Troc

"According to the weasel Richard Marx, the next song we'll play sounds like a cross between Tom Petty and Bob Dylan," Lloyd Cole said midway into his set at the Trocadero Thursday night. "Guess that just wasn't good enough for him," he said, pondering Marx's baffling jab. "Some people just can't be satisfied. " With that, Cole flashed a sly smile and launched into "Weeping Wine," the midtempo rocker that will be the next single from his solid new album, Don't Get Weird on Me, Babe (Polydor)

Among "alternative music" icons, Evan Dando probably isn't the biggest slacker. That title has to go to J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr., famous for still living at home with his mom. But Mascis plays a rip-snorting guitar while sacked out on the couch. The show that Dando and his Lemonheads put on at the Trocadero Sunday night barely showed a pulse. Turned out in T-shirt and torn jeans, shoulder-length hair falling over his coverboy mug, the Fabio of slackerdom knocked off one hook- happy three-minute ditty after the next in a show that drew heavily from the band's softest-yet sixth album, Come On Feel the Lemonheads.

The first time M. Ward performed at the Trocadero, back in 2004, he was low man on the totem pole of an inspired three-headed bill that also featured Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst and My Morning Jacket's Jim James. Three acclaimed solo albums of languid torch-folk later - not to mention an opening slot at the Tower with Norah Jones and a turn through town with She & Him, his endearing duet act with Zooey Deschanel - he sold out the Troc all by his lonesome Friday night. Nearly as impressive was Ward's ability to stop all conversations in their tracks at the start of his set with just the soulful wheeze of his harmonica and a handful of downcast guitar chords.

Rock and roll has never really been about music. Think of the Beatles at Shea Stadium, Woodstock, the Grateful Dead, even Live Aid. Rock is about being in the right place at the right time - with the right sounds providing the social glue. Music is secondary. Meat Beat Manifesto, which appeared Wednesday night before a capacity crowd at the Trocadero, purveys a mutant brand of brutally monochromatic dance music in a style known as "industrial. " Repetitious bass lines (generated by computerized sequencers)

It's been a vaudeville hall, a striptease joint, a home for the Pennsylvania Opera Theater and a movie house for Chinese films. Now the Troc is ready to rock. The Trocadero Theater, a Victorian-era structure at 10th and Arch Streets in the heart of Chinatown, begins a new incarnation next month as a mid-size venue featuring rock-and-roll acts. E-Street Band guitarist Nils Lofgren and singer Steve Forbert will inaugurate the new hall on March 3, with Kid Creole and the Coconuts, Marshall Crenshaw, and Rene and Angela slated to perform during the opening week.

The Donnas aren't the kind of girls you'd bring home to meet the folks. Unless Mom and Dad are Joan Jett and Joey Ramone. But judging by songs the all-girl California quartet played at the Trocadero Tuesday night, including "Midnight Snack" (not about fixing yourself a sandwich in the middle of the night), they're probably just the young ladies you'd want to invite over when the folks are out of town. With a sound that's a little bit gum-smacking girl-group sass; a little bit riot grrl snarl; and a whole lot of maximum riffage a la AC/DC, the Ramones and Kiss, the Donnas will never be credited with reinventing the musical wheel.

Forget for a moment labels and categorizations - jungle, drum-and-bass, down tempo, house. There are really only two types of music that count - good and bad. Remember this Thursday when LTJ Bukem brings his Progression Sessions tour to the Trocadero. Bukem, who is credited with being a pioneer in jungle for his soulful and jazzy sound, will bounce in and out of genres on stage as he does with his compilation and mix series - Earth, Progression Sessions, Producer - or solo projects.

Ben Vaughn was telling the audience Thursday, the first of his two dates at the Balcony above the Trocadero, to fill the second-nighters in on what they missed. "Tell them that I set myself on fire in the second song," joked the formerly local rocker, who moved to Los Angeles three years ago to write music for 3rd Rock from the Sun and other television shows. Vaughn didn't set himself on fire, but he did premiere Rambler 65, a documentary based on the making of the album of the same name, which he recorded in his aqua 1965 Rambler American while it was parked in his New Jersey driveway.

Once again, the Troc is ready to rock. The Trocadero, the 121-year-old theater near 10th and Arch Streets that was Philadelphia's foremost burlesque house for 75 years, was scheduled to reopen as a nightclub on Friday with an approach that could improve the local music scene considerably. Reopened? You say you didn't realize that the grand old lady of Philadelphia theaters - host to W.C. Fields, Mae West and such memorably monikered strippers as Terry Firma ("she's down to earth")

Sporting the loftiest platform shoes in his wardrobe - a pair of 7-inch nose-bleeders - the man who calls himself Dementia was a little down. Although he was in the thick of the Saturday night festivities at the Trocadero, he was concerned that his black fishnet stockings and snug Jean- Paul Gaultier-style one-piecer weren't in the spirit of the night's theme: Marilyn Monroe'd (to Death?). "I wanted to dress up as JFK with the back of my head blown off," the copper-haired 21-year-old from Bristol lamented.

