Sunset Junction is not a music festival.

It’s a street fair, with carnival rides, booths, food vendors, hawkers, crazies,

oppressive heat and sweaty throngs of humanity whose alcohol intake is liable to affect

not only their manners but the various scents they emit. So your enjoyment of the live

acts on Sunset Junction’s three stages will vary depending on your tolerance for the

hassles of communal music experiences.

The lineup assembled by Spaceland Productions certainly ranks with any from the past

five or six years. Again, the afternoon slots on the indie rock-oriented Bates Stage are

populated with some of the best ascendant bands in L.A. The Hoover Stage has enough soul

to save your soul. World flavors spring from the Sanborn Stage — if you happen to have

a bad Sunday afternoon experience, go take in Rocky Dawuni (left) at 6:30 and see

if you don’t feel better about the world.

This blog and my weekly column in Calendar Weekend dwells mainly in the indie-rock

world, and I could fold myself into a beach chair in front of the Bates Stage

(hopefully, in a shady spot) and have a fine two days. Of the 19 acts playing that stage

this weekend, 15 have been featured on this blog or in the column. Worth the hassles?

You bet, especially if you’re among friends.

Drink plenty of water. These

folks are playing at 2 p.m. Sunday:

Upcoming post: My quick look at the Culver City Dub Collective, who are playing

Saturday afternoon.

Earlimart frontman Aaron Espinoza

flinches a bit when you ask about "Mentor Tormentor," the title of the band’s

fifth album, as if you were going to slap his hand with a ruler for the rhyme and

wordplay.

"It refers to a multitude of specific things — the band, the music, the

decision to even be an artist," he says. "To how I can feel completely

fortunate that we’ve done as well as we have, and yet there are days where I think it’s

the worst thing that’s happened to me."

Characteristically, the songs on Earlimart’s long-awaited collection deftly avoid

those extremes. Emotions are seldom bold or stark; instead, like the orchestral nuances

that emerged in recording sessions with bandmates Ariana Murray and Joel Graves at the

Ship studio in Eagle Rock, they are like colors that run together in the wash.

Espinoza’s voice carries the weight of his Everyman wisdom effortlessly, and the album’s

tuneful sheen harbors complexities that beg to be considered.

There has been, however, some palpable "torment."

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Highs are forecast in the mid- to upper-80s for this weekend’s Sunset Junction Street Fair, where dozens of

you — OK, hundreds — will be gorging yourself on carnival rides, food and music.

I looked that up just so I could share the new video for the song "Let Me

In" by Hot Hot Heat, which plays the

Spaceland stage on Sunday evening (more on the lineup in the next day or so). I was at

the Echo the night this was filmed, commenting to a friend (before I knew that a shoot

was going on) that some of the women outside the club that night looked a little Sunset

Strip to be hanging out on the Eastside.

Enjoy:

[Colleague Liam Gowing slept in, asked me the last time I’d played "Singles

show. Of course I did.]

After spending the last decade not speaking to

one another, Squeeze principals Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook patched things up earlier this

year and hit the road for a short reunion tour. At the Greek Theatre on Monday, the

amphitheater was, at best, three-quarters full — a shame because Difford and Tilbrook,

plus classic-lineup bassist John Bentley and new recruits Stephen Large and Simon Hanson

– played a tight, exhilarating set.

Yes, the troops were rounded up to

support Universal’s re-release of the band’s catalog. And the setlist was chosen

accordingly; Squeeze played every song from the indispensable “Singles 45’s and Under,”

along with chestnuts like the rockabilly-tinged “Messed Around.”

In many

ways, the show was the antithesis of the Police’s

self-indulgent and ultimately limp-wristed reunion: Unlike Sting and company, Squeeze

played ‘em like they wrote ‘em, honoring the original arrangements with lock-tight

performances, and saving the improvisational impulses for the solos, which — thanks to

Tilbrook’s speed-freak fretwork — were just jaw-droppingly good.

Here’s

hoping that Fountains of Wayne, who

played a rather perfunctory opening set, was paying attention.

"Hideout," the new album by Film School, isn’t out until Sept. 11, but

it’s already creating a buzz from those who’ve heard its buzzing guitars and

reverb-heavy dynamics. Its the kind of album that dares you to roll up your car windows,

crank it and be swallowed whole. If the band’s debut album was a bit hit-and-miss,

there  are precious few misfires on this one.

