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A few weeks ago I was perusing the Billboard Rock Songs chart, which at present shows a genre in crisis—its ranks are split between the staggering dinosaurs of the nu-metal era, a few poppier rock outfits like Gotye and fun., and a bunch of bands that sound like slight variations on the old-timey-hoedown template laid down by Mumford & Sons. (Foxy Shazam's problematic yet utterly catchy glam-rock stomp "I Like It" was there, too.) But one thing really stuck out: The presence of four acts fronted by women, who have, with a few exceptions, been pretty much exiled from that particular radio format since the '90s. Adele was there; so was Garbage, and so was Norah Jones. Then there was a band called Dead Sara, who had a song called "Weatherman" in the chart's lower reaches. I clicked play, and oh man, was I blown away from note one.

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Tonight at the Bowery Ballroom, the Afghan Whigs—the Cincinnati torchbearers for damaged soul music—return to the stage after 13 years on hiatus, and if their performances on last night's Late Night With Jimmy Fallon are any indication, tonight's sold-out show will be full of the band's trademark self-lacerating fury, with Whigs frontman Greg Dulli leading the charge as he spits out twisted tales of love gone spoiled. In advance of the band's return, which includes a Whigs-selected lineup at this fall's I'll Be Your Mirror festival in Asbury Park, I spoke with Dulli from his home in New Orleans shortly before he left to rehearse in Cincinnati with his bandmates; the parts of our chat that didn't make it into last week's Voice are below.

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Escort.

This weekend Prospect Park will host Great GoogaMooga, a festival that brings together some of New York's best restaurants and musicians from New York (disco technicians Escort; bouncy Brooklyn rockers Fort Lean) and outside the city (Saturday's headlined by the hip-hop polyglots The Roots, while Sunday will be closed out by Daryl Hall & John Oates). How should you plan your day so that your foodstuffs are well matched to the on-stage entertainment? Here's the Sound of the City/Fork in the Road guide to suggested pairings for this weekend.

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When Adam Lambert was on American Idol in 2009, he grabbed viewers' attention with his octave-leaping voice and startling reworkings of talent-show standbys—while he came in second that season, he was certainly that year's most rock-star-like contestant, and he made even more headlines when he came out of the closet on the cover of Rolling Stone shortly after the Idol season wrapped. Today he releases Trespassing (RCA), his second post-Idol album, and its confidence and catchiness should further establish him as one of today's premier male pop stars. Trespassing, which counts among its collaborators Pharrell, Sam Sparro, Chic's Nile Rogers, and Dr. Luke, struts; it brims with grooves and is led by Lambert's overwhelming charisma, and it could very well be the first No. 1 album by an out pop star, as Chris Molanphy noted last week.

SOTC caught up with Lambert yesterday before he performed a brief set at the MLB Fan Cave, located in the former Tower Records space at East 4th St. and Broadway.

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@SowmyaK/Twitter

SWV
S.O.B.'s
Tuesday, April 17

Better than: Veteran performers trying to prove that they're "down with the kids."

The new album by SWV, which came out yesterday, is called I Missed Us—it's the R&B trio's first release in 15 years, hitting at a time when their new-jill-swing legacy is intact through retromania, if not exactly in most songs currently in radio rotation. (Beyoncé's throwbacky "Love On Top" is at the pinnacle of the R&B chart at the moment, but its lush romanticism is something of an anomaly on the increasingly taken-over-by-robotic-beats radio.)

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Wha'ppen/Flickr

A middle-school orchestra takes a stand.

Two nights this week I trucked out to the Bell House to attend the Chickfactor 20th-anniversary shows, which honored the two-decade-old indiepop fanzine with performances by the likes of Versus, the Softies, and Small Factory. Pinned to some of the Bell House's walls was a sign asking the people in attendance to party like it was 1992—specifically, to cease using their cell phones in the concert hall.

I definitely violated this rule, because old habits die hard, especially when the enablers of those old habits are made of cool metal and in an easily accessible space. But I tried to at least abide by it 80% of the time, and I found myself enjoying the sets by the rip-roaring Versus, the pop maestro and Unrest/Cotton Candy/Teen-Beat leader Mark Robinson (who popped in for a two-song double-A-sided set of his band's classics), and the delicately gorgeous duo the Softies—all of whom are in the upper echelon of my personal musical pantheon—in a way that felt substantially different, and not just from the nostalgia pangs.

Perhaps it was the brainspace cleared out by not checking for text messages and at-replies regularly, but I had a lot of thoughts on why cell phones have pretty much ruined my show-going experience, and why they have probably ruined yours, too.

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@monkistan/Twitter

Jarvis Cocker.

