The solo-acoustic concert was part of Adams’ first tour since taking an extended break from the road to deal with an inner-ear condition, which may help to explain why he spent part of the show seated with his guitar before a microphone. Sitting or standing, his performance was never less than riveting.

Adams took advantage of the magnificent acoustics in the hall, sitting well back from the microphones for his voice and guitar (and, occasionally, piano) and letting the room amplify
his music for an audience that, early on, policed itself by shushing over-enthusiastic applauders who dared to drown out more than a moment or two of Adams’ spare, heartwrenching songs.

He was generous with the set, opening with a sigh on “Oh My Sweet Carolina” and moving back and forth through his extensive catalog. He reimagined the rollicking country song “Let It Ride” as a slower, more rueful number, and reworked “New York, New York” as a soulful murmur on piano.

“That was beautiful!” someone in the audience called out when the song was over.

“Did you say, ‘Howard’s Beautiful?’” Adams asked, improvising a full song about someone named Howard who was beautiful and also smart.

It was one of several comic moments in the show. After playing 13 consecutive gutbucket numbers, he paused for a second before starting another one, “Lucky Now.” “I’m going to play a ballad now,” he said, deadpan.

Adams later played a rearranged cover of Ratt’s “Round and Round” to waves of laughter from the crowd. He bookended the Ratt tune with “Jacksonville Skyline” and “16 Days,” songs he wrote with his former band, Whiskeytown, before ending the main set with “Come Pick Me Up.” He returned to play “Blue Hotel” for an encore.

Jessica Lea Mayfield opened the show.

Text by Eric R. Danton, photo by David Black

Gutsier still was the group’s decision to play “Bassbin” early in its set Saturday night at the Bell House in Brooklyn, N.Y.

On “Party Store,” it’s possible to fast-forward or skip the track altogether, but Saturday night, the only choice was to lean against the nearest wall and wait for Dirtbombs mastermind Mick Collins to finish mucking around on his Strat and move on to something with some drive and focus.

He and his band mates — two drummers, a bassist, and a second guitarist—eventually did, filling the second half of their set with some of their classic garage and punk-soul jams, but by then, they’d already pushed through 35 minutes of “Party Store,” demonstrating why the admirably ambitious, surprisingly listenable album has limited live appeal.

If nothing else, the show’s challenging first half built anticipation for the more satisfying second — a wild rip through such bash-and-croon favorites as “Get It While You Can,” “Underdog” and “Ode to a Black Man.”

Collins is charismatic enough to justify most of the band’s left-field experimentation, but when he’s in straight-up rock mode, singing like a haggard soul man and beating on his guitar like a Stooge, he embodies the best of his blighted hometown.

During “Can’t Stop Thinking About You,” the second of two encore songs, the Dirtbombs found a happy medium between brazen dance-rock noodling and three-chord battering. After a quick spin through the fuzzy, hooky tune, the band veered off into an extended noise-rock coda. Toward the end, the musicians began filing offstage one at a time, ultimately leaving one of the drummers tapping a cymbal, as if winding things down.

In fact, he was readying a final assault, and when he kicked back in with his big, mean beat, it was like a horror-movie monster punching out of the tomb. Guitarist Ko Melina and bassist Chris Sutton returned to the stage with drumsticks and tag-teamed the vacant kit, ending the night not with techno or punk, but something more primal and ferocious — a last blast of gutsiness.

— Text by Kenneth Partridge, photo by Brian Alesi

Despite a 10-hour overnight drive from Arkansas to Austin, her easy poise at the microphone and considerable vocal talent shone through, aided by the iced tea and bloody mary she downed before hitting the stage mid-afternoon for a quick set of songs, including tunes from “Sit Resist,” the forthcoming album with her band, the Cans.

She sang sweetly through the stomping stop-start rhythm of “Ain’t No Way,” turned up the power on the impossibly catchy “Master of Art” and sang with off-handed grace on “A Shine to It,” playing ringing guitar arpeggios backed only by high-neck bass notes from Mike Campbell.

The rest of the band returned to end the set with “The Healthy One,” lilting accordion and chiming glockenspiel augmenting her pleasantly rumpled vocals.