Greg Bertens (the artist formerly known as Krayg Burton, at least on the first album)

and mates have relocated to Los Angeles from San Francisco. Let’s see, that makes

tonight’s show at Spaceland a hometown gig, then. Brilliant.

||| Download "Lectric."

||| Brooklyn’s Pela is an opening act for that

show tonight. It will be drummer Tomislav Zovich’s final tour with the band.

Touts for Tuesday, Aug. 14

Oh, what a night: The Magic Numbers and

the Little Ones bring their feel-good

pop to the El Rey. … Dengue

Fever rocks the Knitting Factory. … The One AM Radio looses his gauzy

bedroom pop on the Echo. … Buckfast

plies its Anglophile rock at the Mint. … Eulogies, the new trio assembled by

singer-songwriter Peter Walker, plays a set at the Troubadour opening for rockers the Wildbirds. … The Finches and the Coral Sea entertain at Bordello.

… And Aushua plays the early set at the

Silverlake Lounge.

Photo by Marla Aufmuth

Singer-guitarist Josh Malerman is hitting the books again, and it has

nothing to do with studying. “I’m sitting outside the library in Carson City right now,”

he reports enthusiastically by phone from Nevada. “They’ve got an Alfred Hitchcock

festival going on. It’s fantastic.”

It’s Monday, and later the library would also host a rock show. Malerman’s

hyperkinetic trio, the High Strung,

would headline — another stop on the Detroit-based garage-rockers’ improbable National Public Library Tour. For

the third consecutive summer, Malerman and band mates Chad Stocker and Derek Berk are

turning libraries into places to be rocked, not shushed.

“It’s brilliant; I wish I’d thought of it,” Malerman says of the idea, hatched by a

Michigan youth librarian named Bill Harmer. “At first it was horribly awkward,

especially since we were told, ‘Play as loud as you normally do.’”

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I am not necessarily a fan of the

Mormons, but as a baseball guy I just about did a spit take when I saw the

tongue-in-cheek poster for the Los Angeles band’s current stand at Mr. T’s Bowl. [Sorry

for the sloppy clean-up job; it’s a family blog, you know.]

Luther Russell chuckles

knowingly when an interviewer remarks that the songs on his fourth album,

"Repair," seem kind of happily mopey. "That’s me, smiling at everything

that could possibly be sad," he says, pausing and then laughing. "There you

have it. End of interview."

Yes, that’s the album in a nutshell, but how

the 36-year-old arrived at his sage stage is the back story of "Repair," a

title you can take to mean "some sort of therapeutic thing, or the double-entendre,

like to repair home," he says.

Indeed, Russell’s latest songs materialized after he returned to his native Los

Angeles in 2002 after eight years in Portland, Ore. "When you play a gig up there,

it’s not like you’re looking out into the audience to see who [from the record industry]

might be checking you out," the former Freewheelers frontman says. "I

realized, ‘Hey, if I’m doing it here, it must be because I like it.’ And when I moved

back down here, I brought that attitude with me."

But his move back to L.A. was fraught with real-life problems — his divorce, as well

as illnesses in his family — that slowed his artistic progress yet "probably

informed the songs," he says. When "Repair" was finally recorded,

virtually live and with producer Ethan Johns (Kings of Leon, Ryan

Adams), it was a quick process.

||| Russell plays Saturday night at the Echo. Among the openers is Sarabeth Tucek, whose album Russell

co-produced.

||| Download: "My Own

Blood."

◊ ◊ ◊

Highlights this

weekend

Great

Northern and the Comas make for a

great bill tonight at Spaceland, while Solare

plays at El Cid. That is, if you’re not at the Hollywood Bowl watching Cheap Trick and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra

performing Sgt. Pepper’s. (Hmm.) They’re channeling the Beatles on Saturday night too.

… Speaking of Saturday, the Avett

Brothers play the El Rey, and Ladybug Transistor and Castledoor rock Spaceland. … Also

Saturday night, International Pop

Overthrow finishes up its 10th edition at the Knitting Factory, highlighted by a set

from the Waking Hours. … And on

Sunday, it’s MF Doom at the El Rey.

This just in: Rock the Bells, the big

shindig on Saturday at Hyundai Pavilion at Glen Helen featuring Rage Against the

Machine, Wu-Tang Clan, Cypress Hill, the Roots and Public Enemy, among many others, is

sold out. As you were.

Tony Wilson, the founder of

Factory Records and the man who promoted Manchester bands such as Joy Division, New

Order and the Happy Mondays, has died from complications of kidney cancer at age 57.

Wilson, below, introduced the set by the Happy Mondays at Coachella on April 29.

Photo by Kevin Bronson