Erika Wennerstrom and Heidi Johnson

Better Than . . . standing under the flight path of a jumbo jet at LAX.

If Heartless Bastards keep coming to Los Angeles, they're going to need a bigger boat, to paraphrase Roy Scheider in Jaws. The previous time the Texas band played the Echoplex, back in 2010, they filled the place, but last night the crowd was so large and packed in so tight, even the club's employees had difficulty making their way through the throng to restock the bar with more cases of beer.

Slow Club's Rebecca Taylor. Photos by Falling James

Better Than . . . self-medicating a broken heart without the keen supervision of a pair of trained English romantic-disillusionment specialists.

Slow Club is a band of fascinating contrasts. Onstage, singer Rebecca Taylor tells silly jokes and exhorts the crowd to have fun, and yet she and her musical partner, Charles Watson, croon some of the saddest ballads this side of their hero Leonard Cohen. There are some compulsively buoyant pop moods on Slow Club's recent album, Paradise, but you could say that the Sheffield group are at their best when they're feeling their worst.

"You got the brains/I got the body," Taylor intoned early on at the Echoplex, turning what could have been a sarcastic or boastful line into something vulnerable and hauntingly yearning. Watson answered her plea with star-lit chimes of guitar before the rest of the band came rushing in to fill the lonely void of "Where I'm Waking" with a euphoric chorus.

All photos by Falling James

Better Than . . . going to the circus.

Abby Travis sure knows how to throw a party. She's seemingly ubiquitous as an in-demand bassist, backing everyone from Masters of Reality, KMFDM and Vanessa Paradis to Beck, Eagles of Death Metal and Spinal Tap, but the Los Angeles native performs her own music so rarely that, when she does play, each concert feels more like an event than a gig.

Last night's show at the Dragonfly was no exception, as Travis celebrated her latest solo album IV with a barrage of visual and mental distractions and stimuli. Not the least of which was the ungainly but stunning frock of black feathers she sported when she first strutted onstage.

Timothy Norris

See also our Lana Del Rey slide show.

Better Than... peering through the windows of a candy store.

Perhaps as a sign of her growing musical and magical powers, Lana Del Rey brought her own weather with her to Amoeba Music. L.A.'s currently going through one of its driest and mildest winters in recent memory, but the sky clouded up all afternoon, and a light rain fell outside during the melancholy diva's five-song set at the hangar-size Hollywood record emporium.

Storm clouds of a different nature have been stubbornly pursuing the artist formerly known as Lizzy Grant, even as her three national and international labels (Interscope, Polydor and Stranger) stoke the publicity machine and her new Born to Die album sprints up the charts. Like Obama fending off the accusations of birthers, Del Rey is dogged by questions of authenticity from a newly ravenous pack of critics who claim to be shocked that a pop singer would change her name and reinvent herself.

Falling James

Exene Cervenka of X

(Much) Better Than ... hearing many of these same songs butchered on punk rock karaoke night at the local sports bar.

Of course there's something oddly oxymoronic about a museum inviting punk rock bands over to play (albeit safely outside on the patio). In the very early days of punk, X and the Avengers were blacklisted from most rock nightclubs, much less museums, and their fans were often beaten up by cops just for walking down the street. Not to mention that back then a lineup like this might've cost $3 at the Starwood, as opposed to the $50 and up ticket price tonight at MOCA.

By definition, punk was anti-nostalgic and wasn't meant to last long enough to be examined in a clinical setting, if only as a defiant and/or hopeless reaction to the literal and long-winded monopoly classic-rock groups like the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac had (and still have) over the radio airwaves. There's a reason why X's first concert movie was called The Unheard Music, and why so many of their brilliant early L.A. peers (the Screamers, Black Randy & the Metro Squad, Rhino 39, Ella & the Blacks) were rarely or barely documented at all.

Falling James

Bratmobile's Allison Wolfe and Rainbow Arabia's Tiffany Preston

See also: R.I.P. Ari Up of the Slits, Dead at 48

One of The Slits' earliest and most iconic songs was their 1979 single "Typical Girls," but there was never anything typical about the way the British coven infused their punk-pop ditties with subversive strains of dub and reggae.

Their lead singer, Ari Up, died of cancer in 2010. She was so distinctively charismatic and charmingly rebellious that it took a small army of atypical women from such simpatico underground bands as Rainbow Arabia, White Magic, the Sharp Ease, Bratmobile, Raw Geronimo and Vivian Girls to capture all sides of her irrepressibly mad personality at last night's tribute show at Part Time Punks at the Echo.

Timothy Norris

Morrissey & Kristeen Young
The Shrine Auditorium
11-26-11

Better than ... walking down Hoover in a blue-&-gold Bruins shirt after the big game.

For a person who once famously declared that he was celibate, Steven Patrick Morrissey is clearly too sexy for his body these days, showing a more relaxed and playfully campy attitude about being a pinup hero. In the past, this cultured contrarian just needed words to shock people, but now he's willing to take it all off, either to demystify himself before his overly worshipful fans or simply because he's proud of his hot body.

Falling James

The Ettes' Coco Hames

Better Than . . . Attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

It's understandable that Angeleno music fans might think of the Ettes as the band that got away. There was a time early in the garage-pop trio's career when they were based here in Los Angeles, but that was before they relocated to places like London and Nashville and started working with such producers as the Black Keys' Dan Auerbach and White Stripes helmsman Liam Watson and touring with stellar pals the Kings of Leon and the Dead Weather.

Thursday night's show was somewhat of a triumphant homecoming for the Ettes. When they formed in L.A. earlier this decade, they were a struggling garage band toiling in half-empty clubs in front of a dozen diehard fans. Early releases on labels like Sympathy for the Record Industry helped the group attain a certain cachet in underground punk circles, but the Ettes eventually left town for greener pastures.

Falling James

The Go-Go's

Better Than . . . Falling 20 feet from a cliff while hiking in Northern California.

You've got to hand it to the Go-Go's. At a time in their career when they could be touring with some predictable '80s new-wave oldies act, they instead decide to hit the road with a young, stirringly adventurous opening band like Girl in a Coma. Although they're both all-female punk-influenced combos, the two groups wouldn't seem to be an obvious match on paper. Prodigal homegirls the Go-Go's write compact, giddily exuberant (at least on the surface) pop songs with traditional structures, while San Antonio's Girl in a Coma construct intense, expansive post-punk workouts that are closer to grunge than bubblegum.

Better Than ... The drive-by shooting that occurred just a block down the street from the nightclub over the weekend.

"I've been here before," singer-guitarist Ben Heywood mused coyly between songs, halfway through Summer Darling's show at the Satellite on Friday. "I recognize this place."