JOEL HODGSON, creator of "Mystery Science Theater 3000," has made a career for himself by riffing on movies, lovingly poking fun at the big screen. But for his next act, he'll take on a weightier topic then sci-fi B-movies. This time, he'll riff on his own life. Hodgson, who lives in Bucks County, is the main attraction at "Sunday in the Dark with Joel" happening at the Trocadero and presented by local blog Geekadelphia. The evening (yes, it's this Sunday) consists of two parts: a presentation of Hodgson's new multimedia memoir, "Riffing Myself," and a screening of "The Pod People," a beloved episode of the show Hodgson created in 1988.

South Africa's Die Antwoord creates racing, racy electro-hip-hop with touches of dancehall and dubstep thrown into its overheated mix. Inside that sound, MC Ninja and singer Yo-Landi also use a hardened brand of hometown slang. With that occasionally foul vernacular and their particular patois, Ninja and Yo-Landi - who perform in English and Afrikaans - identify themselves as "Zef" in terms of musical style and fashion sense. They are posh but not posh, poor yet fancy, rocking gold in the face of poverty.

For the last 12 years, Mastodon, Atlanta's nü-Monsters of Rock, have grown beyond their status as crushing cult favorites to become America's best metal band, according to Rolling Stone magazine. Sunday night's sardine-packed crowd at the Trocadero certainly thought so. Rather than act out the usual devil-horn-waving and frat-boy-hollering you get from most metal-head audiences, most of the crowd stood in rapt amazement, quiet even as their fuzzy-headed heroes - bassist/vocalist Troy Sanders and guitarist/singer Brent Hinds - spun their mad tales with quick prog-rock complexities.

A small woman with an outsized voice and a brash guitar style, Polly Jean Harvey relishes extremes. Beginning with her iconoclastic and influential debut, 1992's Dry, PJ Harvey has forged a fiercely independent career. She's moved from aggressive explorations of sexual power struggles to raw, cathartic screeds to beautifully unsettling blues incantations to haunted, introspective ballads. Her collective body of work probably brought the crowd - which skewed older - to the Trocadero on Sunday night.

Grunge-country. Prog-bluegrass. Folk-punk. Hillbilly pop. No matter what you name it, North Carolina picking-and-singing siblings Scott and Seth Avett have probably heard their music called it. And still you can't contain the Avett Brothers. Their rowdy, sold-out show at the Trocadero on Saturday proved that. Since 2000, the Avetts have forged an aggressively played brand of Americana. With lyrics dedicated to passion and the consequences of mistakes, their rustic, impressionist arrangements give the ensemble a chamber-ragtime charm.

The first time M. Ward performed at the Trocadero, back in 2004, he was low man on the totem pole of an inspired three-headed bill that also featured Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst and My Morning Jacket's Jim James. Three acclaimed solo albums of languid torch-folk later - not to mention an opening slot at the Tower with Norah Jones and a turn through town with She & Him, his endearing duet act with Zooey Deschanel - he sold out the Troc all by his lonesome Friday night. Nearly as impressive was Ward's ability to stop all conversations in their tracks at the start of his set with just the soulful wheeze of his harmonica and a handful of downcast guitar chords.

"Follow your bliss. " Amid clips of swimming sea creatures, twirling dancers and flying birds, mythologist Joseph Campbell's saying was one of several inspirational quotes projected behind Mercury Rev at the Trocadero Theater on Saturday night. It could be the band's mantra. Momentous, thunderous songs teem with transcendental images of natural beauty, dreams and, in the words of one of them, "Senses on Fire. " The 90-minute set was an often-blissful sensory overload. Singer Jonathan Donahue spent a brief stint in the Flaming Lips and, like that band, Mercury Rev melds psychedelic experimentation, placid beauty and pummeling power into an open-hearted and wondrous experience.

When the Wu-Tang Clan started in 1992, the members of hip-hop's hardest-working collective almost immediately began dropping their own solo albums. Each of the nine MCs was nearly as potent as the mother ship's debut, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). If RZA was its scientist, Raekwon its actor, and Ol' Dirty Bastard its wild child, GZA was its "Genius. " It wasn't just a nickname from 1995's Liquid Swords. What George Harrison's sprawling All Things Must Pass was to the Beatles' canon, Liquid Swords was to the Wu - a surprisingly grand work, expressive and expansive.

Lovefoxx, the singer of the Brazilian sextet CSS, took the stage of the Trocadero on Thursday night in a skintight bodysuit topped with a feather-boa vest, an outfit that neatly encapsulates the band's blend of minimalism and overkill. The best songs from their self-titled first album, like the iPod-commercialed "Music is My Hot Hot Sex," thrive on an irresistible combination of skeletal beats and the singer's over-the-top persona. Combining pidgin braggadocio with one-finger synth riffs, the group's songs at times recall the stripped-down electro-funk of hip-hop pioneers like Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash.

The Trocadero was steeped in good vibes Sunday night as the Brooklyn indie trio Nada Surf played to a sellout crowd. The nearly two-hour performance was a reminder of how refreshing smart lyrics and melodic songs can be. Clean-cut singer-guitarist Matthew Caws and drummer Ira Elliot were offset by bassist Daniel Lorca's floppy tangle of dreadlocks, and the excited crowd was a diverse cross-section of ages and musical backgrounds. Nada Surf didn't play its fluke 1996 hit "Popular" - the band claimed to not remember how - but the trio dwelled on 2002's Let Go, the album that transformed them from one-hit wonders into indie stars.