MUSIC: Weekend concert round-up

He has a voice roomy enough for a family of five to inhabit, a powerful instrument equal parts hell fire and honeysuckle. And Cee-Lo Green sings in grand gusts of wind and melodrama.
    The Gnarls Barkley crooner presided over the Mandalay Bay beach on Saturday like a preacher at the pulpit, admonishing his flock as if the forecast called for brimstone.
    “I don’t know about you, but I’m gonna rock and roll,” Green announced early on in the band’s fleet, business-minded, encore-free set.
    And he did that, singing from the back of his heels, enveloped in sometimes spooky, sometimes seductive, organ-fired soul that came on like a pastiche of goose flesh, pheromones and adrenaline.
    Gnarls began on a slow-simmer, coming with a pair of dark, haunted waltzes before getting sweaty on “Gone Daddy Gone.”     
    The band has mostly ditched their elaborate stage get-ups of the past – formerly, the group dressed as characters from films as disparate “Star Wars” to “The Wizard of Oz” – favoring a presentation as streamlined as their setlist.    
    The crowd was a mix of sand-spackled beach bums and starched and pressed socialites who sipped free Absolut cocktails in the V.I.P. bar.
    As such, it was a relatively sedate bunch.
    “Don’t be surprised if you have a good time,” Green chided at one point.
    The real surprise on Saturday night however, came from George Michael’s show at the MGM Grand.
    The crowd was the opposite of Gnarls Barkley’s: a loose, lively group that danced in the aisles and celebrated like they had all just lost their virginity. 
    Though he did take the stage some 40 minutes late, clad in a natty black suit and shades, that didn’t damper the spirits any.
    Surrounded by a big-budget production with a huge ‘J’ shaped video screen that flowed off the lip of the stage and a large backing band that played from a series of illuminated tiers, Michael undulated like he had Slinkies for limbs.
    As images of disco balls shooting lightning towered on the screens video screens above him, Michael purred and winked his way through a mix of bawdy, arms-in-the-air pop rave-ups (“Fastlove”) and heavy breathing R&B (“Father Figure”).
    “I’m your man,” Michael sang during the song of the same name near the opening of the show, and no one here on this night needed to be reminded as much.
    In contrast to Saturday’s fireworks, Friday offered some more budget-minded thrills: a free local metal show at the Divebar.
    We were there to see soot-black thrashers Spun In Darkness and Avenger of Blood, two of the leading lights of a solid, underrated Vegas metal scene. The former opened the show, the latter went on late and we missed them.
    This is the rub of a 24-hour town like Vegas: unlike most cities where there’s a curfew for alcohol sales that gets shows done at a specific time, here, gigs can run until the paper boy is on your doorstep the next morning.
    And so it was at the Divebar, where a seven-band bill started at around 10 p.m. Do the math, that means things probably ran until 3-4 a.m.
    Still, the trip was worth it just for Spun in Darkness, whose bare knuckle, old school-flavored death rumble is like a double shot of Wild Turkey: straightforward, unadorned and you feel it like a mule-kick to the gut.     
    Hair flying, the band favored a dense, mid-paced assault with lots of knotty riffing and a subterranean bottom-end. 
    The night was long and their set was (relatively) short, but still, these dudes snarled and grimaced like a pack of underfed Rottweilers.