Pop Reviews

School of Fish needs to stay in class. Lesson 1: Drum machines are anathema to rock 'n' roll. Starting with its first song at Bogart's on Tuesday, the up-and-coming L.A. quartet showed just how important that lesson is. The pleasant rocker "Wrong" was building to a peak. But with drummer M.P. enslaved to a metronomic, mechanical beat that supplemented his own playing, there was no room for the band to move. The song simply ended, a case of rockus interruptus.

Drawing conclusions on the music of Tyler the Creator based on his shocking way with language is like trying to explain the plot of a comic book by noting how much red ink is used. It's not only unfair, but inaccurately draws the Los Angeles-based rapper and founder of the Odd Future crew as one-dimensional, which he most certainly is not. On "Wolf," Tyler's third solo album, the producer, rapper, comedic actor and storyteller revels in his many dimensions, and has released his best album to date - even if it's too long and too sonically flat to confirm his place as a top-rate producer.

The Wild Cards showed Saturday at the Lingerie that they'd be equally effective as an opening act for the Blasters or the Manhattan Transfer--and that's a compliment to the group's cross-genre reach, not a dig at its easy accessibility. All the Cypress-based quartet needs is some signature material that moves away from the swing-jazz framework that dominated Saturday's show.

Thurston Moore's new band Chelsea Light Moving is named after the avant-garde composer Philip Glass' pre-fame moving company, and that's a pretty good metaphor for the band's sound: high-minded musicians doing some dumb, brawny lifting. The band's self-titled debut comes after a gentler acoustic solo album and what appears to be a long hiatus for Sonic Youth (Moore is separating from his wife and band co-founder Kim Gordon). So it makes sense that his next move is this low-stakes, punky project whose album sounds like it was written in an afternoon - in both good and bad ways.

Chrissie Hynde hasn't relinquished her position at the pinnacle of the female rock vocal art, but Sharleen Spiteri, singer of the Scottish band Texas, appears ready to put some major heat on her. Unleashing a full, dusky voice informed by urgency and intelligence, Spiteri convinced the Roxy audience on Monday that her cries of longing and joy flowed straight from her soul. Texas hasn't regained the momentum it generated two years ago, with its debut album.

It was R&B upstart versus R&B veterans when Regina Belle and the Whispers played two sold-out shows at the Universal Amphitheatre on Friday night. Opening act Belle has a wide-ranging voice that invites comparison to Patti LaBelle and Anita Baker. She's an attractive, mostly low-key performer who's new to the concert stage but shows great promise. The 24-year-old singer hit her stride toward the end of her set on a dramatic ballad, "After the Love Has Lost Its Shine."

Red Lorry Yellow Lorry has no truck with levity. Still, the British band's show on Wednesday at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano (they also play Helter Skelter in Hollywood tonight) was a cut above much of what has come out of the sorrow-and-gloom school of post-punk Anglo rock. When broody Brit bands like the Mission U.K. come over and start acting like so many baleful Young Werthers, the first reaction is to wish they'd quit the posing, buy some Chuck Berry records and lighten up.

Some long hair was tossed, a well-muscled lead singer named Spike found a way to remove his shirt midway through the first song, a whammy bar shrieked NNNGAOOOWWww- wee- wee-wee! But what the Orange County band Mind Over Four played at the club Hollywood Live on Thursday was far more dissonant than anything you'd expect from journeyman hard-rockers.

The (rain) gods must be crazy--or maybe just big Oingo Boingo fans. Saturday's showers stopped just before the L.A. band's Halloween extravaganza that evening at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre. And Boingo had barely finished its encores when it began sprinkling again. Maybe the guy who looked exactly like the Pope tooling around the Amphitheatre before show time in a makeshift Popemobile confused those rain gods just enough to help keep the proceedings dry.

Remember those floppy crocheted hats with panels made from cut-up Coors cans that some people wore in the '70s? If that gives you a kick, you probably would have liked seeing Jellyfish at the Roxy on Thursday. If you're still wearing one, you're probably in the band. Bassist Chris Manning was indeed so becapped on Thursday, and if that doesn't give you a good enough picture, how about "Alice in Wonderland"-meets-"H. R.

