At a few of the recent concerts I’ve seen, good performances have been followed by rather tepid applause. Audiences seemed bored or too lazy or maybe too tired because of the late hour to clap loudly enough to demand an encore. This was not the case Sunday night (July 3) when Centro-Matic played at Schubas. The crowd was loud, sounding very glad indeed to hear this band from Denton, Texas, playing in Chicago for the first time in a couple of years. There was no doubt that these fans wanted to hear an encore, and they got it. (Actually, they got two encores.)
Centro-Matic recently released a album, Candidate Waltz, and the set featured a few of the new songs, including the standout track, “Only in My Double Mind,” which has all of the qualities of a trademark Centro anthem: ringing chords, a thumping beat and Will Johnson’s distinctive, slightly creaky vocals — all that, with a soaring chorus and lots of “ahhs.”
Of course, Centro-Matic also played some of its staple songs, including several tracks from the 2003 album that remains one of its best, Love You Just the Same. And the band dug out two songs from its very first album, 1996’s lo-fi Redo the Stacks, “Rock and Roll Eyes” and “Am I the Manager Or Am I Not?” And Centro-Matic can also be counted on to play a quirky cover, and this time, it was Lionel Ritchie’s “All Night Long.” Through it all, Johnson kicked up his legs as he played guitar while his longtime bandmates — Matt Pence, Scott Danbom and Mark Hedman — gave the music both driving force and subtle shades. It was yet another triumphant show for one of indie rock’s most dependable bands, with a pretty nice opening set by Sarah Jaffe.
Four years ago, The Believer published a remarkable article by Joe Hagan in its annual music issue about a singer-songwriter I’d never heard of: Bill Fox. And the magazine came with a CD featuring a beautiful song by Fox, “My Baby Crying.” Fox gave up playing music after releasing two albums of folk rock, Shelter From the Smoke (1997) and Transit Byzantium (1998). Before that, he’d played scrappy garage power pop in the 1980s in the Mice, who had one of their songs, “Bye Bye Kitty Cat,” covered by Superchunk. Robert Pollard of Guided By Voices was a Mice fan, as it’s easy to see why.
But by the time Hagan wrote his loving ode to Fox’s music in 2007, Fox didn’t even own a guitar. Fox, who has struggled in the past with manic depression, was working as a telemarketer. He declined to be interviewed. One of Fox’s friends relayed his reaction to the reporter: “Man, I don’t want to be on the internet.” Out of respect for Fox’s wishes, The Believer did not put its article about Fox online. However, it is on Hagan’s website here. According to Hagan, Fox’s brother, Tommy, described him as “a crabby loner and contrarian who barely makes ends meet and refuses to talk about his music with anyone, especially a reporter.”
It was a fascinating, poignant story, and as I soon discovered, Fox’s music was great, too — with touches of Bob Dylan and other classic folk musicians, along with the acoustic sides of Big Star and Guided By Voices, but more than anything, just heartfelt, well crafted melodic songs. (You can hear some of his songs on this myspace page.) Since The Believer article was published, Fox has begun playing a few shows now and then. Unbeknownst to me (or practically anyone) he came to Chicago in 2009 for a performance at Quenchers. And this past Saturday (July 2), he was back, playing in front of an appreciative audience filling a small room, Uncommon Ground on Devon Avenue.
Given what I’d read about Fox, I was both eager and a little apprehensive about seeing him in concert. I hoped for a triumphant return by a singer rediscovering his love for music and his fans. I feared … I’m not sure what, but something going awry. There did not turn out to be much drama — just a guy with an acoustic guitar, playing some excellent songs. I believe a few of them were either new songs or old ones he never released, but he also played some of his most memorable tunes, including “Get Your Workingman’s Things,” “Let in the Sun,” “Over and Away She Goes” and “Lonesome Pine.” After playing for a little under an hour, Fox left the stage. The crowd clearly wanted an encore, but that was all Fox was going to play on this night. I hope to see him again.
Kudos to Chicago singer-songwriter Dan Phillips, who performs under the name Zapruder Point, and who helped to bring Fox to Chicago as part of this show. Zapruder Point was originally scheduled as the headliner, but switched places in the lineup, opening for Fox with a nice set of his own songs. (His music can be heard on Bandcamp.)
