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 Mendel 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

3 stars (out of 4)

The Beastie Boys were once unlikely innovators, whether taking the art of sampling to previously unimagined heights with the Dust Brothers on “Paul’s Boutique” (1989) or fusing punk and funk with rap on “Check Your Head” (1992).

Now they traffic in affable, danceable, self-deprecating ‘80s nostalgia. The notoriously bratty trio has hung on long enough to embrace what once would’ve been considered a contradiction: hip-hop elder statesmen. “Hot Sauce Committee Part Two” (Capitol) is the group’s first album in seven years, delayed in part by Adam “MCA” Yauch’s battle with cancer.

The Beasties do not try to keep up with current production trends. There are no Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne or T-Pain cameos. There is an unironic cowbell fill; dated phrases such as “be kind, rewind” abound; retro cultural references to Kenny Rogers, Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” Ted Danson and the Lambada are everywhere. So are grimy keyboards, grimier vocals and sparse beats that sound like they belong on a demo rather than a major-label release. In contrast to the polish of much mainstream hip-hop, “Hot Sauce Committee Part Two” sounds like a crusty mix tape you might pick up from a hooded dealer on a Brooklyn street corner.

That’s not a bad thing. On the contrary, it’s a refreshingly understated return to long-ago form by one of hip-hop’s most venerated groups. Money Mark’s vintage keyboards spread grease over the hard-hitting if uncomplicated beats. The B-Boys focus on old-school hip-hop that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on a mid-‘80s single, and also touch on hard-core punk ("Lee Majors Come Again") and reggae ("Don't Play No Game That I Can't Win"). The Beasties fling boasts and nonsense with verve: MCA’s raspy brio, Mike D’s fine whine, Ad-Rock’s comical incisiveness. All heritage acts should age with this much humor.

“Oh my God, look at me/Grandpa been rappin since ’83,” Ad-Rock proclaims. Who could’ve predicted that?

greg@gregkot.com

Candy Golde: As side projects go, this one has plenty of talent to recommend it, with Nick Tremulis joined by Eleventh Dream’s Day Rick Rizzo, Cheap Trick’s Bun E. Carlos and Wilco’s John Stirratt, plus man-about-town Mark Greenberg. Jon Langford opens, and no doubt will be putting in an appearance as well with the headliners, 9 p.m. Friday at Double Door, 1572 N. Milwaukee, $18 and $20 (door); ticketfly.com.

Grails: This shadowy Portland quartet, which includes band members who have worked with everyone from Neurosis to M. Ward, incorporates hammering metal and ambient drone in their instrumental explorations, lately adding an element of electronic manipulation to further deepen and disturb the sound, 7 p.m. Saturday at Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western Av., $10; ticketweb.com.

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.

The Smashing Pumpkins delivered a double dose of news Tuesday about past and future recordings.

In a video posted on the band’s Facebook page, singer Billy Corgan announced that the current band – which includes no original members besides himself – will record a new album, “Oceania,” that will be released later this year. “Even though I pronounced the album dead” a few years ago, Corgan said, he says the band has a number of songs written and will begin recording them next month, with the aim of releasing an album Sept. 1. “Oceania” will be part of the massive 44-song “Teargarden by Kaleidyscope” project, in which the band has been releasing songs as free downloads soon after recording them. Details of exactly how “Oceania” will be released were not divulged. 

Corgan also said that after about a decade of negotiation the band and its former label, EMI, had reached an agreement to reissue remastered versions of all the Pumpkins’ albums from the band’s first era (1991-2000) over the next three years on CD and vinyl with bonus tracks. In addition, what Corgan calls a “digital box set” will be created that will enable the band to release material from its archives “any way we want,” including free downloads. He said the archival material includes everything from the band’s early rehearsals in Chicago during the 1980s through what was to be its final show at Metro in 2000.

