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.

John Lydon, who is profiled in Sunday's Times, is a quote machine, and therefore pure gold for the journalists lucky enough to shove a tape recorder in his face and get him going. Pop & Hiss recently played chauffeur for the legendarily outspoken singer of the Sex Pistols and Public Image Ltd. while he was promoting his new art book, "Mr. Rotten's Scrapbook," and during the ride (which ferried him from his home in Marina del Rey to the Times building in downtown L.A.), Lydon offered thoughts, tips, advice, and observations on his life in 2011 and his nearly 20 years spent living in Southern California.

On East Los Angeles and its many cultures and neighborhoods: "It used to be such a nice, quiet place, but it’s gotten to be gang-y of late, Pasadena, and into Glendale. It’s all gone very different over the years. It’s funny, I’ve watched this town change dramatically. It’s the problem with America is that you separate yourselves. You ghettoize yourselves. You have your black communities, your Mexican communities, your this, your that. You’re too separate, and you’re desperate because of it. You’re all at war, but you’re all fighting the same problem, you’ve just not come to grips with that. That 'us and them' mentality. That’s the boss man that wants you to believe in such nonsense. Divided we fall. United we conquer."

On living near Venice: "Or as we know it locally, 'Very-nice,'" he said. "I like the beach culture because it doesn’t interfere. It’s not nosy and it’s not peeping through lace curtains. It’s floppy Joes and no shoes on your feet and why give a damn  about what the neighbors [are up to].

When trying to alleviate some dental pain, Lydon took a slug of Johnny Walker Black: "Ah, that’ll get rid of the toothache all right! Don’t waste your money on all that Listerine mouthwash. That’s really poor alcohol. If you’re going to do that, go proper. Why [mess] about?"

On his hairstyling technique: "I keep noticing these little barber shops, and I’ve definitely been meaning to give one a visit at some point, because I went nuts two days ago with one of those electric shavers, and somebody rang and I -- accidentally when I was using it -- turned and I went too high up the back, and I need that straightened out. It’s really, really hard to get the back of your head done proper. And who do you trust with dangerous implements at the back of your skull?"

Considering that the guys in Ween, who are featured in Saturday's Times, built part of their legend on their alleged fondness for huffing household cleansers and the like, they have never been known for their grimly sober stage shows. In fact, one of the last times we saw Ween in concert some five or so years ago, a bottle of Jack barely left the vicinity of Dean Ween's puffy lips. But it didn't seem to negatively affect the proceedings -- Ween played for nearly three hours that night, including many sumptuous cuts off of "The Mollusk," one of their most accomplished works.

If only the crowd in Vancouver, Canada, had gotten so lucky the other night. According to several blog reports, their concert on Jan. 24 was a sorrowful catastrophe, with Gene Ween (nee Aaron Freeman) so wasted that the rest of the band eventually abandoned him on stage, but only after he interrupted songs with extraneous guitar tunings, botched lyrics and weird vocals, and sometimes simply staggered around amuck. There's video floating around but we don't want to be responsible for spreading it because we still smile (in spite of our blushing at some of the lyrics) when we hear the raunch country classic "... Up a Rope." Wait, actually, we don't have those kinds of scruples. What the hell, here's the video.

According to reports from the next nights in Seattle and Portland, Ore., Ween got its act together quick and turned in stellar shows that left the fans blissed out enough to flood the band's Facebook page with accolades. So what will we have in store for us Saturday when they come to the Wiltern? Let's hope the business side of Ween's righteous mullet-friendly party-rock. In the meantime, read our Saturday story on how a band with no new album but a devoted legion of fans manages to sell out the Wiltern.

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo credit: Jimmy McGinley

In an era in which immediate Internet ascent and nebulous "buzz" are viewed by many as career apotheosis, Tanya Morgan represent the triumph of the slow, steady grind. Formed out of the amoebic stew of the Okayplayer message board world in the early years of the last decade, the team of Von Pea, Donwill, and Ilyas quickly became a favorite among those in corners of the Web who believed that hip-hop's been sliding downhill since Jay-Z's "Reasonable Doubt" in 1996.

Due to their influences (A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, the artists on Rawkus Records) and laidback bent, the Brooklyn- and Cincinnati-bred group was an unlikely candidate to be polarizing. But much of the last decade of hip-hop criticism and message board mongering has been spent drawing lines between those who viewed nostalgia as an inherent evil and those being dragged kicking and screaming into the new era.