This year’s Taste of Chicago was scaled down from previous years. No fireworks. And fewer famous bands playing on the concert stage. That was supposed to be the idea, anyway. As it turned out, this year’s festival actually included more musical acts that interested me than usual. Alas, I missed seeing Loretta Lynn on Friday night, but I did catch the Jayhawks Saturday afternoon (July 2) at the Petrillo Bandshell. Now, here’s a show that I thought would draw a decent-size crowd, since the Jayhawks seem to have a pretty good following, thanks in part to WXRT, which was sponsoring the free concert. But for whatever reason, the park had plenty of empty seats.
Still, it was a solid performance, a highly enjoyable set of the Jayhawks’ best songs from their early records, Hollywood Town Hall and Tomorrow the Green Grass — the albums the band made back when it had both of its key singer-songwriters, Mark Olson and Gary Louris. Olson left the group in the mid-1990s, and then Louris and the other Jayhawks carried on. Olson has rejoined the Jayhawks now, and it was a joy to hear Olson and Louris swapping vocal lines in those classic songs they collaborated on in the early ’90s, which have really stood the test of time. The songs were anchored by Louris’ melodic guitar riffs and solos, which were instantly recognizable to anyone who’s spent time listening to those albums.
The Jayhawks also treated us to a couple of songs from their forthcoming album — the first one featuring both Olson and Louris in 16 years. Can’t wait to hear the whole thing.
The free concert Monday evening (June 27) at Millennium Park’s Pritzker Pavilion was one of those shows that had you wondering: Who’s everyone here to see, the headline or the opening act? I was there for the headliner, Low, who have a terrific new album out, C’mon, and put on a great show back in April at Lincoln Hall. The fact that Glen Hansard was opening seemed like a nice bonus. But clearly Hansard, the lead singer of the Frames and one-half of the Swell Season duo that gained fame and fans in the film Once, drew a large contingent of concertgoers Monday. His modest acoustic songs were pleasant enough, and Hansard threw himself into some of the songs with an almost startling intensity — including a cover of Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks.” A predominantly female bunch of Hansard fans oohed and ahh’ed at all of this, and then a lot of them packed up and left before Low took the stage. Their loss.
Low played a set that was pretty similar to the recent one at Lincoln Hall, playing most of the new record and a sample of a few older songs, climaxing with “When I Go Deaf” as the encore. It was beautiful to behold the vocal harmonies of guitarist Alan Sparhawk and drummer Mimi Parker soaring out into the summer air at Millennium Park as the songs unfolded with stately grace — evoking both of the words in the title of one song, “Majesty/Magic.”
The latest cool spot for concerts in Chicago is Logan Square — the square itself, a park (which isn’t actually all that square) in the middle of Kedzie Avenue, Milwaukee Avenue and Logan Boulevard, where that eagle-topped column rises high above the traffic. (That’s the Illinois Centennial Monument.) The Empty Bottle put on a concert here last year with Lightning Bolt and Dan Deacon, which I missed. Sunday afternoon, the Bottle kicked off a new monthly series of free concerts featuring bands playing at the base of the monument. Due to my packed schedule (I had a play to see downtown), I wasn’t able to see the headliner, Califone, but I did catch the opening act, Chicago’s sprawlingly big hard-rock band Bloodiest.
The park turned out to be a pretty great place to enjoy the weather and catch some music, and I’m looking forward to seeing some of the future shows. (July 24: Thee Oh Sees with Football. Aug. 21: High Places. Sept. 18: Mucca Pazza.)
The wait is finally over. Tuesday (June 28) is the release date for Welch’s fifth album, The Harrow & the Harvest. The good news is that she and Rawlings are up to their old tricks. This record does not reinvent their formula — not in the least. And that’s just fine. Why fix something that isn’t broken? Welch writes, sings and plays modern-day old-timey music. That is to say, the idiom is old-fashioned, a style of folk song with its roots in bluegrass, gospel, blues and other old traditions. And even the words Welch sings can seem as if they’re ripped pages out of some century-old chapbook. But this is a modern girl singing, and sometimes contemporary references surface on the lyric sheet. The feelings are certainly universal, penetrating from whatever distant, imaginary place these pieces of mountain music are supposedly set.
