The roots of Flying Lotus, Gaslamp Killer and the rest of the Low End Theory crew are often glossed over in the rush to annoint them as vanguards of an avant-garde beat generation. Admittedly, the artists that frequent the weekly club at the Airliner in Lincoln Heights incorporate a vast array of influences, but their DNA reveals a hip-hop influence in spirit if not sound.

Accordingly, when Gaslamp, Nobody and Daddy Kev recently took over DJ Muggs' "Soul Assassins" radio show on Shade 45 (download link available here), Muggs and his co-host, the venerable local DJ Mr. Choc, spent much of the two-hour session praising their contemporaries for the way they've expanded the genre's aesthetic. So, consider Muggs' appearance Wednesday night at the Low End Theory both a co-sign from the legendary producer and a tacit nod at how much of an influence he's had on the last 20 years of production.

In the midst of my conversation a few days ago with Clive Davis, the veteran label chief, talent scout and record producer offered up a particularly welcome bit of news about Aretha Franklin, who went through some serious surgery last fall reportedly related to a diagnosis of  cancer. She has subsequently discredited widely circulated reports that she has pancreatic cancer.

Davis said that if all goes according to plan, he'll be working this year with the Queen of Soul, who he brought over to Arista Records in 1980, overseeing the dawn of a new era of chart success for her over the next decade.

"I just got off the phone with her, and she's sounding very good," Davis said. "We had a wonderful conversation, and we’re looking forward to working together. She's planning to come here when the weather gets a little warmer in New York."

He said he's also just wrapped up work with one of Franklin's myriad R&B disciples, Jennifer Hudson.

"I'm very excited about the new Jennifer Hudson album we've just completed," he said. "I love the idea of showcasing big voices of someone unique like her, who can not only break through with hits but also have a big career."

Davis will host his annual pre-Grammy Awards bash on Saturday night, and he'll also be on hand Wednesday night at the Grammy Museum to be the first honoree in the facility's new "Icons of the Music Industry" question-answer series.

-- Randy Lewis

Photo: Jennifer Hudson and Clive Davis at the 2010 Grammy Awards "Salute to Icons honoring Doug Morris" in Beverly Hills. Credit: Jason Merritt / Getty Images

This week is the 47th anniversary of the Beatles’ first U.S. visit and their initial appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” that plunged the country into the deep end of Beatlemania.

Two days after that seismic telecast, the Fab Four played their first bona fide concert on U.S. soil at the Coliseum in Washington D.C., an event that was shown in movie theaters around the country in a closed-circuit telecast that has never been widely broadcast since.

Editor's note: Every week, our colleagues at Brand X’s L.A. Unheard column unearth one of L.A.’s best undiscovered acts.

The band: Oh Darling, an L.A. indie-pop quartet. Formerly Portland, Ore.-based, the group’s become a regular on the eastside scene since arriving in town in 2009.

The sound: While one might expect a band named "Oh Darling" to pay homage to "White Album"-era Paul McCartney, the group skips the psychedelia in favor of upbeat, hook-laden love songs cuter than a Zooey Deschanel movie. Don’t look for speaker-busting fuzz, either, despite recording sessions in the band’s Echo Park home studio: Oh Darling’s blast from the past is refreshingly bright and clean, cutting loose from the lo-fi trend of fellow retro locals Best Coast and La Sera.

The details: The group's latest album, "Brave the Sound," is due April 26. Oh Darling will join the Robotanists' free Silverlake Lounge residency with Kissing Cousins on Monday.

The rest: Visit Brand X to download the band's "Happiness."

-- David Greenwald

Photo: Oh Darling. Credit: Alicia J. Rose

Since 2005's self-titled debut, Akron/Family has spent a half-decade inching from experimentation toward accessibility. Over the course of member and label changes and a number of releases, the group’s ramshackle acoustic recordings, once filled with found-sound samples and ghostly harmonies, turned toward jam-band grooves and thrashy rock riffs. Akron/Family's weirder material is behind it, and the group's audiences have grown accordingly: The act that scared off UCLA students with a 20-minute noise marathon at a show in 2006 had college kids chanting along to every lyric at a Natural History Museum headlining gig two years later.

But "S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT" is a conscious effort to pocket the hacky sack. Songs such as “Silly Bears” and “Another Sky” retain the group's recent crowd-pleasing guitar work, but a few knob twists put the searing tones closer to the distorted, bracing territory of Liars or Women. It’s on the ballads where the group’s time machine best hits its mark: “Cast a Net” and the album-closing cool-down of “Canopy” and “Creator” find the trio’s voices merging in alien harmonies while acoustic and electric guitars unfold as gently as ancient parchment. Whether raucous or tuneful, Akron/Family’s melodies tend to sink below the music -- leaving lyrics such as those of “Silly Bears,” perhaps the first sludge-rock anthem applicable to a future “Winnie the Pooh” movie soundtrack, wisely out of the spotlight.

