoutyou_nguzungzu

-- August Brown