The Five Best Concerts in L.A. This Weekend

By LA Weekly Fri., Dec. 14 2012 at 3:46 AM

Categories: Los Angeles Concerts

The Weeknd -- See Sunday

Friday, December 14

Thrill Jockey 20th-anniversary party with Wooden Shjips, Liturgy, Trans Am, Kid Millions
THE ECHOPLEX
Back in the '90s, arty Chicago alt/indie warhorse label Thrill Jockey basically drew the map for marginalized music's move into the mainstream, with a roster including Tortoise, Fiery Furnaces, Tunng and The Sea and Cake. Psych stylists Wooden Shjips explore the mythology and metaphor of the American frontier on their '60s-'70s fuzz-rocked West, produced by Phil Manley. Manley is also the founding member of trio Trans Am, which will lay out the goods from its post-funk, electro-fractured Thing. Brooklyn black-metal modifiers Liturgy bring an assaultive trance, whose formal cues derive from Steve Reich, Glenn Branca and Lightning Bolt; their feral grindcore comes refreshingly free of lyrical references to the horns of the goat or the bony finger of doom. John Colpitts was reborn as Kid Millions: composer, writer, drummer for Oneida and now also known as Man Forever, he explores drum performance as pure sound experience. --John Payne

Saturday, December 15

Ty Segall, Bleached, Night Beats
EL REY THEATRE
Laguna Beach's Ty Segall is a power chord-playing bro straight out of the garage with a tough new/old take on classic rock. A facile and fun tunesmith knocking around one very large warehouse of rock-idol moves and motifs, he delivers his Troggs/T. Rex/Beatles/bubblegum in a charismatic, carefree style that belies the obvious passion and brains behind it all. Seek out his new Twins for more magical musical mélanges. Also tonight, Gun Club meets Blondie in L.A.-born-and-bred post-post-punks Bleached, while Seattle's Night Beats drop hallucinatory sonic bombs on all things psych-grease rock and roll. --John Payne

See also: Make No Mistake: Bleached Are Punk as Fuck

Astronautalis, Busdriver, Jel
THE SATELLITE
"Our work is never done; we are Sisyphus," Astronautalis declares on the title track of his fourth album, This Is Our Science. Like that king of Ephyra, the Minneapolis rapper also known as Andy Bothwell keeps pushing a boulder up a mountain stacked with his own words, only to watch it all tumble down again. Elsewhere, on the bittersweet love song "Contrails," he wonders, "What kind of fool is so stupid to climb a mountain to do it/Then climb back down to the town without a picture to prove it?" Astronautalis prefers using words to take pictures, finding himself in awe of a woman who's both an escape artist ("leaving's your living, built in your bones") and crippled inside ("I know her cane is just a comedy"), and who leaves an endless trail of wreckage behind her ("Your contrail's coated in broken homes"). The imagery comes even faster and denser by way of local hip-hop prophet Busdriver, who overloads his songs with blurry, rapid-fire and insanely inventive wordplay, while Anticon founder Jel constructs his tracks on a mighty foundation of big and loud live drumming. --Falling James