Like most sequels, "S/T II" doesn't quite recapture the original's magic. But it evokes enough of Akron/Family’s early work to appease old fans as well as new ones, pointing the group back, at long last, in the right direction.

-- David Greenwald

Akron/Family
“S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT”
Dead Oceans
Three stars (out of four)

Nicole Atkins is the kind of classic pop singer who could have been a megastar at any point except the last five years. She has a huge, rangy voice flecked with soul that sounds great atop broken-bottle slide blues (“My Baby Don’t Lie”), wine-sloppy piano ballads (“Hotel Plaster”) and even an unexpected stab at X-inspired surf punk (“You Come to Me”).

Maybe the handmade breadth and skill of “Mondo Amore” can catch a commercial slow burn like that of her onetime tourmates the Black Keys. But it’s rough out there for a firecracker female singer for whom Auto-Tune is merely what you do to your pink Cadillac every 3,000 miles.

Neko Case is probably the best reference point here, and Atkins’ band nails the same kind of grain-silo reverb and guitar tremolo that give tunes such as “This Is for Love” their weight. But she’s at her best atop the tear-blotted strings of “War Is Hell,” which give her room to sing for the rafters and bend the song into unexpected chord changes. There isn’t a clear standout single, but “Mondo” is sturdy, well-arranged pop that old crooners and hipster blues brothers alike can claim as theirs.

-- August Brown

Nicole Atkins
"Mondo Amore"
Razor & Tie
Two and a half stars (out of four)

Over the Rhine is the Ohio indie husband-wife duo Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist, who’ve been making gorgeous records for a couple of decades that sound like they sprung from another time.

On their new one, they’ve found a soulmate in producer Joe Henry, who bathes their ethereal musical excursions in the sonic equivalent of a thick buffalo hide rug spread over an oak floor before a stone fireplace. Bergquist’s voice has the old-soul quality of a seasoned blues singer, and she’s complemented expertly in “Undamned” by that other great, white female blues singer of our time, Lucinda Williams.

Something’s slipping away, tantalizingly out of reach or just coming within one’s grasp in songs whose lyrics are sculpted with poetic attention to imagery that’s as evocative as it is ambiguous. “Everybody has a dream that they will never own,” Bergquist sings enigmatically in the opening track, “The Laugh of Recognition.” Detweiler’s “Infamous Love Song” comes off like a soliloquy, a graceful testament to the passion and commitment necessary to keep love alive.

One photo in the album artwork shows the couple standing in a sunny field of blooming flowers; another captures a thick grove of woods in which the light struggles to peek through. Over the Rhine expertly explores those contrasting moods in a work as exquisitely beautiful as Van Morrison’s most graceful efforts.

-- Randy Lewis

Over the Rhine
“The Long Surrender”
(Great Speckled Dog)
Four stars (out of four)

In the days leading up to Sunday's Grammy Awards, which Pop & Hiss will be covering live, this blog will tackle various Grammy artists, personalities, categories and just plain oddities. 

Don't let anyone ever tell you that Grammy voters don't take risks. Scan the full list of Grammy nominees, and there's plenty of left-of-center picks. Yet when it comes to some of the more experimental artists, there's no guarantee that voters actually listen to the music.

There may not be any artist nominated this year that's weirder than Denmark's Oh No Ono, and that's likely why the band isn't recognized for its music. Way down in the best recording package field, a category that once nominated locals No Age, one will find Oh No Ono's "Eggs." 

Designed by Malene Mathiasson, the CD booklet is a treat to flip through,  even in the online world. Mathiasson crafted a sort of split-screen collection of fantastical artwork -- pieces that fall somewhere between role-playing-game-like art and dreamily sensual works. It allows for a form of interaction, allowing users to flip through either the top or bottom panels, which the virtual representation re-creates. 

The album was released in January 2010 on Friendly Fire Recordings, and the experimental pop is borderline transfixing and frightening. The warped orchestrations are a collage of high-pitched vocals, squirming electronics and church-like organs. It's a long way from Lady Gaga. Heck, it's a long way from the Arcade Fire. Sample the band at its most odd above with single "Swim."

-- Todd Martens

Photo: Cropped image of Mathiasson's Oh No Ono artwork, released last year on Friendly Fire Recordings. 

A list of upcoming concerts across the Southland, with on-sale dates in parentheses.

Wiltern
Elvis Costello & the Imposters, May 11; Adele, June 9 (Fri.)

Hollywood Palladium
Deftones, June 10 (Fri.)

The Orpheum
Brett Dennen, June 18 (Fri.)