Accordingly, Tanya Morgan's early work channeled the Native Tongues and the Lyricist Lounge set, and when they failed to create anything as strong as A Tribe Called Quest's "Low End Theory," a vocal minority immediately and wrongfully dismissed them. Conversely, their admirers championed them as torchbearers of a flame that they never asked to carry. But quietly and stealthily, they've evolved into one of the finest groups of their generation.

2009's "Brooklynati" was hailed as a minor classic in quarters as varied as their Okayplayer stomping grounds, XXL and the Onion's A.V. Club. Even Robert Christgau, the self-proclaimed dean of American rock critics, praised their "soul and smarts." But in 2010, the group seemed to take its biggest step forward, with Von Pea and Donwill releasing solo offerings that established them as legitimate solo artists in their own right.

Even if the name Pure Filth doesn't ring a bell, chances are that your bell's been rung by their obliterating sound systems over the last several years. Indeed, the booming sonic centrifuges provided by Sam Robson (a.k.a. Sam XL) have become the de facto gold standard at Los Angeles bass music parties, from the Low End Theory to the Bassface parties downtown, to the riotious campground Coachella after-parties. If it's not a Pure Filth system, you might as well be using clock radio speakers.

Beyond the hyperbole lies empirical truths.  Attend any one of the parties listed above, and you can''t ignore the crowds of young people sucked into the maelstrom of disemboweling bass. The sound systems created by Pure Filth are loud to the point of causing tinnitus, but they offer a bizarre ablution. Consider it purification via the suffocating kickdrum and heavy wobble.

For a surging, psychedelic band such as the Crocodiles, being provocative is a surefire ticket to underground popularity. But these days, it’s not all about raucous stage shows and sonic threats to Sheriff Joe Arpaio for the San Diego duo. Instead, members Brandon Welchez and Charles Rowell are doing something they consider equally risqué: embracing pop music.

“From a lyrical perspective we just try to be honest with whatever is going on in our lives,” Welchez said. “The second record is somewhat death-obsessed. But the further along we go, the less shy we are about showing the pop side of our sound.”

But don’t expect lighthearted songs to translate into a bubble gum aesthetic during their show at the Echo on Friday. Punk-rock attitude and spastic stage antics -- a trademark that dates back to their previous bands such as the Plot to Blow Up the Eiffel Tower -- remain a viable reason to see these guys live.

Though much of the buzz (for better or worse) for the last few days has been for the emotionally charged audition of Chris Medina back in Milwaukee, after spending two days in Nashville -- only the second time the show has made it to Music City -- judge Steven Tyler proclaimed he thinks they may have found “the one.”

Quite a promising statement for such an early phase of the competition (there is still a few more rounds of auditions before Hollywood Week), despite it coming from one of rock’s elder statesmen, who’s undoubtedly seen his fair share of talented vocalists on the road.

The judges made one thing clear when they arrived to the famed Ryman Auditorium, former home of the Grand Ole Opry: They were hoping to find someone to fill Carrie Underwood’s multiplatinum heels. 

Johnny Rotten has lived in Los Angeles for the last two decades, and for a time considered his post-Sex Pistols project Public Image Ltd to be an L.A. band, he told The Times recently when he loaded into the passenger side of an old Volvo to get ferried to a video interview downtown. If any of that information is news to you, the video above will perhaps serve you well. In it, Lydon, whose work with the aforementioned two bands transformed rock music in myriad ways over the course of the 1970s and '80s, is his typically acerbic self.

The punk archetype, who turns 55 on Monday, pulled no punches over the course of two hours in the car and at The Times building, especially when the subject of the current breed of punk bands came up. Specifically, Green Day, whose music Rotten apparently dislikes.

Said Lydon when asked about his inheritors: "Many of the punk bands are cop-outs and imitators and have made it easy for the likes of Green Peace -- Green Day, who I hate. I really ... I can’t stand them. To me, they’re like coat hangers, and haven’t earned the right, they haven’t earned the wings, to be wearing the mantle of punk. They haven’t had to go through the violence, and the hate, and the animosity that us chaps way back when had to put up with. We had to fight for every single footstep."

“Cause when you're 15 and somebody tells you they love you / You're gonna believe them / And when you're 15, don't forget to look before you fall / I've found time can heal most anything / And you just might find who you're supposed to be / I didn't know who I was supposed to be at 15” – Taylor Swift, “Fifteen”

There is something about youth that has the American Idol judges desperate to dole out golden tickets.

Call it the Justin Bieber effect, call it cuteness, you might even call it pity, but the judges' affinity for teens –- specifically 15-year-olds (the show's new lowered minimum age) -- reached a fever pitch when the show ventured to Milwaukee for a round of tryouts.