As with most of their previous recordings, Rawlings co-wrote all of the songs here, and his fluid soloing on the acoustic guitar is a constant presence. Rawlings sings subtle harmonies — his voice is never distinct enough for its own personality to emerge, but it lends an emotional undertow or uplift to Welch’s lead vocals — but the real duet going on here is the pairing of Welch’s voice with the singing of Rawlings’ guitar strings, a really exquisite dance. Welch doesn’t have the grandiose voice of a diva, but she doesn’t need it with this music. For all we know, she might be capable of more flamboyant singing that would wow us, but her personality seems too modest to try knocking us over by belting out a big note. She’s subservient to the songs and the stories they tell.
The production of The Harrow & the Harvest sounds as simple as could be: two voices and two guitars, and just about nothing else. (What else is there? A bit of banjo, some harmonica and a hand knocking on the body of a guitar.) The performances sound like live concert performances, without any overdubs, and with a spontaneous sense of invention in Rawling’s searching melodies on the guitar. There’s a lovely sense of stereo separation among these spare elements. Listen with headphones for the full effect.
And the songs? These are another 10 great ones by one of our greatest songwriters. The album opens with “Scarlet Town,” a lively number that jumps along, thanks to some fast runs on Rawlings’ guitar. The lyrics are ominous, describing a mysterious place the narrator visits despite being warned to stay away. “The things I seen in Scarlet Town did mortify my soul,” Welch sings. “Look at deep well, look at that dark grave, they’re ringing that iron bell in Scarlet Town today.” A metaphorical place? A state of being? It seems so: “You left me here to rot away,” she sings, adding later: “I’ve been looking through a telescope from hell to Scarlet Town.”
Then the record shifts gears with the second track, “Dark Turn of Mind,” which sways along, softly and slowly. The melody is so beautifully bittersweet that it’s hard to know if Welch (or whoever her character is this time) is happy or sad. “You’ll never know how happy I’ll be, when the sun’s going down,” she sings. And as the song ends, she confesses to being the sort of person with one of these dark minds, but she doesn’t make it sound like such a bad thing. “Some girls are as bright as the morning. Some girls are blessed with a dark turn of mind.” It seems like a confession, to having the sort of personality that doesn’t fit into the conventional idea of a happy, normal person.
The album continues on in this vein, shifting tempos and moods and styles, but all within the framework of old-fashioned acoustic music that Welch and Rawlings have honed during their many years together. The melodies and chord progressions take some delicious and unexpected turns at a few points, adding depth and sophistication that go far beyond simple three-chord ditties.
Even in a song that sounds fun, like “Six White Horses,” which features banjo, harmonica and a hand-slapping rhythm, the lyrics are foreboding and Biblical. “Six white horses, coming two by two, coming for my mother, no matter how I love her…” At first, it seems like just a simple description of some animals — but then it becomes a harbinger of death. And by the end of the song, the horses are coming after the song’s narrator. But while your mind wanders to thoughts of those horses straining at the reins, the music keeps clopping happily along. It’s a joy to hear.
That’s the sort of dichotomy that makes Welch’s music so wonderful. But more than anything else, to put it quite simply, this is beautiful music, skillfully written and superbly performed. It’ll take many more listens to decide how The Harrow & the Harvest rates in Welch’s already accomplished discography, but it’s already certain that this record’s more than up to snuff. Gillian Welch is back, and that’s a cause for celebration.
Yo La Tengo was in fine form Saturday (June 25) at the Wicker Park street festival known as the Green Music Fest. It was an excellent little cross-section of most of the various moods and styles of music Yo La Tengo plays — only a little bit of the quiet, loungy stuff, but plenty of drony grooves, a handful of the band’s catchiest and most memorable songs (“Sugarcube” was a highlight for me) and lots of sharp-edged guitar solos by Ira Kaplan.
I assumed All Tiny Creatures would be getting a certain amount of buzz. If for no other reason, this band from Madison, Wis., has guest vocals from Justin Vernon of Bon Iver on its new debut album, Harbor. And well, Bon Iver is playing at big venues now like the Chicago Theatre and hanging out with Kanye West.
