Concert Previews

He didn't get the hype Radiohead did, but hip-hop performance poet Saul Williams beat the Britishers to the punch last year when he made his latest Trent Reznor-produced album,

The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust!,

only available online. (Go to niggytardust.com to get it, and cough up the five bucks.) The album, which includes a straight-up cover of U2's "Sunday, Bloody Sunday," backs up the rhymer's sharp-tongued agit-prop with a rocked-out manifestation of the wall-of-sound production style of Public Enemy's Bomb Squad. At his gig at the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin last month, however, Williams displayed a softer side. He plucked at an acoustic guitar, singing a new song about Frida Kahlo's supposed affair with Josephine Baker, and explaining that with

Niggy

, "I'm trying to deal with all this hate, but with creativity, not sweeping it under the rug."

- Dan DeLuca

Blown-out atonal folk-blues; Godz-like garage-rock dissonance; ghostly a cappella; post-free-jazz extemporaneousness — all have issued from the mysterious entity known as Jandek over three decades and 52

albums. Every disc is released by Houston’s Corwood Industries, starkly packaged with only odd song titles

(“You Painted Your Teeth”) on the back. Blurry photos of the same man on some album covers led many to

assume he was Jandek. No — but it apparently is one Sterling R. Smith, “the Rep” of one-artist label Corwood

who, shockingly, began playing concerts in 2004. Jandek is Smith and whoever; the odd tunings

are on purpose. Jandek’s oeuvre isn’t unintentional “outsider” music like the Shaggs or, obviously, William

Hung, although it is a welcome antidote to American Idol-style pop conformity. “Unchained Melody” it

ain’t — more like unhinged melody, as well as unpredictable, unconventional, unassuming — and, for the

devoted or merely curious, presented with an ultrarare opportunity to witness Jandek live and local,

unmissable.

Jandek plays at 7 p.m. Saturday at the German Society of Pennsylvania’s Barthelmes Hall, 611 Spring Garden St.

Tickets: $25. Phone: 215-925-7892,

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