There isn't a working band that has more fun playing live. The energy created is healing.

 
In the middle of Arcade Fire's set at the Shrine Auditorium on Thursday night, during its disco-dripping song “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains), the group's lead singer Win Butler ran offstage and into the crowd. This isn't unusual for the band — onstage the eight-member (and counting) ensemble batters the fourth wall as hard as it thwacks its dozens of drums, keyboards, violins and other sundry noisemakers.

What was strange was what Butler did when he made it to the back aisles. He gathered some new friends among the legion of iPhone picture-snappers, brushed his sweaty southern-goth haircut to the side and stopped to watch his band play.

Even if his jaunt was a bit of lead-singer peacocking, Butler still must have felt what the many hundreds of thousands of Arcade Fire fans have suspected since the arrival of its 2004 debut album “Funeral” — that we're watching a rambling cast of accordion-playing Canadians grow into the defining rock band of the 21st century.

The group has played some of the biggest stages the world can offer, licensed a song to the Super Bowl and topped album charts while releasing its music through the scruffy indie label Merge. Arcade Fire's best songs, like the gang-chorus rapture of “Wake Up” and call-and-response burner “Rebellion (Lies),” will be on our oldies stations in 40 years.

And after three albums, including the latest “The Suburbs,” the band members have finally written enough of them that their Shrine show could even make their singer take a step back and revel in the grandeur.

Leave it to Sting to join the current craze for big-band albums not with a set of standards or cool-hunting covers but with a collection of his own songs. Even during his early days with the Police, Sting carried himself with the assured air of someone whose artistic significance was a long-established fact; a couple of decades later, he gives the impression that a search for deeper, more worthwhile material simply yielded no results.

Yet if Sting's confidence can sometimes come across as arrogance, it's also what makes "Symphonicities" work: Here's a songwriter with enough belief in his creations to risk radically retooling them. Accompanied by London's Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra (with whom he's in the midst of a world tour), Sting reimagines "Roxanne" as a lush Latin ballad and gives "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" a swelling Celtic thrust.

Not everything on the 12-track disc is such a departure: "Englishman in New York," for instance, sounds more or less like the original studio version, as does "You Will Be My Ain True Love," the singer's Appalachia-inspired contribution to the film "Cold Mountain." For those selections, perhaps Sting concluded that perfection hardly needed improving.

-- Mikael Wood

Sting

"Symphonicities"

Deutsche Grammophon

Three stars (out of four)

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The British pop singer's chilly YouTube allure fails to translate in a show that's long on techno trappings but short on charisma. 

The hooded gold-lamé riding cape seemed like a good sign Wednesday night at the El Rey Theatre, where the English pop singer Little Boots played a sold-out show in support of her debut album, "Hands."

Known to her parents and to the accounting staff at Elektra Records as Victoria Hesketh, Little Boots makes shiny, buzzing dance music that foregrounds her fascination with technology, and her El Rey concert actualized those gear-head tendencies.

In addition to playing keyboard, she at various points strapped on a keytar, plucked out notes on a laser harp and constructed loops on a Tenori-On, a futuristic Japanese gizmo that resembles a kind of musical Lite-Brite.

Yet Little Boots also appeared determined to demonstrate she's not just a technician. Not long after arriving onstage in the riding cape, she removed it to reveal a more form-fitting outfit, one better suited to prancing about while she sang "New in Town," a catchy "Hands" highlight in which she promises to "show you a real good time." Later in her hourlong set, she changed into a sparkly black muumuu (or the top half of it anyway) and pumped her fist as she rode the pneumatic disco beat of "Stuck on Repeat."

As fetching as those costumes were -- and despite a grade-A laser show -- Little Boots didn't really succeed in proving her pop-star mettle. The problem wasn't her material: Funny and sexy in equal measure, "Hands" is packed with small-wonder delights; it's the kind of pop record that sounds as good through headphones as it does on a car stereo. And Little Boots' three backing musicians did solid work at the El Rey, adding live-band muscle to the sleek electronic grooves.

A nostalgic Carey shows today's divas how it's done in a soaring performance. Lady Gaga and Beyonce, take note.

 
Halfway through her highly entertaining show Tuesday night at Gibson Amphitheatre, Mariah Carey stood onstage in a sparkly gold cocktail dress and waxed nostalgic for a (more) gilded age.

"Remember the video with the jet skis?" she asked wistfully, referring to the James Bond-inspired clip for her 1997 hit "Honey," which the singer's seven-piece band had begun playing. "They don't make those anymore."

 Nor do they make pop divas like Carey anymore. In an era of high-tech performance-art opacity (think Beyoncé or Lady Gaga), her transparent blend of vocal talent and goofy charisma seems appealingly old-fashioned. Tuesday's concert, the first of two at the Gibson in support of last year's "Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel," felt at times like an attempt to break down the kind of mystique that's grown up around Carey's successors. 

Which didn't mean it lacked for production pizazz: Elaborately costumed in a cloud of honey-colored taffeta, the singer made her entrance upon an enormous swing that lowered from above the stage; later, during "Angels Cry," a pair of dancers performed a Cirque du Soleil-style aerial number while suspended from a flimsy band of cloth.