To call bassist Flea's new collaborative effort, Atoms for Peace, a departure for the versatile musician is to underestimate the scope of his talents. Over his 30-year career, he's played punk bass, slap bass, jazz bass, trance bass, arena rock bass and nearly naked tube-sock bass. On "Amok," the five-man supergroup's debut album, the artist known for his work as a nihilist in "The Big Lebowski" - oh, and as a founding member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers - provides mesmerizing doses of hypnosis bass to create some of the most groove-heavy lines of his career.

As its title implies, "IV" is the fourth studio album from this long-running Los Angeles punk band. But that total comes with an asterisk: Following "III" in 2008, the Bronx effected an unlikely transition and released two records - both excellent - as Mariachi El Bronx, an honest-to- Dios mariachi outfit complete with brass and guitarrón . Now the group has shed the charro suits and returned to its original sound with 12 serrated hard-core jams...

"Two Lanes of Freedom" is Tim McGraw's first album since he announced that he gave up alcohol five years ago. It's also his first record for Big Machine - appropriately, also Taylor Swift's home label, given her single "Tim McGraw" - and he looks hale and hearty in the album's accompanying videos. It all signals a major new start for McGraw, one of pop-country's bestselling but critically assailed figures. If only the songs on "Two Lanes" were as honed and wiry as their singer. The album should keep him atop the country commercial firmament, but doesn't really advance him as an artist.

A couple of albums from 2012 we missed . . . Martha Wainwright "Come Home to Mama" (V2/Cooperative Music) Three stars At No. 11 on my (and, I suspect, many others') 10 best albums of 2012 list is "Out of the Game," Rufus Wainwright's funny, funky collaboration with producer Mark Ronson. But if "Out of the Game" got a bit lost in the Frank-and-Fiona shuffle, it at least made a bigger splash than the latest from Wainwright's younger sister Martha, who like Rufus was born to the urbane folk singers Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III. McGarrigle died in early 2010, weeks after Martha became a mother herself, and that's the experience she recounts on "Come Home to Mama," a powerful set of songs - including the last one written by McGarrigle - released to minimal fanfare in mid-October.

Anyone who believes that rock and roll is dead would have gotten a defibrillator shock at Gary Clark Jr.'s Troubadour set Tuesday. The two-hour show revalidated the idea that an inspired guitar, bass and drums combo on a small stage can still be more overpowering live than pummeling dance beats and a hundred-foot LED wall. The 28-year-old Austin, Texas, singer-guitarist is perhaps the most exciting blues-based instrumentalist to emerge since Jack White. His sound culls from a century of American guitar music, performed with a panache that's wholly contemporary.

Bonnie Raitt began her encore Saturday night at the Greek Theatre with what might be her most well-known song. "I Can't Make You Love Me" here shared much with Raitt's 1991 studio recording. Set to a ballad tempo and arranged around a rippling piano part, the tune (written by Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin) has been covered in recent years by a new generation of tradition-minded pop stars, including Adele and Bon Iver, both of whom she thanked Saturday for bringing it to the attention of fresh ears.

"If this doesn't make you feel sleazy," promised Warrant lead cusser-singer Jani Lane during Wednesday's Universal Amphitheatre show, "nothing will." Would he settle for sleepy? The hit-making hard-rock quintet did its darndest to be distasteful at this hometown show, from the $10 souvenir G-strings to all the Tipper Gore-baiting bad language a brave fifth-grader might muster.

For the last song of the Head and the Heart's set at the Music Box on Thursday, "Rivers and Roads," the band slowed down to a tense build. The acoustic guitars took on a head of stream, the low-tuned drums pounded like a distant, gathering storm. Finally, at the big payoff crescendo, singer-violinist Charity Rose Thielen took the mic and ripped off a Southern-soul shout that seemed to come from a wholly new well of primal, musical joy for the band. The Music Box crowd went ballistic.

On Friday night at the MGM Grand Garden Arena, Ryan Seacrest made a bold announcement, the same one that peppered many of the ads for the first I Heart Radio music festival. "This is the biggest live music event in radio history," he declared of the two-night extravaganza that brought onto the same stage, among others, Alicia Keys, Jay-Z, Carrie Underwood, Coldplay, Steven Tyler, Sting, Randy Jackson, Nicki Minaj, Rascal Flatts, Bruno Mars, Jennifer Lopez, Usher, Sting, Kenny Chesney and Lady Gaga.  Seacrest, best known for his work on "American Idol," as host of the long-running "American Top 40" radio program and, for Angelenos, the morning drive-time DJ for KIIS-FM (102.7)