A few songs into Juanes’ Sunday night concert at Staples Center, a stooped older man in a red sweater — at least 75 by my reckoning — shuffled into a center aisle and started pumping his fist in the air with the fervor of a guerrilla fighter.

Juanes can have that effect on people. The Colombian rock star has been dubbed the Latin American Bono, and with good reason. Like the mystically rabble-rousing U2 frontman, he has attached himself to a plethora of political and humanitarian causes, particularly those focused on his war-torn South American homeland. In live appearance he seldom misses an opportunity to advocate for land-mine victims or wave the banner of international peace. Time magazine named him one of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2005.

Musically, the comparison with Bono and his post-punk Irish brethren is less apt, as the singer-guitarist reaffirmed in Sunday’s show. In truth, Juanes is a lover first, a fighter second. His music pleads with, rather than confronts, his listeners; it high-fives rather than exhorts.

Over the years, the compact, slight-framed artist has traded in his brooding, long-maned, Byronic persona for a sunnier, close-cropped appearance that better suits his buoyantly athletic performative style and natural easygoing charm. Closing fast on 40, but still infused with a boyish earnestness and eagerness to please, Juanes broke no new artistic ground Sunday but left his audience roaring its approval of his numerous hits, rendered by the singer-guitarist and his band with passionate, meticulous professionalism.

Thursday night at Largo at the Coronet Meshell Ndegeocello played the first of a handful of West Coast concerts dedicated to the music of Prince, and her performance was so strong that it didn’t just make me wanna go home and listen to my Prince records (at least not anymore than I usually wanna do that). Rather, the show made me wanna hear what Ndegeocello might do with the dozens of Prince songs she didn’t get to: “Kiss,” “Black Sweat,” “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.”

It’s not hard to grasp this veteran singer-bassist’s interest in one of pop’s wiliest shape-shifters: Like Prince, Ndegeocello moves freely from genre to genre; she’s also spent her career alternating between commercial success (think of her and John Mellencamp’s hit 1994 cover of “Wild Night” by Van Morrison) and creative indulgence (check out “Dance of the Infidel,” a jazzy 2005 album credited to her group the Spirit Music Jamia). Several times Thursday she mentioned how seriously certain Prince songs had affected her, even before she’d become a professional musician. As a teenager, Ndegeocello said, she played “Lady Cab Driver” so often that her mom eventually told her to stop; later in the show, she described “Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)” as having changed her life.

 
Lykke Li emerged onstage Wednesday night at the El Rey Theatre in a cloud of smoke strafed from behind by blinking strobes. Columns of dark fabric, hung from above, further obscured the young Swedish singer, as did a billowy black top that made her physical shape difficult to ascertain. By the end of her first number, the smoke had cleared a bit and the stage lights had at least been switched on; you could tell she was surrounded by a five-piece band and was wearing leather hot pants.

But that was more or less the extent to which Lykke Li revealed herself during this curiously bewitching show. Her goal, seemingly inspired by ’60s-era girl groups, was stretching out romantic disillusionment into a kind of defensive unknowability, and she succeeded to the vocal delight of a capacity crowd.

A member of the same bustling Stockholm scene that produced Robyn, the Knife and Peter Bjorn and John, Lykke Li turned heads throughout Europe and in the United States with her cutesy 2008 debut, “Youth Novels”; among other things, it earned her a coveted spot on “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” soundtrack alongside the Killers and Thom Yorke of Radiohead.

To make “Wounded Rhymes,” her impressive new album, she relocated to Los Angeles, where her lack of a driver’s license resulted in an enforced solitude you can hear in the hollowed-out textures and proudly dejected lyrics. “Sadness is my boyfriend,” she sings over the “Be My Baby” beat in one fresh tune, “Oh, sadness, I’m your girl.”

At the El Rey, Lykke Li gave that stylized pathos a confrontational edge, pushing her voice beyond its kewpie-doll daintiness and toughening the go-go rhythms in “I Follow Rivers” and “Youth Knows No Pain.” Two of her accompanists took to the drums for the latter, while the singer herself bashed away at a cymbal near the end of “Dance, Dance, Dance,” from “Youth Novels.”

After that song she requested a whiskey from anyone willing to fetch her one, adding, “I was getting too hot to handle.” But heat wasn’t quite what she provided Wednesday, not even in slower, soul-influenced material like the new album’s “Unrequited Love” or “Possibility,” her haunting “New Moon” contribution. Lykke Li’s energy was colder and more scientific: She was finding out how much stress classic pop models can withstand before they begin to buckle.

-- Mikael Wood

Photo: Lykke Li performs at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles on Match 9 2011. Credit: Gary Friedman/Los Angeles Times

My first mistake Wednesday night was presuming that Swans, the semi-legendary New York post-punk band recently re-formed by frontman Michael Gira, would turn up at the El Rey Theatre in a form somehow diminished from its brutal mid-’80s peak, when the group put out a punishing live album called “Public Castration Is a Good Idea.”