— Text and photo by Eric R. Danton

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Singer Alison Clancy is the stalkee. She also performs like id unleashed, which has apparently led to some club owners in Brooklyn banning Electric Child. No need for that here: clad in a bronze-colored skintight bodysuit, she pranced and prowled around the stage, made forays into the audience and executed the occasional arabesque, hinting at her other gig as a dancer for the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Clancy was backed by a bassist and drummer on the trio’s trashy electro-punk songs, including the stalker’s tune, “Peter Peter” (wonder what his name is?), and a cover of Le Tigre’s “The Empty” that the band performed at a recent Kathleen Hanna tribute show in New York.

— Text and photo by Eric R. Danton

After what must have been a grueling rehabilitation, Collins returned last year with “Losing Sleep,” the first album he has recorded since the hemorrhages. (His 2007 album, “Home Again,” was mostly completed in 2004, before the injuries.)

He was a quietly joyful presence on stage, perched on a road case and smiling. Though he spoke between songs in slow, careful cadences, he sang with great fluency on jangly power-pop songs, including the title track from “Losing Sleep,” “Make Me Feel” from his 1994 album “Gorgeous George” and the Orange Juice classic “Rip It Up,” a sort of founding document of the Glasgow scene.

— Text and photo by Eric R. Danton

In a badass 40-minute demonstration of western-style twang, Amaker and the Rodeo rolled through instant classics “Man in Charge,” “Break My Broken Heart” and their sweet cover of Kraftwerk’s “Pocket Calculator.” Read more about their set here. Suffice to say there was no need to light up that applause sign.

— Text and photos by Eric R. Danton

She was clearly having a great time. Flanked by a pair of guys laying down clattering beats on sequencers and synthesizers, Young slid back and forth across the stage wearing a giant smile as she dropped a relentless stream of brash lyrics, like a one-woman Yo Majesty, minus the tendency to disrobe on stage.

— Text and photo by Eric R. Danton

Their May 2009 reunion shows in Manhattan and Brooklyn came at the tail end of their first-ever U.S. tour, and amid the comic-gold stage banter of founders Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee, the shambolic Scottish popsters played the bulk of their catalog, which then consisted of one just album and a couple of EPs.

Wednesday night at Webster Hall, their biggest New York venue yet, the Vaselines faced a tougher challenge. Last month, they released, ‘Sex With an X,’ their first new album in 20 years, and now that they’re no longer coasting on goodwill, their dynamic has changed. Kelly and McKee opted for a less-talk, more-rock approach, and while doing so allowed them to squeeze some 20 songs into their hour-long set, neither fans nor the band seemed to be having quite as much fun.

Of course, it was a Wednesday night, and MIA had likely lured the city’s more boisterous indie rockers to her gratis gig at Brooklyn Bowl. The room was at best three-quarters full, and those in attendance were welcoming but far from ecstatic.

McKee appeared happier than anyone to be there, and as she slipped into her usual role, that of the pretty girl with the sweet voice and dirty mouth, she marked a sharp contrast to her partner’s businesslike demeanor. Gone was that back-and-forth patter that made last year’s

shows a delight, and whenever McKee would a make sex joke about her band mates or the dudes at the merch booth, Kelly would just stand there, tuning his black hollow-body guitar or checking the set list to see what was next.

He didn’t even take the bait and when McKee talked about how she’d wanted to sell Vaselines underwear on the tour.

“Would you have bought them if we’d already worn them?” she asked the audience, eliciting the predictable affirmative cheer.

Luckily, Vaselines songs have built-in cheekiness, and McKee didn’t need to carry the comedic load. In addition to title-says-it-all tunes ‘Rory Rides Me Raw’ and ‘Monsterpussy’ and the trio of songs famously covered by Nirvana — ‘Molly’s Lips,’ ‘Son of a Gun,’ and ‘Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam — the band fared well with new such new ones as ‘Mouth to Mouth’ and ‘I Hate the ’80s.’

On that last song, Kelly and McKee sang about how the titular decade “wasn’t all Duran Duran doo-ran doo-ran doo-ran.” That is to say it was about more than pure-pop silliness, and on this particular evening, a professionalism and musical proficiency took hold, the same was true of the Vaselines’ live show.