El Rey Theater
Bell'Aria, April 25 (now); Xavier Rudd, May 2 (Fri.); Khaira Arby, March 8 (Sat.)

Nokia Theatre
Espinoza Paz, March 19 (Sat.)

Club Nokia
Stryper, March 9; KEM, March 30 (Fri.)

Royce Hall
Bryan Adams, April 9 (Sat.)

Santa Barbara Bowl
Janet Jackson, April 10 (Sat.)

City National Grove of Anaheim
Merle Haggard, May 12; Gipsy Kings, May 18 (Sat.)

Troubadour
Civil Twilight, March 3; the Concretes, March 4; Baths, March 5; Yemen Blues, March 6; Asobi Seksu, March 9; Toro y Moi, March 23 (now)

The Echo
Amanda Jo Williams, Feb. 8; Barb Wires, March 2; Johnossi, March 8; Seasons, March 9; Joey Cape, March 12; Incan Abraham, March 29; the Baseball Project, March 31; PVT, April 14; Subhumans, April 20 (now)

Echoplex
Leftover Crack, Feb. 27; Rainbow Arabia, March 25; the Chris Robinson Brotherhood, March 28, April 11, April 25, May 9 and May 23; Jamaica, April 23 (now)

Photo by Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times

The last time U.K. songstress Adele graced a stateside stage was a 2009 set at the Hollywood Bowl, which despite some flubbed lyrics and band restarts, The Times praised her effortless voice.

The 22-year-old will have the chance to make up for that last showing when her summer headlining tour, which she announced Monday, rolls through L.A. on June 9 at The Wiltern.

In support of her critically acclaimed sophomore album “21,” out stateside Feb. 22, the tour will kick off in Washington, D.C. on May 12 and run through June 20 in Nashville. 

Released overseas, “21” hit No. 1 in a handful of countries, including the U.K., Ireland, Germany, Holland, New Zealand, Switzerland, Austria and Belgium. 

“21” logged 208,000 copies in its first week in the U.K. -- making it the biggest-selling January release in five years, since the Arctic Monkey's “Whatever People Say I Am That's What I'm Not” in 2006.

The album’s first single, “Rolling in the Deep,” is enjoying a nice wave of buzz with critics and currently sits in the top spot on VH1’s “Top 20 Countdown.”

Tickets go on sale to the public Feb. 11 with a presale beginning Wednesday on her official site.

Check out the dates after the jump:

 
Decades before Jay-Z, Nicki Minaj, Eminem or Lil Wayne made names for themselves in mainstream hip-hop, Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash and Kool Herc introduced the movement to the first adopters, who spread the genre to the masses via not only music, but dancing, art and DJing. 

That rich history of hip-hop culture, dating back to the days of b-boys and b-girls breaking on streets, DJs scratching turntables, MCs battling each other on corners and graffiti writers tagging wherever and whenever, is explored in a new coffee-table book and accompanying Grammy Museum exhibit, which opens Tuesday. 

“Hip-Hop: A Cultural Odyssey” is a massive, sprawling 420 page opus that includes exclusive photos and interviews with the pioneers, trendsetters and icons of the genre and provides an exhaustive account on the birth, evolution and global ripple effect hip-hop has had over the last four decades.

Feminine reticence is a deeply embedded trait. Women songwriters in the rock era have used it strategically. Freedom is linked to noise, the earthy squalls of Janis and Aretha or the riot grrrls’ indignant hollering. Yet quieter voices can get to the heart of many predicaments women face, precisely because they embody those binds: the challenge of asserting oneself in a father-dominated family or a social guy zone; the persistent worry that raising your voice might mark you as overly needy, crass or just too big.

Two new releases from women sure of their quiet voices reflect that predicament. Jessica Lea Mayfield is only 21, but she’s been performing for years as part of a family bluegrass band, and “Tell Me” is her second solo album. Working with her producer, Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, Mayfield has developed a sound that’s coy and plain-spoken, a fascinating take on the demure female singer, especially as that role has unfolded within Mayfield’s chosen home base of Americana. Her cool connects her to Patsy Cline; her haunted side recalls Gillian Welch. She also has a bit of the shambolic indie rocker in her, sometimes even sounding like a female J. Mascis.

Mayfield’s slim soprano relies on a sly drawl that makes you wonder if she might be teasing you, and her lyrics are frank and poetic, the confessions of a young heart learning how to contain itself. “Where did my … self … control … go?” she breathes ever so carefully in “Run Myself Into the Ground,” as Auerbach’s mix of spacey electronics and vintage tremolo guitar form shadows behind her. Mayfield’s internal debate about whether self-control is something worth preserving is her most interesting subject, a deeply relevant counterpoint to the exhibitionistic tendencies of so many young performers.