But it seems that most of the world hasn’t discovered All Tiny Creatures yet. The band played for just a handful of fans Friday night at the Empty Bottle. (Bad timing? Lack of publicity? Who knows why?) The room may have been fairly empty, but the music was worthy of reaching a bigger audience. All Tiny Creatures has some musicians in common with other Wisconsin bands, including Volcano Choir and the more experimental Collections of Colonies of Bees. The first track I heard by All Tiny Creatures a couple of years ago, “To All Tiny Creatures,” is an infectious, keyboard-driven instrumental song, with a strong Krautrock flavor. The band’s newer songs retain that minimalist vibe, with driving beats underneath shimmering patterns of keyboard and guitar notes, but softly sung vocals are a key ingredient now. It’s nice to see some innovative music coming from the state north of Illinois. The next time All Tiny Creatures comes to town, I’m hoping they get the bigger turnout they deserve.
Last weekend (June 10-12) the Empty Bottle hosted the second annual Neon Marshmallow Festival, three nights of experimentation, electronica, drones and full-on blasts of noise emanating from laptops and instruments. The artists who stood behind their computers and created shimmering, vibrating or pulsing waves of sound tended to blur together over the course of the weekend, but a couple of them stood out as more inventive than the others: Oneohtrix Point Never and Mike Shiflet (who also played guitar, though you’d be hard-pressed to identify what notes or sounds were coming from that instrument).
Outer Space was contagiously energetic, and Sword Heaven was more of an assault, as the drummer’s screams were picked up by a contact mic duct-taped to his throat. That wasn’t the only sonic attack of the weekend. Sickness made brief bursts of industrial noise, punctuated by silence — until an audience member decided to join in with sarcastic toots of a harmonica during those quiet interludes, which prompted Sickness to demand a stop to this silly embellishment on his music. The most difficult set to survive was that of The Rita, who blared a dissonant, ear-splitting explosion for more than half a hour, which practically drove me out of the building. Acoustic guitarist/incoherent moaner Bill Orcutt performed intriguing, hushed music with a mystical air, but the set felt tense thanks to his abrupt opening shriek into the microphone: “Shut the fuck up!”
The two definite high points were the closing sets on Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday, Pelt performed a gorgeous musical meditation, starting with prayer bowls and lightly brushed gongs and building to violins, harmoniums and banjo. On Sunday, electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick got behind his laptop and electronic gear, reconstructing the deconstructed pieces of his compositions into a truly impressive tapestry of sounds. The way he put them together seemed organic, even if the music was purely electronic. Subotnick showed the kids how it’s done.
Rene Hell White Rainbow Lucky Dragons Sword Heaven Outer Space Sickness Bill Orcutt Oneohtrix Point Never Pelt Mike Shiflet Morton Subotnick
Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys came to Schubas Thursday night (June 9) for a concert of his solo music, and he brought along a whole bag of tricks. Need some audio samples? Rhys played them the old-fashioned way, with a miniature turntable spinning records such as a BCC sound-effects collection while Rhys and his band performed. Rhys also had some sort of electronic drumsticks, a device with a glowing red appendage that sounded like a Theremin, a yellow safety vest just in case his airplane crashed, some big signs saying “APPLAUSE,” WOAH,” and “THANK YOU.”
Rhys also had a repertoire of catchy songs, of course, as well as a wonderful, Welsh sense of humor and whimsy, which he displayed with his fanciful song introductions. And it helped that he had such a sharp backing band, Y Niwl, who are also from Wales. Y Niwl was the opening act, too, performing a groovy set of instrumental rock hearkening back to ’60s surf, twang and party rock. Y Niwl then returned to the stage for the main set, playing behind Rhys as he played tunes from his new album, Hotel Shampoo, and two earlier solo records.
The high point of the concert for me came at the end, when Rhys played the epic “Skylon!” — which was 14 minutes long in the studio version on his 2007 album Candylion, and was as long or longer in the live performance, combining a narrative about an airplane flight with a cycling riff that had some of the chugging power of a Velvet Underground rave-up but more of a psychedelic aura. yniwl.com gruffrhys.com
Millennium Park’s Pritzker Pavilion has a pretty full schedule of concerts all summer, not just the Monday-night “Downtown Sounds” shows I’ve written about earlier, but also classical, jazz, world music and more. The Thursday evening “Music Without Borders” series got started June 9 with the Mongolian-Chinese band Hanggai and Honduran singer-guitarist Aurelio Martinez.