Yet rather than presenting these elements as immovable facts of nature, Carey took every opportunity to expose the business behind the show. Before an effervescent version of "Always Be My Baby," she invited her hair-and-makeup team onstage for a mid-set touch-up, then decided she could do the job just as well herself. "I went to beauty school," she said, powdering her nose. "Five hundred hours in 11th grade."

For "My All," Carey sat in a chair, explaining that her shoes were too tight; within seconds, though, she'd discovered that the chair had been placed out of range of the several industrial fans on hair-blowing duty. So while she waited for a stagehand to fix the problem, the singer took a sip of what she promised was water from a nearby champagne glass. "If you see me drinking from the bottle," she confided, "you know we've got a problem."

What made all these disclosures so endearing, of course, was Carey's singing, which 20 years after her emergence with the melisma-soaked "Vision of Love" has lost little of its uncommon power.

Randy Newman's best, most pointed songs usually will come around again with enough time, timely once more either from history repeating itself, or mankind living up to his worst expectations.

At his concert Friday for UCLA Live at Royce Hall, his quietly wounded and defiant “Louisiana 1927” told of another generation's devastating flood, but had new poignancy in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. And, sadly, the biting, hilarious detail of 1972's “Political Science” may never lose its relevance: “They all hate us anyhow / So let's drop the big one now.”

His two-hour solo performance of musical storytelling and ribald character studies began with the singer-songwriter ambling over to his Steinway, a man in black and a full head of white hair plucking the spooky melody from “Last Night I Had a Dream,” a dark and funny tale. It set a tone for the night.

Loudon Wainwright III and Richard Thompson wrapped up their five-week tour as a duo, under the fittingly ironic title “Loud & Rich,” with a sterling display of songwriting acumen and musicianship Friday at UCLA, but one that wasn’t particularly loud or likely to make anybody rich.

Not in the filthy lucre sense, anyway. These two folk-rock veterans appeared long ago to have achieved peace in the knowledge that their astute brand of music fills clubs and theaters, not arenas and stadiums. They’ve been pals at least since the days when Thompson produced a couple of Wainwright’s standout albums in the '80s, and used the occasion of their stop at Royce Hall as part of UCLA Live’s eclectic music series to revel in the richness of words skillfully strung together and married to music that carries those words straight to the heart. And, on more than once occasion, to the funny bone.

In fact, many times during the evening Elvis Costello’s famous pronouncement -- “I used to be disgusted, but now I try to be amused” -- seemed to be play, but it was often hard to tell who was on which side of that equation.

Wainwright, perhaps the most adroit humorist in pop music of the last 40 years, opened the three-hour performance with a set heavy on recent-vintage material, including three from his ambitious double album “High Wide & Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project.” That set showcases the music of the influential but largely forgotten early country singer from Spray, N.C., a freewheeling, wisecracking, hard-drinking, banjo-playing troubadour for whom Wainwright, also born in North Carolina, obviously holds an affinity.

The solo format left him without the deft instrumental and vocal support he gets on the album from a broad swath of family members (including his kids Rufus, Martha and Lucy) ex-family members and friends. But Thompson jumped in to add color on "If I Lose," bending and sliding steely notes and making his acoustic guitar sound like a dobro.

 
The jokes came quickly at Royce Hall on Thursday night as UCLA Live director David Sefton introduced the trio of virtuoso musicians about to take the stage. With Béla Fleck on banjo, Edgar Meyer on double-bass and tabla master Zakir Hussain, where exactly does one categorize such a seemingly bizarre mix of bluegrass, classical and Indian music?

Despite each musician's diverse background, this wasn't an evening defined by jarring, chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter genre mash-ups. In fact, what left the biggest impression was how seamlessly the three principals' seemingly disparate sounds meshed.

Of course, it's not as if the musicians had just met. Equally comfortable with pianist Emanuel Ax as he is recording with mandolinist Chris Thile from Nickel Creek, Meyer has worked with "new-grass" standard-bearer Fleck numerous times, including a Grammy-winning album from 2001, "Perpetual Motion." A collaborator with musicians such as John McLaughlin and the Grateful Dead's Mickey Hart, Hussain teamed with Fleck and Meyer in 2004 for a piece commissioned by the Nashville Symphony, which became the recently released "The Melody of Rhythm."

Backed by an orchestra for that album's three-movement centerpiece, this tour centered on the musicians' delicate and sympathetic interplay.

The '60 survivor takes an emotional journey through her career, including her new album and the hit that started it all, Jagger-Richards' 'As Tears Go By.'

Marianne Faithfull has lived a life of reinterpretation. She began as a pretty young face with a sweet voice, scoring her first hit with the precocious Jagger-Richards ballad "As Tears Go By," a 1964 Brit-pop single that might have suggested a career as Kiki Dee or Petula Clark. But she had other ideas, and a more dangerous path to follow in life and art.