As host Ryan Seacrest pointed out, every single 15-year-old that auditioned in Milwaukee received that coveted golden pass to Hollywood.

With viewers being treated to a operatic tribute to Bieber’s hit, “Baby,” Seacrest acknowledged that the pint-sized star's lightning-quick rise was a main motivator for the show to lower the age limit from 16 to 15. This would undoubtedly usher in an influx of Beiber-like prodigies, and Seacrest said, “They've certainly delivered so far on the road."

But what exactly constitutes delivered?

Though Bieber has enjoyed unparalleled success in a strugglingmusic industry, he built up a hefty fan base with an abundance of popular YouTube videos, which gave him a foundation of fans to pull from when it came time for his debut. "Idol," however, provides little backstory for each contestant during the audition rounds, choosing to focus on tear-jerkers. 

Last year, I spent a bit of time on a fairly treacherous-looking video set with the local noise-punks No Age. On Thursday, they released that video, for the single "Fever Dreaming" off their recent album "Everything In between." The clip, directed by Patrick Daughters, is one long tracking shot that uses the edge of the camera frame to torment Dean Spunt and Randy Randall with the encroaching threat of --  well, you'll see. But a fever dream is pretty far down the list of maladies they're suffering from by the end.

-- August Brown     

Pop & Hiss published Part One of a conversation among L.A. singer Bethany Cosentino of Best Coast, Nathan Williams of Wavves (who's Cosentino's boyfriend), and writer Matt Diehl last week, but the interaction was a little too long to digest all at once -- and we even edited some of it out. Still, it was an entertaining, pull-no-punches roundtable totally worthy of publication, so what follows is the conclusion. The pair are in the midst of their first-ever duel-headlining tour, which arrives in Tallahassee, Fla., Thursday before venturing up the Eastern Seaboard:  

1/27, Tallahassee, Fla. (Club Downunder)
1/28, Athens, Ga. (40 Watt Club)
1/29, Carrboro, N.C. (Cat's Cradle)
1/31, Washington (9:30 Club)
2/1, Philadelphia (Starlight Ballroom)
2/2, New York (Webster Hall)
2/3, Brooklyn (Music Hall of Williamsburg)

For a full list of the tour, check here. The pair arrives at the Music Box on Feb. 24. (Note: the freewheeling conversation contained a certain amount of cussing, some words of which we've excised from our relatively family-friendly blog.)

Matt Diehl/Los Angeles Times: Last year, you both controversially dissed Katy Perry (“Oh I hate Katy Perry so much, you do not represent California Girls, ...,” Bethany posted on Best Coast’s Twitter). Why the hate?

Bethany Cosentino: We’re not into Katy Perry. I admit that she has good songs; I just don’t like her — I don’t like that whole kitsch thing. But she takes her cat on tour, which is cool.

Nathan Williams: I like “California Girls” — that song is great. I just don’t like that she’s like “I’m a weird girl” when she looks like a model. I love Lady Gaga, however.

LAT: Bethany, are you fan of Bruce Springsteen? I noticed the drum fill that opens [the Best Coast song] “Boyfriend” is the same as the one from Springsteen’s “Badlands”…

NW: I love Bruce Springsteen. When I was first listening to the rough mixes from the album, I was like, “Wait — this is ‘Badlands’!” But Bob [Bruno, Cosentino’s musical partner in Best Coast] had never heard that song before. I pointed it out to him, and he was like, “Oh my God, that’s really weird.”

LAT: A couple of years ago, Wavves was all over the Internet due to a beef and physical fight with members of the band Black Lips. What was that about?

BC: Well, when you’re in a band that’s existed for a long time and you get some amount of success, and then someone else comes around who’s only been around for a year gets bigger than you… It ... people off.

NW: Situations like that do nothing but help you.

Monotonix plays the Echoplex on Thursday, and prospective attendees should hide their beers, protect their cellphones and be prepared to rethink how they view a rock show.

The Israeli trio hates playing on the actual stage, instead opting to rock out in the audience, on the audience, atop the bar, in the bathroom -- and don't be too surprised if the 40-something singer Ami Shalev ventures outside the club to climb a tree and sing from a branch.

They take the antics of Gogol Bordello, the raw power of the Stooges, and meld it with a type of performance art that's equal parts house party, Marx Brothers and chaos.

In support of their new album "Not Yet", produced by legendary engineer Steve Albini, Shalev spoke to Pop & Hiss by telephone, noticeably happy with their sophomore offering, released through Drag City on Tuesday.