In concert, Merrill Garbus slams out chords on a ukulele, hammers on a drum, turns her voice into a choir by recording it and then manipulating the sound with a foot pedal, and sings like she’s busting a vow of silence. The one-woman band who records under the name of Tune-Yards has lately added a few collaborators – bassist Nate Brenner and a horn section – but there’s no denying the central personality at the core of one of the year’s best albums so far, Tune-Yards’ “Whokill” (4AD).

    For Garbus, 32, the journey to the place where she is now – an intersection of ecstatic East African music, folk earthiness, avant-garde experimentation, and bigger-than-life vocals – brimmed with tangents and detours.

    She grew up in a family of musicians on the East Coast, but gravitated toward theater. While in college she became fluent in Swahili and studied in Kenya, where she immersed herself in African music. Puppetry, of all things, came next; she picked up a ukulele and wrote a “creepy” puppet opera “about a mother selling her kids to a butcher.”

3.5 stars (out of 4)

The plaintive harmonies and get-back-to-the-country imagery of Fleet Foxes’ well-received 2008 self-titled debut helped define a musical movement of 21st Century bands in search of lost, 19th Century ideals: Midlake, Blitzen Trapper, Bon Iver. Now the Seattle sextet returns with the far more ambitious “Helplessness Blues” (Sub Pop).

Though the melodies aren’t quite as instantly memorable, the album is in many ways superior to its predecessor. The band’s multi-part harmonies function more as a piece of the wide-screen arrangements rather than the dominant feature. The voice of Robin Pecknold is more out front and lyrically direct; against an intricate web of counterpoint melodies, he plays the troubled narrator wrestling with his place in the world. Employing everything from woodwinds to Tibetan singing bowls, with finger-picked acoustic guitars sailing atop rumbling timpani, the band makes a wonderful sound: rich but not overstuffed, intricate but not labored, virtuosic without sounding like anyone’s showing off. The songs don’t stick to verse-chorus formula, they’re more like mini-suites that turn and twist without drawing attention to their complexity.

If there’s a shortcoming, it’s that the band is almost too subtle for its own good; all that beauty and detail is rarely played for dramatic effect. When Pecknold’s pristine voice rises and finally cracks on “The Shrine/An Argument,” followed by a free-jazz freak-out, it’s the type of musical jolt the rest of the album lacks.

But such outbursts probably wouldn’t make sense in fleshing out the album’s central theme. “Could I wash my hands of just looking out for me?” Pecknold sings on “Montezuma.” On the title song, he declares his desire to “be a functioning cog in some great machinery, serving something beyond me.”

In striving for more self-less version of self, Pecknold and his excellent band have made an album that embraces modesty. Which is why it may take a few listens for its rarefied combination of beauty and anxiety to hit home. In this case, another virtue that Pecknold extols -- patience – has its rewards.

greg@gregkot.com

    Femi Kuti, 48, is the first-born son of a legend. It is not an easy life constantly being measured against a man who changed African music, but Kuti has forged a brilliant career of his own.

    “I can’t run away” from Fela’s legacy, he says in a conversation while on the road with his 14-piece band, which arrives Saturday at Metro. “In a way, I’m much luckier than my father, because he went through a lot to make music. He went through a lot just to live.”

     Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the late Nigerian saxophonist and revolutionary, pioneered a militant brand of African funk called Afro-beat, openly opposed his country’s dictatorial government and was beaten, jailed and constantly harassed for his troubles. All the while, he released a steady stream of politically charged albums and performed thousands of epic-length concerts worldwide with a band numbering nearly 30 members. Over the decades he became a venerated and outspoken voice of truth in Africa and an international superstar. When he died in 1997, a million people attended his funeral in Lagos, Nigeria. In recent years, the saxophonist’s life and music were celebrated on Broadway in the hit musical “Fela!” and a movie of his life is in the works.

2.5 stars (out of 4)

At one time, Harris’ voice was like country’s angelic consciousness, a reminder of its essence as the Nashville sound became increasingly suburban-ized. Her brief early ‘70s partnership with the late Gram Parsons left her with a sense of mission to carry the music forward without forgetting its past. She slipped between the cracks of genre, touching on rock and gospel, soul and folk, even as she hewed to country’s plainspoken truths. By the mid-‘90s, her voice had lost some of its pristine luster, but she plunged into even riskier, less-well-defined territory as an artist, spearheading Nashville’s progressive wing with Buddy and Julie Miller, Gillian Welch and Steve Earle.

“Hard Bargain” (Nonesuch) was recorded with just three musicians; Harris, Giles Reeves and producer Jay Joyce play pretty much everything on the album. Its intimacy settles around the listener like a fog, Harris’ voice drifting past with spectral fragility. Never the most innovative songwriter, she relies primarily on earnest originals that touch on big subjects without offering much in the way of insight or revelation: an infamous civil-rights-era murder (“My Name is Emmett Till”), Hurricane Katrina (“New Orleans”), Parsons yet again (“The Road”). But she brings a conversational grace to “Darlin’ Kate” (a tribute to her late friend, songwriter Kate McGarrigle) and a forlorn dignity to “Lonely Girl.” It’s not so much what these songs say but how -- the sound of a slow, disintegrating beauty that Harris in her fifth decade of music-making has mastered.

greg@gregkot.com 

Low: The Duluth, Minn., trio returns with its first album in four years, a typically lovely yet somehow disturbing exercise in restraint, “C’mon” (Sub Pop), 9 p.m. Thursday at Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln Av., $15 ($18 at door); lincolnhallchicago.com.

greg@gregkot.com

Eleventh Dream Day records at a leisurely pace – producing an album once every five years or so. But it’s not like anybody’s slacking off. Day jobs, families, numerous other recording projects and bands – Rick Rizzo, Janet Bean, Doug McCombs and Mark Greenberg don’t have much down time. So whenever their schedules align and Eleventh Dream Day reconvenes, they’re in sprinter’s mode. That was especially true of “Riot Now!” (Thrill Jockey), the latest album in a career that stretches back to the early ‘80s.

