Aretha Franklin: The soul icon, bouncing back from surgery for an illness last November, is back with a new album, “Aretha: A Woman Falling Out of Love,” and a tour, 8 p.m. Thursday at the Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State St., $47.50, $67.50, $85, $125; ticketmaster.com.

greg@gregkot.com

On the way to making Death Cab for Cutie’s forthcoming album, “Codes and Keys” (Atlantic), singer Ben Gibbard quit drinking, got married and ended up relocating to Los Angeles, a city he once despised.
       
The dramatic changes were foreshadowed by Death Cab’s bleak 2008 release, “Narrow Stairs.” 

“That record is kind of a fulcrum in my life,” Gibbard says. “So much of the negativity in my life got funneled into it. I realized after the fact that I didn’t want to go any darker. I wanted it to be the bottom for this band and my own emotional spectrum in terms of writing. I had no grandiose plans to turn my life around. But there was this eerie moment ...”
       
It’s a good thing Gibbard has a video of the moment because no one would’ve believed him. He prefaces the story he’s about to tell by asserting, “I am not making this up”:
       
"Around spring of ‘08, I went with my mom to a (Seattle) Mariners game, and I had this very real thought as we were sitting there that my life was about to change. Then a foul ball came flying off the bat and I caught it in my hat. I have the video to prove it – the ball, the hat. It was out of a movie, but it was indicative of something. A couple months later I reconnected with the person who would become my wife.”

Paul Simon has played stadiums and festivals. He’s done Central Park. So it was a treat Monday to see one of the most venerated songwriters of the last half-century turn the relatively intimate, sold-out Vic Theatre into his living room.

The 69-year-old singer-songwriter dressed for the occasion in loose-fitting jeans and black T-shirt underneath an unbuttoned shirt. His eight-piece multi-culti band framed him, with Simon at times resembling a crossing guard at a three-way intersection as he directed musical traffic. His foot tapped, his arms waved, he crouched and jutted a guitar toward his musicians, he even played an air washboard solo.

In one sense, the two-hour, 24-song performance played like a mini-history of rhythm, spiraling out from the doo-wop of Simon’s native New York to West Africa down the coast to Capetown and then out to the Caribbean, into Brazil, Memphis and New Orleans. His band of multi-instrumentalists was versatile enough to keep pace with Simon’s game of continental hop-scotch, the singer demonstrating how he synthesized his rhythm journeys into durable pop songs.

3 stars (out of 4)

The former rhythm section of slow-core masters Galaxie 500, Damon Krukowksi and Naomi Yang make music that takes its time, in no hurry to impress on "False Beats and True Hearts" (20/20/20). It glides rather than gallops – especially when Yang sings in a voice as light as a breeze rippling through lace curtains – which makes it perfect background for all sorts of civilized activities. But zoom in on the jewel-like songs and the group’s rigorously controlled brilliance – wedding acid-folk’s hazy glow to chamber-pop’s lush detail – can be hypnotic.

With Michio Kurihara’s guitar lines twisting around becalmed vocals like vines, the duo builds miniature gardens of sound – deceptively serene settings for songs about deception, memory, the knowledge that “the dawn won’t come till the night settles down.” That fragile perspective has proven remarkably resilient over 25 years and seven quietly impressive studio albums.

greg@gregkot.com

3.5 stars (out of 4)

The projects by serial collaborator Danger Mouse, a k a producer-songwriter Brian Burton, have ranged from cultish (“Dangerdoom” with rapper MF Doom) to spectacularly (if unexpectedly) commercial (the 2006 Gnarls Barkley album, “St. Elsewhere”). Almost all of them have yielded music that shows omniverous range and a sure feel for melody.

On “Rome” (Capitol), Danger Mouse joins composer Daniele Luppi to revisit the golder age of Italian film scores, specifically the “Spaghetti Westerns” of Ennio Morricone. This is about big-picture soundscapes rather than individual star turns, so even high-profile guests such as Jack White and Norah Jones meld into the concise but richly detailed songs (Jones’ self-effacing personality is well-suited toward that sort of approach, while White allows his voice to become just another creepy texture on “The Rose With a Broken Neck”).

Burton and Luppi are wise to employ many of the original musicians and singers featured on classic ‘60s soundtracks such as “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and “Once Upon a Time in the West.” They also recorded in Rome’s Form Studios, founded by Morricone. The wordless harmonizing by Alessandro Alessandroni’s choir, the evocative vocals of soprano Edda Dell’Orso, the melancholy chime of a celesta, the queasy rumble of a carnival organ, clipped guitars playing against a swooning string section – each of these sounds connects with a beloved, bygone era. But “Rome” does one better than conjure nostalgia; it puts those vintage signifiers in service of fine, contemporary songs.

greg@gregkot.com

The Bulls pop out of a fourth-quarter time-out and stride back into the thick of a tight home playoff game against the Atlanta Hawks knowing that U2 has got their back. At this moment, the dramatic, slow-building intro to the Irish band’s “Where the Streets Have No Name” is like a sixth man on the floor, stirring the fans out of their seats and eliciting a giant, collective “Yaaaargh!” Bono would likely approve.

Soon after, Derrick Rose is bringing the ball upcourt in a must-score situation and the R&B star Usher is right there with him in a short snippet of his hit “Yeah!” As the Bulls grab a defensive rebound, the Bo Diddley beat to Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy” urges them to push the ball upcourt on a fast break.

Every Bulls game at the United Center has its own soundtrack. Just as each game is different, rollercoasters of volatile emotions and rapidly changing fortunes, the music and sound effects roll with the changes. A team of about 20 technicians plays DJ each night at the United Center, accenting the ebbs and surges on the floor.

    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