The LA Setlist: June 24-30, 2024

With a voice like a hypnotist’s swinging watch and sublimely restrained self-production skills, Marissa Nadler’s 2021 lockdown album The Path of the Clouds is the ultimate caress of a quarter-century career already littered with pinnacles. A dream folk expression of emotional wanderlust while physically housebound, The Path of the Clouds delves into both its writer’s will to metaphorically disappear and very real historical cases of mysterious disappearance. Nadler reminds us that “epic” needn’t mean “overblown," and that “lush” doesn’t require a million tracks of digital manipulation. Mesmerized and mesmerizing, The Path of the Clouds includes contributions from Emma Ruth Rundle, harpist Mary Lattimore, and someone else who knows a thing or two about wistful atmospherics, former Cocteau Twins bassist Simon Raymonde. Nadler is producing her finest work in her forties, and many fans will likely travel to her L.A. County shows at Zebulon and Transplants Brewing this week to witness this subtle tsunami. Tickets at Dice.

A working class lad who earned a scholarship to London’s prestigious Royal Academy of Music, Joe Jackson scored international hits with his 1978 debut single (“Is She Really Going Out With Him?”) and album (Look Sharp!) the following year. But while he rode the new wave wave for two albums, his musical palette was always much broader and has since included reggae, jazz, and jump blues. Jackson’s early work was compared to equally nervy pop by Elvis Costello and Graham Parker, with Look Sharp! making Rolling Stone’s 100 Best Debut Albums of All Time. Jackson abandoned the mainstream in the early ‘80s, going on to release 21 stylistically scattered albums. Last year’s What A Racket! is a meticulous music hall pastiche complete with 12-piece orchestra and fictitious backstory. Recent live shows have comprised a solo set followed by tracks from the new record performed with a 9-piece band. Tickets at Ticketmaster.

Long a songwriter for the likes of Luke Bryan, Adele and Brad Paisley, Chris Stapleton’s solo career has helped nudge mainstream country back towards its roots since his hit 2015 debut, Traveller. A soul singer who often harmonizes with his wife Morgane, he has a background in progressive bluegrass and rock ‘n roll bands. Stapleton’s solo releases embrace both these genres plus old-school/outlaw country and Southern rock which, combined with his proven gift for emotive songcraft, has proven irresistible to listeners, resulting in all five of his albums hitting the top 3 of the Billboard 200.

Find your seats early for Grace Potter, a striking, strutting force of nature who has defied longtime expectations by not (yet) headlining Hollywood Bowl-size venues herself. Known for bluesy, soulful roots rock, the free-spirited Potter also adds folk, funk, R&B and country hints on her 2023 homage to spiritual and literal journeys, Mother Road. (Potter also headlines The Troubadour on Friday, June 28.)

Tickets to the Hollywood Bowl shows at AXS.

Yet another TikTok-made star, the very oddness that confined Yeat to peripheral figure in online rap collective Slayworld, where he was overshadowed by the likes of Summrs, Autumn! and Kankan, is his solo golden goose. A penchant for complimenting designer-brand outfits with balaclavas gives fair warning of Yeat’s singular musical and lyrical irreverence, with the Orange County-born artist putting Auto-Tune vocal processing and made-up lingo at the heart of his futuristic, experimental approach from his 2018 beginnings with “Brink!” Released in February, the prolific Yeat’s fourth studio album, 2093 is a 78-minute dystopian sci-fi concept that, given the subject matter, is incongruously glitzy and big-budget. It dials down his eccentricities while palpably reaching for Travis Scott-level commercial validation. While his incorporating rage rap and electro elements is understandable as a short-term career move, the secret to Yeat’s longevity may well be keeping himself weird.

Tickets to the all-ages show are on sale at AXS.

Rather than a band in the conventional sense, I Speak Machine is an audio/visual project that marries the talents of veteran experimental composer/producer Tara Busch (the audio) and Welsh filmmaker/writer Maf Lewis (the visual). The LA-based wife-and-husband duo has released three albums over the past decade and toured extensively as openers for the likes of Gary Numan and L7. While their first two records were soundtracks to Lewis films, which were screened alongside live performances by Busch, 2022’s War is a standalone work. Co-produced remotely with England’s Dean Honer, War took four tortuous years to complete, yet retains a visceral, confrontational snarl that harks back to her days in rock bands. Synth heavy and industrial indebted, War is kept intriguing by Busch’s honeytrap vocals, alternately sweet and seductive utterances that lure the listener into something dangerously darker than implied. Tickets at Dice.

Considering that she’s widely recognized as among the most influential female rappers of all time, it’s remarkable that Cardi B has released just one album, 2018’s Invasion of Privacy. But this infectiously enthused New Yorker was a comical TikTok sensation before she ever set foot in a studio, and then became an endearing breakout star of VH1’s Love & Hip Hop: New York, which ultimately chronicled her rise to fame. Yet none of this should overshadow Cardi B’s rap chops or lyrical nimbleness, spitting unvarnished, finger-in-the-face tirades à la Foxy Brown or Lil’ Kim while capable of magnificent rhymes like, “These b*tches salty, they sodium, they jelly, petroleum” (from “Money Bag”) It’s significant that not only has Cardi B been in demand as a feature on tracks by everyone from Ed Sheeran and Bruno Mars to G-Eazy and Lil Yachty, but that there’s yet to be a dud among them. Tickets at Ticketmaster.