The first reissues will be out by Christmas this year: “Gish” (1991), “Siamese Dream” (1993) and “Pisces Iscariot” (1994). Next year, “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” (1995), “The Aeroplane Flies High” box set (1996) and “Adore” (1998) will be reissued. In 2013, the 2000 albums “Machina/The Machines of God” and “Machina II: The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music” will be packaged together “in the right order,” Corgan says, to be followed by a greatest hits compilation.

greg@gregkot.com 

Photos: Lolla lineup

Coldplay, My Morning Jacket, Deadmau5 and A Perfect Circle will join previously reported headliners Eminem, Foo Fighters and Muse at Lollapalooza on Aug. 5-7 in Grant Park, the festival will announce Tuesday.

Also among the artists to be announced by Texas-based promoters C3 Presents are Cee Lo Green, Damian Marley with Nas, the Cars, Ween, Bright Eyes, Big Audio Dynamite, Girl Talk, Titus Andronicus, Deftones, Kid Cudi, Sleigh Bells and Arctic Monkeys.

The seventh annual festival will again feature more than 130 performers on eight stages.

As usual, the festival has only a smattering of hip-hop and world-music artists, though a handful of Chilean bands – Chico Trujillo, Los Bunkers and Ana Tijoux – have been booked as part of a cultural exchange with Lollapalooza Chile, which debuted April 2-3 in Santiago.

Lollapalooza will double the size of a stage devoted to DJs and electronic music at this year’s festival Aug 5-7 in Grant Park.

The plans were revealed in an interview with Charlie Jones, one of the partners of Texas-based promoters C3 Presents, who said the electronic-music area has proven to be the fastest growing musical attraction at the festival since Lollapalooza’s 2005 debut in Grant Park.

To accommodate the growth, the Perry’s Place stage will be moved to a softball field west of Columbus Avenue on the festival’s southern end across from Hutchinson Field, where the main stage is located. The tented Perry’s stage will be designed to accommodate more than 15,000 fans, double the size of last year’s location farther north.

The lineup for the festival will be announced Tuesday, but the Tribune has reported that Girl Talk has been booked for Lollapalooza, a likely headliner for the Perry’s Stage.

 “Kids are all standing with their arms folded tight,” Win Butler sang at the outset of Arcade Fire’s concert Friday at the UIC Pavilion.

But he wasn’t talking about present company. Most of the capacity audience in the first of three sold-out concerts at the venue was acting out as passionately as the band from the get-go.

With their latest release, “The Suburbs,” anointed as an improbable – if  highly worthy – album of the year at the Grammy Awards last February, the Montreal octet had reason to celebrate (Additional concert photos HERE).

They did it by turning heavy subjects into cathartic sing-alongs on 16 songs spread over 90 minutes: the death of close friends and family in their debut album, “Funeral” (2004); the political madness that consumes the characters in “Neon Bible” (2007); and the ghosts of memory, childhood and home that infiltrate “The Suburbs” (2010).
 
In most arena-level bands, there's a hierarchy: a designated mouthpiece and possibly a sidekick, with everyone else making do with punching the clock or lurking in the shadows. But Arcade Fire spreads the personalities across the stage.

2 stars (out of 4)

Steve Earle’s latest album, “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive” (New West), shares a title with a historical novel he was writing (to be published in May) and the last single Hank Williams wrote in his brief lifetime. Most of these 11 songs share Williams’ sense of mortality and try to glimpse at the world beyond the one we see. The performances are mostly stripped-down country-folk tunes, outfitted with sighing pedal steel and fiddle under the direction of producer T Bone Burnett. At times it feels like a period exercise, Earle and his accomplices evoking a hoedown in need only of a few hay bales (“Little Emperor”), ancient troubadours jamming around the Maypole (“Molly-O”), and over-served saloon denizens leading a jaunty sing-along (“Gulf of Mexico”). A few specific references to modern events are sprinkled throughout, but mostly Earle sings in unusually hazy generalities or clichés (“Every Part of Me,” “Lonely are the Free”). The tepid music doesn’t help, with only the distorted vocal and blues harmonica on “Meet Me in the Alleyway” disrupting the rocking-chair flow. Maybe working on a novel distracted Earle, but the feisty dust-kicker of old appears to have taken this one off.

greg@gregkot.com