It was recorded in two days, mostly first takes, after the Chicago band had honed the songs during a residency at the Hideout. The sound is appropriately violent and unruly, Bean’s drums rolling and tumbling around McCombs’ strident bass lines and Rizzo’s sheets-of-sound guitar, while Greenberg’s keyboards spackle the cracks in the arrangements with drone.

 “I’ve been playing with a Les Paul (guitar) and Super Reverb, and if you turn it up to ‘10’ in the studio and let it rip, it sounds really great,” Rizzo says of a guitar tone that echoes the mayhem he routinely raised on stages in the early days of the band. “We’re getting ready to play a show and I realized I had ripped a speaker. My amp couldn’t take it anymore. We go away for awhile, but everytime we get together the band just finds that place automatically. The amazing part is Janet’s drumming. She doesn’t rehearse and then she comes in there and plays like she does.”

2 stars (out of 4)

On its self-titled debut album, the Seattle co-ed sextet specializes in misty ballads and piano-driven sing-alongs that long for an America that doesn’t exist anymore. The wistfulness shares some characteristics with the music of (more accomplished) Sub Pop labelmates Fleet Foxes and Blitzen Trapper, with all its references to a more spiritual sense of self tied to a bucolic, idealized past. Like the hippie bards and folkies of the ‘60s, these 21st Century songwriters take personally their generation’s lost innocence. In addressing just how rootless we have become, the Head and the Heart fill their songs with romantic images of deep valleys, “whiskey rivers” and home. The earnestness can become cloying: “we were young, so many years ago.” More problematic are the melodies and the songs themselves; they strive for rousing resonance, a deep sense of loss, but often settle for pat prettiness and easy sentimentality.

greg@gregkot.com

3.5 stars (out of 4)

After the home-made, decidedly low-fi charms of her 2009 debut album, “Bird-Brains” – recorded on a Dictaphone – Merrill Garbus ups the ante on the follow-up. Whereas its predecessor was quirky and small, “Whokill” (4AD) is quirky and expansive; an offbeat personal statement that frequently morphs into a killer dance album.

Garbus adds not only a bassist and songwriting partner, Nate Brenner, but a horn section to flesh out her one-woman-band: strumming a ukulele, pounding drums, layering and looping her voice into a choir. Garbus’ one-of-a-kind voice is a thrilling, go-for-broke instrument, an uninhibited cry of joy and vulnerability. It rides a wave of polyrhythmic percussion – everything from tribal drums to what sound like ticking alarm clocks and clattering pots and pans.

“I need you to press me down before my body flies away from me,” she demands on “Powa,” a literal translation of just how uplifting and transformative the sound of this music can be. For all its eccentric details and occasionally fractured flow, the songs brim with ecstatic blasts of saxophone and undulating waves of rhythm that suggest Afro-pop’s endless groove.

greg@gregkot.com

Wax Trax! Records Retrospectacle -- 33 1/3 Year Anniversary: Time to break out the jack boots and bomber jackets, the label that put “industrial” on the musical map is back for a celebration of its late founders, Jim Nash and Dannie Flesher, with proceeds going to charity. Among the former Wax Trax bands and artists scheduled to play are Front 242, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, Rights of the Accused, Luc Van Acker, Ministry’s Paul Barker and Chris Connelly, 8 p.m. Friday-Sunday at Metro, 3730 N. Clark St., Friday-Saturday sold out, $41 or $350 VIP table for Sunday (at time of publication); etix.com.

Mike Watt: The bass-playing, Popeye-cheeked epitome of all that is good and righteous about indie-rock will headline a doubleheader. He’ll host a showing of the documentary “We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen,” about his first great band, then perform with his current trio, the Missingmen, focusing on the terse punk blurt of its latest release, “Hyphenated-Man” (Clenched Wrench), 7 p.m. Friday, “We Jam Econo,” $10; and 10 p.m. Friday, Watt and the Missingmen, $15, both at Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, schubas.com.  

greg@gregkot.com

Glasser’s Cameron Mesirow was one of the exceptions at the recent South by Southwest Music Conference in Austin, Texas. Unlike many “must-see” bands, she only performed twice during the five-day festival; some bands played seven or eight times as many gigs.

“I refuse to be that kind of band,” Mesirow says with a laugh. “Seventeen shows in five days? I bet 16 of those shows didn’t matter to them.”

Mesirow treats each of her shows as an event, with a visual panache to match her vocal abilities and unconventional yet highly melodic songs. She opened her first show in Austin with a rapturous a cappella version of a traditional Irish ballad, “Let No Man Steal Your Thyme,” then dove into the layered, swirling avant-pop of her hypnotic 2010 debut album, “Ring” (True Panther Sounds). She matched the swooning arrangements with shaman-like twitching and dancing in a layered hoop dress. It was simple but mesmerizing theater, the kind of showmanship that frankly not enough pop concerts have.