While best known for his ballads and narrative corridos, regional Mexican singer-songwriter Gerardo Ortiz has always taken chances since breaking through with his 2010 album Ni Hoy Ni Mañana. While among the architects of the alternative corrido sub-genre, the Los Angeles-born, Sinaloa-raised Ortiz has also thrown in cumbias and mariachis (notably on 2013’a Archivos de Me Vida). Also something of a TV star following a 2016 NBC Universo biographical documentary and appearing as a judge on reality competition Tengo Talento, Mucho Talento, he’s consistently released chart-topping albums (13 in 15 years, including live releases) while accumulating a slew of Premio Lo Nuestro awards and two GRAMMY nominations. Ortiz’ most recent full-length, last year’s No Tengo Rival (“I Have No Rival”) is at once poppy, punchy, and soulful, with slick vocals traversing his most diverse material to date, including elements of the sierreño sound rooted in his native Sinaloa.

Tickets to the Concierto de Campeones at Ticketmaster.

Confusingly, there are two incarnations of goth pop veterans Gene Love Jezebel treading the boards, and both are usually billed as simply Gene Loves Jezebel, without differentiation. Sadly, this stems from a seemingly irreconcilable rift between the band’s co-founders, Welsh identical twins Michael and Jay Aston, who since 1997 have each led their own version - Michael’s in the US and Jay’s in the UK. This Whisky A Go Go show is Michael’s manifestation of a band that had three Billboard 200 albums at the end of the ‘80s and even performed on 1988’s MTV New Year’s Party. Almost personifying the poppy, slightly glammy side of goth-adjacent post-punk that scraped international charts thirty-plus years ago, both current embodiments of Gene Loves Jezebel perform convincingly authentic renditions of cult classics like the twice-released “Desire,” “The Motion of Love,” and the lately rather ironic “Jealous.”

Tickets to the all-ages show at Ticketweb.

Since 2008, hip-hop stalwarts The Roots have hosted and performed at the Roots Picnic, an annual festival in their native Philadelphia which expanded to multiple stages in 2014, added a New York edition for 2016, and then grew to two days in Philly in 2022. Over the years, the event has attracted crowds of up to 25,000 and featured luminaries like Pharrell, Lil Wayne, D’Angelo, John Mayer and countless others.

The sold-out Hollywood Bowl version, billed as a celebration of the first five decades of hip-hop and dubbed Roots Picnic: Hip-Hop is the Love of My Life bears little resemblance to the Philly fest’s much larger venue and bill, other than a performance by The Roots. This scaled-back Picnic instead boasts its own more modest but nonetheless stacked lineup including Queen Latifah, Common, Digable Planets, Arrested Development, The Pharcyde, Black Sheep and Jungle Brothers.

Dutch darkwave pioneers Clan of Xymox are likely familiar to anyone who ever bought a Bauhaus album or wore a black mesh shirt. Seventeen albums into a 43-year career, only one of the band’s original trio of singer-songwriters, Ronny Moorings, remains; yet Xymox shows continue to be significant gatherings of the pasty and gloomy. Rooted in the likes of early Cure and Joy Division, their take on goth rock harnesses introspective lyrics and moods to driving and often danceable arrangements, creating the broad appeal behind their staying power. The band/brand has prevailed through the bewildering blizzard of lineup changes common to acts admirably struggling to survive in semi-professional twilight while juggling increasing adult responsibilities as they age. And although predictable purveyors of the staple goth sound, Moorings & co. have absorbed trends along the way, including overt Madchester motifs while based in England at the turn of the 1990s.

Tickets to the all-ages show are on sale at Live Nation.

On his 87th birthday last year, Brit crooner Engelbert Humperdinck released his 44th album, All About Love. Now he’s on a global tour including far-flung stops in South Africa and Azerbaijan. As All About Love’s title implies, romance has been the abiding theme of both the 140-million-plus records he’s sold worldwide and his private life. This is an artist from another age - a man born it what was then still called the British Raj (colonial India) and who remained married for 57 years despite alleged “extra-curricular” antics. All About Love collects pop and R&B covers, including many released during his own 1960s-early ‘70s heyday (Humperdinck’s first six albums were all Top 20 US and UK hits) including the Bee Gees’ “How Can You Mend A Broken Heart” and Barry White’s “You’re The First, The Last, My Everything.” Tickets at AXS.

While Hollywood’s Catalina Jazz Club is a long running jazz bastion, it occasionally books artists from other genres. Former child actor and 2016 The Voice winner Alisan Porter has largely delivered country, pop, and rock-lite fare, acrobatically tackling Roy Orbison’s “Blue Bayou” for her Voice blind audition and focusing on country for her Nashville-recorded 2019 debut album Pink Cloud. While known for her breakout acting role in 1991’s Curly Sue and a string of TV shows, Porter has always sung, including being the youngest ever Star Search winner at age five, and two Broadway roles. She’s a songwriter, too, co-penning Pink Cloud with GRAMMY-winning pianist/producer Matt Rollings (Lyle Lovett, Willie Nelson). The mother of three has shown that she’s in it for the music with the independently released Pink Mist and intimate performances such as this one. Tickets at Ticketweb.