Chicago’s mercurial and downright peculiar weather of late didn’t cooperate for this occasion. The temperature dropped from the 90s the previous day to the 50s, making for a pretty chilly outdoor show. The crowd was a small fraction of the audience that turned out a few days earlier, packing the park for Iron & Wine. (I missed that concert, but believe me, it was crowded. Just check out these photos at Time Out Chicago.)
Despite the sparse attendance and cool temps, Thursday’s concert featured two lively performances. Aurelio Martinez’s spry guitar playing and exuberant personality got the crowd moving a little bit, especially a small group of folks waving the Honduran flag. Martinez is not only an accomplished musician — he’s also a politician, a member of the Garifuna community and the first black person to become a deputy in the National Congress of Honduras. His most recent record (released by Sub Pop in January) is Laru Beya, and a couple of free mp3s are available here. It’s interesting and unusual to see Sub Pop releasing a record that would normally be lumped in with that amorphous category, “world music.”
The main act was Hanggai, an array of Mongolian musicians dressed in traditional garb… Well, maybe that was traditional garb. I’m not so sure about that weird bare-chested vest-like get-up the one singer wore, which made him look a bit like a member of the Mongolian Hell’s Angels. The guys played a mix of Western instruments such as electric guitar and banjo with Asian instruments, and the music was also a blend of Asian melodies with American rock ‘n’ roll. It’s surprising to read that Ken Stringfellow of the Posies and latter-day Big Star produced Hanggai’s most recent record, He Who Travels Far. In concert, Hanggai’s music was accessible and fun. The crowd even applauded whenever the singers spoke between songs in their native language, even if few people in the pavilion understand what they were saying. The songs often had a galloping beat, and people got up to dance in front of their seats. (Millennium Park’s security staff strictly enforced a “no dancing in the aisles” rule Thursday night. It sure would be nice if the park set aside a little more space for dancing.)
The Seattle band Earth, which has been making slow, pounding instrumental rock music since 1989, played Wednesday night, June 8, at Chicago’s Mayne Stage. Earth’s leader and founder, guitarist Dylan Carlson, calmly played stately riffs from the group’s new album, Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light I, as well as compositions going back to Earth’s earliest recordings. The band’s current lineup — all-female, other than Carlson — was anchored by the drumming of Adrienne Davies, who’s been with Earth since 2005. She looked like the slow-motion film of a regular drummer, lifting her arms into the air and bringing down the drumsticks with thump. The two newest members of Earth, cellist Lori Goldston and bassist Angelina Baldoz, completed the band’s quasi-orchestral wall of sound. This was heavy music, but not of the head-banging variety — more meditative than metal. myspace.com/earthofficial thronesanddominions.com
The opening act, Ô Paon, was very impressive in her own right. That’s the stage name of Montreal native Geneviève Castrée, who currently lives in Washington state. (She’s also and artist and writer.) Singing completely in French (with some vocal quirks reminiscent of Björk), she used looping pedals to build vocal harmonies and repeating guitar chords. Ô Paon seemed to entrance the quiet and attentive audience with her idiosyncratic songs. I know she won me over, in any case. At the merch table, I picked up Ô Paon’s self-released 2010 album Courses, which features arrangements by Thierry Amar of the great Montreal bands Silver Mt. Zion and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. It’s a good listen. opaon.ca
This was my first visit to Mayne Stage, a fairly new venue in Rogers Park. I liked the look and sound of the room. The U-shaped balcony and high ceiling reminded me of Lincoln Hall. Mayne Stage apparently puts out tables on the floor for many shows (which would give it something of a Park West vibe), but the floor was open for the Earth concert. The acoustics were crystal-clear.
The Swedish duo Wildbirds & Peacedrums are a rare combination of vocals and percussion. Mariam Wallentin sings and plays percussion (including a steel pan, usually associated with Caribbean music), while her husband, Andreas Werlin, plays a standard drum kit. Beyond the percussion, the band’s musical instruments are pretty minimal. The effect is almost like hearing a cappella music with a beat. For their show Tuesday night (June 7) at the Empty Bottle, Wildbirds & Peacedrums had a third touring musician, who played organ-like chords on keyboards, to flesh out the sound a bit, but Wallentin’s strong, evocative voice and Werlin’s inventive rhythms were still the focus. The band’s songs find an interesting balancing point between accessible ballads of the sort one could imagine getting radio airplay and more daring experimentation.