My second (and more serious) mistake was not wearing earplugs.

Last year, Swans, who rose from the same New York scene that spawned Sonic Youth in the early 1980s, released “My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky,” its first studio disc since 1996. Given Gira’s earlier pronouncements on the unlikelihood of a Swans reunion, the album’s appearance came as something of a surprise to his fans, who over the last decade have followed the artist’s work under his own name and with a new outfit, Angels of Light. Gira also runs the indie label Young God Records, whose breakout star, Devendra Banhart, opened Wednesday’s show.

Local Natives are front and center, if not a bit awestruck, in collaboration with a chamber orchestra.

“This is the first time I’ve ever gotten to play a real piano live,” said Local Natives’ keyboardist Kelcey Ayer toward the end of the Silver Lake indie band’s raucous debut with a chamber orchestra on Saturday. He then pointed at his usual instrument, a relatively humble Nord synthesizer. “I hate that thing. But this is like....” He hugged the breadth of Walt Disney Concert Hall’s grand piano and grinned, content.

Even on their 2010 debut album, “Gorilla Manor,” Local Natives seemed to want to go bigger. The band plays a pretty, traditional take on guitar-based indie pop, but the five-piece laces each song with four-part harmonies as intricate and crystalline as a stained-glass window. Their percussion-mad performances show they clearly love being in a band, an easy task after a buzzed-over Coachella set and two sold-out nights at the Music Box last year.

An orchestral collaborative set is a daunting opportunity for musicians still in their early 20s. But in their world of guitars, drums and voices, Local Natives already thought like an orchestra. To add an actual one only underlined the many things they do well.

The first half of the set, a campfire take on half a dozen singles with a string quartet, served mostly as a showcase for those voices. Ayer, guitarists Ryan Hahn and Taylor Rice, and bassist Andy Hamm suggest Crosby, Stills & Nash in the way they approach melody, less as something on top of an arrangement than as a space for the whole band to work. Confined to acoustic instrumentation, songs like “Eyes Wide” and a cover of Television’s “Careful” felt intriguingly democratic. Rice is ostensibly the lead singer, but mostly because he’s in the middle of the stage.

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.

 
What happens when innovations become tropes? That depends on the innovators, as was made smashingly clear by Monday’s performance at the Music Box by Gang of Four (more about smashing later). The U.K. quartet’s classic 1979 album Entertainment! heralded the group as punk-funk progenitors, blurring disco’s dance floor urgency with punk’s political insurgency. Gang of Four since became one of popular music’s most influential concerns for everyone from R.E.M, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Fugazi to new post-punk revivalists spanning Bloc Party and the Rapture.

The band, formed in Leeds in 1977, has also endured as timeless rather than nostalgic by remaining one of rock’s most kinetic live acts. When they reunited in 2005, their concerts proved even better than when Gang of Four was supposedly in their prime. While this recent performance wasn’t up to that level, it still demonstrated a commitment to savage artistry like no act in recent memory.

“The first time we played here, it was a disaster,” singer Jon King snarled a third of the way through the concert, launching into an anecdote about a bass player with a smashed nose leaving the stage slick with blood. 

For more than a decade, Americans have pondered the appeal of the French singer-actress-model who captured the heart of Hollywood's sexiest leading man. Outside of Chanel ads and foreign films, Vanessa Paradis has remained a primarily European enigma.

Consider the chanteuse hereby found in translation. After her sultry, charming performance at the Orpheum Theatre on Friday -- her second-ever concert in North America (she'd played New York on Wednesday) -- we're now wondering if it's Johnny Depp, Paradis' baby daddy, who's the lucky one.

Clad in all black and standing at the center of a blood-red room, Lucinda Williams cracked a rare smile. “Sorry to be so dark on Valentine’s Day,” she said, after tearing through a new song that questions the motives for a suicide, but no one in the audience seemed in need of an apology. The devoted fans, KCRW insiders and other begrudging romantics at Bardot’s weekly School Night party were intently focused on Williams and her tear-stained blues. Playing an hourlong set, Williams, with her three-piece band, trotted out slow-burn anthems for the weary, the dispossessed, and the brokenhearted, but most of all for those who know how to pick themselves up off the barroom floor and love all over again.

In the hands of Williams, love pushes us toward new states of recognition, a deeper sense of self and mission. “You Were Born,” a drifting bit of desert motel noir, finds her reading off a list of conditions, including disgrace, slavery and abandonment, that we weren’t born for –- only to counter them with the simple, repeated gospel that “you were born to be loved.” On the title track of her 10th album, Williams sounds as though she’s found her wisdom in both a pint of whiskey and a pack of worn tarot cards. Everyone she encounters in the song offers their blessings: the watchmaker, the homeless, the girl selling roses, the prisoner who knew how to be free.

