The Five Best Shows in Los Angeles This Week: Garbage, Nick Lowe, Culture Collide

By LA Weekly Mon., Oct. 1 2012 at 3:30 AM

Categories: Los Angeles Concerts

Screaming Females

Tuesday, October 2

Garbage
WILTERN
When they formed in 1994, future chart fixtures Garbage had the makings of a sterile vanity project. Created by veteran studio rats (including Butch Vig, producer of Nirvana's Nevermind), with a grafted-on unknown vocalist, their formula appeared better suited to impersonal one-hit electro than enduring alt-rock. Yet, though quilted with samples and loops, Garbage's elegant pop still throbs and breathes, and selecting Shirley Manson as their feisty figurehead uncorked potent yin-yang magic. The kinda-goth Scot boasts an intriguing demeanor that's part bawdy barfly, part svelte temptress, while almost sighing a threateningly sexy contralto that casts welcome humanity over her bandmates' much-massaged instrumentation. Manson's unconventional beauty and disarming frankness (happily admitting to once defecating in a boyfriend's Corn Flakes) ably dispel any lingering air of manufacture. --Paul Rogers

Screaming Females
PALLADIUM
They're called Screaming Females, but that primal cuts-you-in-half sound you're hearing is coming from Marissa Paternoster's guitar, which she uses to speak the language of Neil Young and Greg Ginn both -- actually, both at once -- in a new album of punk built from nothing but sharp edges. Screaming Females have been DIY since day one, rising from the all-ages basement shows of New Jersey to finish their recent record Ugly with Steve Albini and build themselves a band that's gonna be as indestructible as the Wipers, P.J. Harvey, Sleater-Kinney or Dinosaur Jr. (You know the deal: shreds up front, rhythms in the back.) When old people wonder about the kids being alright, what they're really hoping for is to get a chance to see this band. Proof that punk is still live and loud. --Chris Ziegler

Emmylou Harris
ROYCE HALL
"Honky-tonk angel" used to mean something not very nice -- the kind of girl who'd never make a wife, if you get what Hank Thompson was trying to say in an age when you couldn't use certain words on your album. But let's reclaim it for what it really should mean, because Emmylou Harris is an angel of the honky-tonks if there ever was one, with a voice so pure and sad and clear and true that it couldn't possibly come from this dirty old earth. (And besides, she's got that silver hair -- you know they all look like that up in honky-tonk heaven.) By now, she's somewhere between archetype and myth, a woman who glided beside and between country and rock & roll's absolute greats to become one of country and rock & roll's greats herself. --Chris Ziegler