— Kenneth Partridge

As you’d expect, the band was sloppy Tuesday night at Rumsey Field in New York’s Central Park, the first of four SummerStage shows. But Pavement was sloppy with purpose — the band carefully cultivated that shambolic aesthetic during its initial 10-year run from 1989-99, and it remains gloriously intact for this year’s in-it-for-the-money reunion tour.

And really, is there any doubt that Pavement (or singer Stephen Malkmus, at least) is in it for the money? Although the quintet played a generous two-hour, 28-song set, Malkmus didn’t seem particularly engaged until the latter portion of the show, which may have had something to do with the fact that he stood on the far stage-right side, away from his band mates. In fact, most of the time, he seemed bemused by all the fuss over a bunch of songs from, in some cases, 20 years ago. And there was fuss — the first Central Park concert was said to have sold out in just 2 minutes when it went on sale a full year ago.

“Thanks for not losing your tickets. Or selling them,” Malkmus quipped at one point.

Still, the show was a persuasive reminder of why Pavement was so influential in the first place. The musicians played together with casual ease on songs full of churning guitars and Malkmus’ off-handed vocals. Malkmus’s dissonant guitar solo on “Fin” came without regard for whether the notes fell in the proper key, and he and guitarist Scott Kannberg shifted in and out of unison on “Elevate Me Later.”

Percussionist Bob Nastanovich shouted out lead vocals on the chorus of “Debris Slide” and noisy stabs of guitars and squelching electronics poked through Malmus’ sing-songy vocals on “Stereo.”

“That was pretty good, I like that,” the singer said after finishing the song. “Way to go, Pavement!”

Malkmus started to come alive toward the end of the main set, praising a jangling, surprisingly together version of “Range Life” (“That was a good version,” he said. “I’ve heard them all.”), and jumping up and down not quite in time with the beat as he played a guitar solo on Pavement’s near-hit, “Cut Your Hair.”

After ending the main set with the breezy rocker, the band returned for a six-song encore that included cacophonous roiling (and shouting) on “Conduit for Sale!” and gluey guitar on “Silence Kit,” before the band finished the show with “Stop Breathin’.”

— Eric R. Danton

Assisted at first by a pair of horn players, the musicians seemed almost dwarfed by the massive proscenium for a song or two. It didn’t take long, though, for them to grow into it, Bryan Devendorf’s relentless drumming lifting the songs as singer Matt Berninger grew increasingly intense. He staggered around the stage at times between lyrics, as if shouldering the heavy weight of memory or melancholy or whatever it is he feels when he inhabits those songs in concert.

The rest of the band supplemented his rumbling baritone with vocal harmonies here and there as they blended guitar, piano and driving bass lines on songs from the band’s new album, “High Violet,” and a broad selection of older tunes.

Soon a string quartet joined The National, adding a sweetness of tone to “Squalor Victoria” as Berninger doubled over, howling the refrain. Annie Clark of St. Vincent joined them to sing harmony and play piano on a searing version of “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks,” and when Sufjan Stevens came on to sing wordless vocals with Clark on “Afraid of Everyone,” there were 14 people on stage creating a lush, full sound.

That number fluctuated from song to song, not least because Berninger embarked on various incursions into the crowd. He walked about halfway back in the orchestra section during “Abel,” climbing on a seat to sing as he faced the rest of the band on stage. He went one better during “Mr. November, the middle tune in a three-song encore, venturing up the sort of ledge running from the front edge of the stage to the first balcony section, which he climbed across, microphone cord trailing him the whole way, and walked down the other side.

By the end of the hour and 45 minute show, the band had conquered the vast expanse of Radio City Music Hall, and the soaring space felt for a few moments like one of the cozy clubs on the Lower East Side where the band got its start.

The Antlers opened the show with a set of atmospheric rock songs that sounded huge and imposing on the giant stage.

— Text by Eric R. Danton, photo by Keith Klenowski

Set list: “Mistaken for Strangers,” “Anyone’s Ghost,” “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” “Brainy,” “Secret Meeting,” “Slow Show,” “Squalor Victoria,” “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks,” “Afraid of Everyone,” “Little Faith,” “Available,” “Conversation 16,” “Apartment Story,” “Abel,” “Daughters of the Soho Riots,” “England,” “Fake Empire.” Encore: “Runaway,” “Mr. November,” “Terrible Love.”