For the dusty and dreamy “Awakening,” Williams was joined onstage by Blake Mills, a 24-year-old guitarist from Malibu who offered elliptical loops of slide guitar. On “Honey Bee,” a track from 2008’s “Little Honey,” Mills traded runs that verged on speed metal with Val McCallum, the other guitarist scrapping on stage.

Whatever wisdom Williams proffered was also served with a squirt of hot sauce in the eye. The Louisiana native kicked off her set with “Buttercup,” a wry kiss-off to a freeloading lover looking for her forgiveness, and she closed with the more ferocious version of that sentiment. On “Joy,” from her 1998 breakthrough “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” Williams shrieked in her shredded, revenant voice, “You took my joy; I want it back!” Have you dated Lucinda Williams? Consider yourselves warned, ex-vampires.

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo taken by Lauren Strasnick with the romantic Hipstamatic application on her ultra-futuristic iPhone.

In Ryan Bingham’s song “Hard Times,” he sings of making good moments from bad, and that’s exactly what happened Saturday night at the El Rey, where a boisterous capacity crowd cheered this young country-rocker’s bleak confessionals as though they were top-down summer jams. Addressing the audience with a splash of surprise in his weather-beaten voice, Bingham at one point compared the concert to a “pre-Super Bowl party”; earlier, his rhyme of “Tijuana” and “marijuana” had inspired plenty of spirited whoops.
 
Credit “Crazy Heart.” Last year, Bingham won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for “The Weary Kind,” his theme song from the Jeff Bridges film about a washed-up country star. That Hollywood attention has greatly expanded Bingham’s following, as has his partnership with producer T Bone Burnett, who cowrote “The Weary Kind” and oversaw Bingham’s 2010 album, “Junky Star.” (Burnett’s other clients include Willie Nelson, Elton John and Elvis Costello.) Where Bingham’s first two efforts played mostly to an alt-country core, “Junky Star” has connected with younger, more varied listeners. Place the record in your cart on Amazon and that site will recommend recent discs by Arcade Fire and Kings of Leon to go with it.

Daniel Lanois' sharp new band displays power and finesse in this full-throttle show.

If last year's self-titled debut by Black Dub hasn't received the widespread attention it deserves, Daniel Lanois has only himself to blame. This L.A.-based musician, best known for producing landmark recordings by U2 and Bob Dylan, led an action-packed 2010, publishing a memoir about his life in music and teaming with Neil Young for Young's album “Le Noise,” which is up for a Grammy next month. There was also a serious motorcycle accident last June that left Lanois with six broken ribs and forced him to postpone Black Dub's first tour.

Judging by the group's electrifying performance Friday night at the El Rey, Lanois should make more time for Black Dub in 2011: Here was a well-established record-industry insider channeling the seat-of-the-pants spirit of a band with something to prove.

Black Dub's music is built around Lanois' scrubby widescreen guitar, but its other voices are no less crucial. Drummer Brian Blade, a veteran of the jazz world who's played with Wayne Shorter and Joshua Redman, provides an ever-shifting groove. Bassist Jim Wilson (filling in on the road for Daryl Johnson) connects the sound to funk and reggae. And singer Trixie Whitley, daughter of the late blues star Chris Whitley, fires the sound with raw emotion; her hoarse soul honk probably hasn't changed since the day she discovered it.

 
Here’s something we didn’t know about Iron and Wine’s Sam Beam: The laudably bearded former film professor and father of five is actually one of the suavest sex jam singers of recent note. True, the moments of baby-making R&B at the first of his two sold-out nights at the Wiltern on Tuesday came tempered with death and cosmic impermanence and a bit of a ’70s yupster-funk sheen. But Beam wasn’t kidding when he titled his latest album “Kiss Each Other Clean” — his current live set puts heavy emphasis on backseat smooching.

Iron and Wine has undergone one of the more remarkable transformations in indie-folk since 2002’s “The Creek Drank the Cradle,” which is nigh impossible to describe without the words “sepia” and “toned.” Beam’s sound was rooted in adept acoustic fingerpicking, close-harmony whispers and lyrics that evoked rural pleasures and spiritual perils without coming off mawkish.

But after an unexpected hit with a cover of the Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights,” he hung a hard left into humid Afro-pop guitars, noisy jazz breakdowns and percussive exotica that complemented his ever-stronger singing. It turned out his intimate pleas sound kind of saucy with a bedsheet-tight backbeat.

“Kiss,” his major-label debut for Warner Bros., is his most sonically adventurous yet, but it posed a particular challenge for this round of touring. How does a low-key folk guy wrangle a dozen-strong backing band into something that can hold the Wiltern for two nights?