Last night Pulp, the masters of turning the miniature into anthems that shake the rafters of even open-air concert spaces, played their second of two shows in New York City, their first gigs in our city since 1998, when the band played the Hammerstein Ballroom. Their potent blend of creamy synthpop hooks and Jarvis Cocker's wry commentary on romance, class, and sex was, as I pretty much expected, absolutely thrilling even though their last album, We Love Life, is 11-plus years old; the vitality present in even the band's less anthemic songs, like the hangover squint "Sunrise," coursed throughout the room. Leading the way was Cocker, who I last saw with a green-painted face belting out bare-bones, self-lacerating sex jams. Last night he was in louche-professor mode, posing foppishly on the big beats, swinging his hips just so, drawling out the wistful lyrics of anthems about chances not taken, fizzled relationships, and muddling through the physical and emotional aftermath of drawn-out nights, and—most importantly—doling out aphorisms between songs as if they were delicious, decadent truffles. He didn't quote the Wikipedia entry about New York the way he paid tribute to Chicago when I saw him solo at the 2008 Pitchfork Music Festival, but he was still full of pearls of wisdom and notable factoids. And I wrote a lot of them down, mostly because I was too busy dancing like a fool during the actual songs to take proper notes; here are the seven best that made it into my notebook.

7. [While introducing "Something Changed," a sweet love song about the unpredictable nature of romance] "It would be rubbish if we knew when these things would happen... You haven't come here for a night of spoken word, have you? Sorry."

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Who's Zoo? feat. Relaxed Muscle
Whitney Museum of American Art
Saturday, April 7

Better than: Another Monday morning.

The Scottish choreographer Michael Clark's body of work has been about marrying opposites—underscoring his works with the music of the Fall and David Bowie, mingling professional dancers with amateurs onstage. In his just-completed residency at the Whitney Biennial, Clark continued those themes with Who's Zoo?, an abstract, yet charged performance set to songs by Pulp and Relaxed Muscle, two bands led by the singer/songwriter/DJ/author/all-around artistic overachiever Jarvis Cocker.

Pulp (whose reunion tour makes stops at Radio City tomorrow and Wednesday) is florid and expansive, creating anthems out of situations both small and grim; best known here for its withering putdown of class tourism "Common People," the band's last three albums (Different Class, This Is Hardcore, and We Love Life) are absolute treasures, chronicling the painful aging of not just Cocker and his bandmates but of a generation burned out on the hedonism it embraced if not wholeheartedly, then at least willingly enough to indulge in more than their fair share of excesses. Relaxed Muscle—which released one album, A Heavy Night With... (Rough Trade), in 2003—isn't Pulp's polar opposite, but it's much more suited for a club basement than a Glastonbury headlining set; while it retains Cocker's trademark wit, its songs are bare-bones, riding on the barely disguised erotic energy coursing throughout them as much as their music. "Sexualised," in which Cocker sneeringly reels off a list of those parts of the world that erotically charged (basically, everything ever) over grinding guitars and a relentless dance beat, probably sums up their world view best.

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Michael Jackson: Immortal
Madison Square Garden
Wednesday, April 4

Better than: Ringling Bros.

Cirque du Soleil's take on Michael Jackson's catalog, Michael Jackson: Immortal, is certainly ambitious. The twoish-hour set has a live band, aerialists and fireworks, flips and flops, a dancing sequined glove, and, of course, the songs that Jackson imprinted on American culture, from "I Want You Back" on.

Structured somewhat chronologically and built around the concept of what the Cirque folks are calling "Michael's inspirational Giving Tree—the wellspring of his creativity," the show moved along at a fast clip. The plot, as it is, is structured around the deeper meanings of Jackson's more inspirational songs (as well as the controversial 1996 single "They Don't Care About Us"); healing the world, saving the children, how one becomes a dancing machine, et cetera.

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@mjw_56/Twitter

Andrew W.K.
Webster Hall
Monday, April 2

Better than: Moping.

Andrew W.K.'s 2001 album I Get Wet is one of those records that tends to polarize people; it combines monster riffs, giddy lyrics about partying and beautiful girls, and living-in-the-red maximalism in a way that either electrifies or makes people reach for the ANYTHING ELSE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD button.

Last night at Webster Hall, though, the room was 100% in favor of the keyboard-wielding signer/motiviational speaker/club owner's debut, singing along from word one of "It's Time To Party" and taking that song's plainly stated message to heart throughout the evening. There was pogoing; there was yelling; there was headbanging; there were, at one point, about 40 people on stage who weren't contracted members of the band. A lot of the interlopers got off the stage in the most party-like way: They dove.

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