Palladium

MUSIC On Cake's first album since 2004, "Showroom of Compassion" — a runaway chart success — the Northern Californian outfit is in toned condition, turning out polished compositions that could fit in with its classic catalog. The band will play from both the old and the new at this Los Angeles tour stop. The Palladium, 6215 Sunset Blvd. 8 p.m. Sat. $35. livenation.com.

Ellie Goulding described herself as “just a country girl” at her sold-out Hollywood Palladium show Tuesday night. That's a curious self-image for a 26-year-old English electro-pop vixen with a one-quarter shaved head and a quiver of ravey, chart-topping singles. But then she followed that quip with “Anything Could Happen,” the first single off her most recent album, “Halcyon,” and it made more sense. On record, that tune is a throb of synthesizers and pitch-tweaked vocals.

Here's a sign that a punk band is out of touch: When its fortysomething guitarist stands before a sold-out crowd of four thousand mostly white, beefy dudes, and rails against the one thing he hates the most - using a violent homophobic slur to do so. Granted, Pennywise's Fletcher Dragge was trying to rip on his heavy metal-listening high school nemeses, and the rest of the band cringed and mumbled “Not cool” while Dragge tried to walk it...

“Rick Springfield, you have a song that people recognize after three frigging notes. Congratulations, Rick frigging Springfield,” Dave Grohl said on Thursday to his colleague in a new band celebrating the former Van Nuys recording studio Sound City. Springfield, for his part, looked tickled to be onstage at a sold-out Hollywood Palladium hearing praise from the Foo Fighters frontman seconds into his own 1981 hit “Jessie's Girl.” Grohl's friendly jibe - a mix of jealousy and bonhomie in the dark arts of rock hitmaking - showed the point of his entire Sound City Players project.

WHAT A surprise it was to see the 1940 photograph of the Hollywood Palladium ["Palladium Gets a New Dance Card," by Geoff Boucher, Oct. 5]. It brought back many fond memories as I was there. It was wartime and I went with a girlfriend and our dates, who were soldiers. I remember Tommy Dorsey was performing, and I could see Lana Turner was sitting at a table on that balcony. My date wanted to see Tommy Dorsey up close, so we pushed our way through the crowd of dancers to where the orchestra was and then I fainted right in front of him. After that I recall a thrilling ride in a rumble seat of a Ford.

Thick billows of acrid smoke engulfed the stage of the Palladium about an hour into A$AP Rocky's sold-out concert on Friday night. A young Harlem-born rapper whose next-big-thing status in New York hip-hop mirrors that of Kendrick Lamar in L.A., A$AP Rocky had quieted the room and was attempting to start some kind of birthday presentation for one of the show's openers, Schoolboy Q. Suddenly, both men -- as well as a cake topped with burning candles...

A flurry of speculative buying of palladium, recently used in nuclear fusion experiments in the United States and Europe, today pushed the price of the metal in Europe to its highest level in more than eight years, about $178 an ounce. Palladium prices have jumped almost 27% since late March when two scientists, one American and one British, claimed to have sustained a nuclear fusion reaction at room temperature in an experiment using palladium and heavy water. If the results of the experiments are confirmed, the breakthrough could herald a new era of cheap nuclear power and create a major market for palladium.

Lenore Carlson was on the money when she subtitled her play, "Palladium Is Moving," "A Nasty, Vicious Comedy." But surely her tongue was in her cheek as she scrawled those words. Half the fun of this "Palladium" at the Court Theatre in Hollywood is watching a sleazy bunch of telemarketers get theirs. The other half is watching them get each other on the way to getting theirs. The idea isn't entirely new to the stage.

Palladium futures prices surged to their highest level in nearly 5 1/2 years Wednesday on New York's Mercantile Exchange amid optimism that recent nuclear fusion experiments could spur demand for the metal as an ingredient in the power plants of tomorrow. Other precious metal futures prices also advanced. On other markets, cocoa futures plunged, gasoline prices rose but other energy futures were mixed; grains and soybeans were mostly higher, and livestock and meat futures were mixed.

Jewelry: An article in the Business section Sunday about precious metals in jewelry said palladium was denser than platinum. Platinum is much denser than palladium.

Greg Graffin knows something about teenage rebellion. As the young singer for one of SoCal's most prominent hard-core punk bands, Bad Religion, raging against parental control (and the global system) was his core mission in the early 1980s. Although lyrics on the band's new album, "True North," still focus on political grievance and societal ills, the generational conflict he once experienced as a suburban San Fernando Valley punk has now emerged between Graffin and his own son, now 21. He's learned to accept it. "[Children are]

Here's a sign that a punk band is out of touch: When its fortysomething guitarist stands before a sold-out crowd of four thousand mostly white, beefy dudes, and rails against the one thing he hates the most - using a violent homophobic slur to do so. Granted, Pennywise's Fletcher Dragge was trying to rip on his heavy metal-listening high school nemeses, and the rest of the band cringed and mumbled “Not cool” while Dragge tried to walk it...

Words don't mean a lot to Chino Moreno. For the singer and lyricist from the ethereal metal band Deftones, songs are all about melody and the venting of pure emotion, not poetry. “I really don't think too much about writing lyrics. I'm not like a poet,” says Moreno, calling from a Deftones tour stop in Argentina. “It's all pretty much how I feel about the sound of the music. Melody always comes first, and the words will just come. It's sort of a puzzle to put together.” Even his fellow band members aren't sure what he's singing about, although the emotional stakes seem clear.

Before Chan Marshall's Cat Power took the stage at the Hollywood Palladium on Thursday, the house DJ set the mood by playing Bob Dylan's "Shelter From the Storm" as her band walked on. She couldn't have picked more apropos entrance music. Marshall recently announced that she'd canceled her upcoming European tour due to struggles with angioedema, a painful skin-swelling condition, and an apparent bankruptcy. "I have not thrown in any towel, I am trying to figure out what best I can do. Heart broken.

Admit it. You thought you had Cat Power's Chan Marshall pegged — and maybe grown a little nervous that her smooth, smoky voice and increasingly carefree demeanor had settled into a blue-eyed soul groove that would soundtrack hipster dinner parties through the next decade. But "Sun" will prove you wrong. A big, confident and captivating pop album that's so far removed from her Memphis-inspired previous album of originals "The Greatest" (In between, she released an album of covers called "Jukebox")

A strange feeling came over Randy Blythe of the heavy metal band Lamb of God just moments before stepping onstage last August: He got nervous. The occasion was opening night of the Knotfest hard rock festival in Council Bluff, Iowa, another in a series of high-profile gigs for the singer. But it wasn't the crowd or the spotlight that had him anxious. Just days earlier, Blythe was imprisoned in the Czech Republic, facing manslaughter charges and uncertain as to when or how he would be released.

Two Japanese and an American who developed a key synthetic technique for making complex organic molecules used in medicine, agriculture and electronics have been awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Richard Heck, 79, emeritus professor at the University of Delaware, Ei-Ichi Negishi, 75, of Purdue University and Akira Suzuki, 80, a retired professor at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan, will share the $1.5-million award for their creation of a family of reactions involving the metal palladium that allow chemists to link carbon atoms together more efficiently and with less waste.

Thick billows of acrid smoke engulfed the stage of the Palladium about an hour into A$AP Rocky's sold-out concert on Friday night. A young Harlem-born rapper whose next-big-thing status in New York hip-hop mirrors that of Kendrick Lamar in L.A., A$AP Rocky had quieted the room and was attempting to start some kind of birthday presentation for one of the show's openers, Schoolboy Q. Suddenly, both men -- as well as a cake topped with burning candles...