Four decades later, she is an adventurous interpreter of rock, jazz and wounded cabaret, delivered in a raw, whiskey-nicotine wail. It's a remarkably elegant and versatile instrument, earned from long experience and a life-altering period of addiction and despair in the 1970s. At Royce Hall on Saturday for UCLA Live, Faithfull performed a wide-ranging set from throughout her career, including songs from her 22nd studio album, "Easy Come, Easy Go: 12 Songs for Music Lovers."

The collection of cover songs was produced by sometime-collaborator Hal Willner, and demonstrates her gift at re-creating songs in her own image, whether written by Duke Ellington, Dolly Parton, Randy Newman or Brian Eno. Her vocal range is not vast, but is able to express real strength and vulnerability, with an occasional softness in that weathered growl.

Emmylou Harris, Dwight Yoakam and other singer-songwriters nimbly display music's varied forms in a casual fundraiser for the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

Great as he was, the late singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt was wrong when he said that there are only two kinds of music, "the blues and zip-a-dee-doo-dah." Emmylou Harris quoted that line Thursday at Club Nokia, and the singer-songwriters gathered around her nodded agreement. Yet their own songs and others they offered during this show to benefit Nashville's worthy Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum demonstrated the limits of Van Zandt's assessment.

Any visitor to the museum  realizes that music also can take the form of a joke, a nursery rhyme, a prayer, a come-on or a campfire tale. In an evening that began as a history lesson (including a brief talk by the museum's director, Kyle Young) and expanded to include a few song debuts, a duet or two and plenty of barbs about Dwight Yoakam's tight jeans, Harris, Yoakam, Melissa Etheridge and Vince Gill touched upon all those forms, showing the flexibility of "country" as they did so.

They started, fittingly, with something by Gram Parsons, a Southern-born artist whose California-based career typified how country has progressed by applying its torch and twang to many styles and sources. Gill sang "Sin City," a traditional lament infused with the energy of 1960s rock. Harris, Parson's artistic foil during his short life, sang her famous harmonies.

The boys of AFI are goth lifers -- though it's not the makeup (well, not entirely) but their message. The dozen tracks on the band's latest, "Crash Love," once again mourn decay and romance gone wrong over sweeping, layered post-punk guitars. To singer-lyricist Davey Havok, love is an endlessly tragic and anxious state: "I'd tear out my eyes for you, my dear / anything to see everything that you do."

Produced by Joe McGrath and Jacknife Lee with the band, "Crash Love" is AFI's most confident, enjoyable album yet. Though there remain echoes of the Cure, the Smiths and many other morose pop heroes from the 1980s, the result feels more organic now, rooted in the genuinely bleak and hopeless rather than the simply theatrical sounds of My Chemical Romance.

Within the collection's tightly crafted 43 minutes is music of gloom, force and energy. The band finds hope and something approaching joy in the rousing, anthemic "Beautiful Thieves," and Jade Puget's guitars sound bright enough for endless radio rotation on "Veronica Sawyer Smokes." Hard-core riffs lurk beneath the pleading vocals on "Sacrilege."

The music of AFI wasn't always as daring as its fashion sense, but the NoCal band has grown with accelerating sophistication, stepping further beyond easy pop-punk thrashings to something grander, with music to match the mopey melodrama of Havok's words.

-- Steve Appleford

AFI
"Crash Love"
(Interscope)
Three and a half stars (Out of four)

The latest addition to the Britney Spears empire was unveiled this morning: a new cut in "3" that hit on all the hallmarks that have made the Britney brand strong for much of the last decade. Swedish producer Max Martin was behind the boards, the man who helped Britney craft such synthy-dance hits as "...Baby One More Time" and, more recently, "If U Seek Amy."

And the message? The song stays close to the Spears playbook of sex and more sex, deflecting all attention away from her  myriad controversies to put the focus squarely on the come-on. "Living in sin is the new thing," Spears coos in the lyrics, but the topic is old news for her.

The song is slick, but it's cold, and therefore in line with Spears' recent trek around the globe. Her Circus comeback tour was an elaborate stage get-up, one to prove that the franchise is alive and well, if alive and well is judged solely by dollar signs. Gymnasts, magicians and clowns put on a massively designed three-ring show, all while Spears shredded one glitter-soaked midriff-exposing outfit for another.

Yet there was little attachment to the song, zero interaction with the audience, and skin stood in for emotion -- or even talent. Like "Blackout" and "Circus," "3" is a study in production; give Spears' team credit for  elevating the song above typical dance products.

She runs through her songbook and raises the danger level.

The pop singer known as Pink has worked hard over the last decade to cultivate a reputation as a risk taker and a rule breaker, making wildly eclectic records that gleefully disregard the strictures of genre (flamenco-flecked electro-ska, anyone?) and pointing fun at fellow celebrities she figures could use the reality check.

Friday night at Staples Center, where she brought her yearlong world tour in support of 2008's "Funhouse," Pink's taste for danger took new shape. Several songs into the two-hour show, she paused the proceedings for a special announcement, telling the capacity crowd that she'd separated her shoulder four days earlier and that the injury was causing her a considerable amount of pain.

"But I've waited my whole life for tonight," she added, "so . . . it." Like much of what she says, Pink's actual verb of choice can't be quoted in a family newspaper.