It’s a shame that the concert was sparsely attended, but the 40 or so fans who did turn out responded with some highly enthusiastic applause. At a couple of points, Wallentin walked out to the edge of the stage and sang without amplification, her powerful voice carrying across the room. In the ovation that followed, I could sense a common experience in the small but appreciative, the recognition that we’d just witnessed something beautiful and unusual. wildbirdsandpeacedrums.com myspace.com/wildbirdsandpeacedrums
I was lost in a dream for three hours one night last week in New York — wandering through the rooms of a haunted hotel, running up and down stairs as I chased after the characters from a Shakespeare tragedy, witnessing blood spilled and washed off their bodies, watching it all through the eyeholes of a white Venetian mask. This was Sleep No More, a mostly wordless version of Macbeth performed by the British theatrical troupe Punchdrunk inside a large old building in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood.
Calling it a play is insufficient. It’s part theater, part dance, part haunted house, part art installation — and one of the most incredible artistic immersions I’ve ever been through. As I say, I was lost in a dream. Of course, as with any play or film or concert, I knew at all times that I was watching (and, to some extent) participating in a performance. A game. A play. But like few performances I’ve ever experienced, Sleep No More felt like I was in the midst of some strange thing that was actually happening.
What is it? In rooms scattered across the so-called Hotel McKittrick, a dozen actors perform Shakespeare’s tragic tale, loosely adapted from the Bard’s original “Scottish play.” Audience members, required to remain silent and wear those masks (which make them appear like the orgy participants in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut) are left to wander around the hotel, essentially searching for the action wherever it’s happening.
From what I was able to figure out, the action is on a sort of loop, with each actor going through the same sequence or a similar sequence three times over the course of the show. At three points, they all gather in a grand ballroom for a tableau resembling the Last Supper — and two (or maybe three?) times, they gather in the same room to dance. In between, they go their separate ways, performing scenes solo or in small groups.
This scheme has its frustrating elements. It’s impossible for any audience member to see everything happening in every room. At the end, you’re left wondering what you missed. (For one thing, I know that I missed out on the scene where the witches give Macbeth their prophecy that he will become the king.) For some stretches of time, you look around rooms where no actors are present, while action is happening elsewhere. (That’s not a waste of time, however, since the rooms are filled with curious and striking objects and decorations, which you may scrutinize almost as much as you’d like.)
To me, however, these potential frustrations are part of what makes Sleep No More so special. They reinforced the sense that I was in the middle of complex, overlapping events — which were being witnessed in different order and from different angles by each audience member. It would be interesting to see audience members compare notes after a performance, to see how they would piece together what had just happened — much like a police officer or a journalist interviewing various witnesses to an accident or crime. In fact, I did overhear a bit of this sort of discussion in the lounge at the end of the night, people saying to one another, “Did you see the part where…?”
And while I know I saw maybe a third or a fourth of everything that happened in the Hotel McKittrick, what I did see was compelling and unforgettable — especially Lady Macbeth tossing herself around her bedroom with frightening abandon, a physical expression of her character’s famous “Out, damned spot!” line. And there were several startling moments of fight choreography and dance moves that felt downright dangerous. Seeing the story in wordless, fragmented scenes turned it into a fascinating puzzle.
Putting the audience members in those masks was a brilliant idea. As you move around the hotel and watch the other audience members, it’s impossible not to start thinking of them as characters in this unfolding drama. The actors and audience members occasionally brush up against one another. At a few points, I was alone or almost alone with an actor somewhere in the building, and it occurred to me that I was getting what was essentially private performance at that moment. In the closing scene, Lady Macbeth suddenly appeared in the midst of the crowd, standing next to me. I think I was one of only a few people who realized she was there. By standing next to her, and feeling her bump into my shoulder, I was experiencing this scene from a perspective unlike the rest of the audience. And I’m sure everyone else in the audience had similar moments different from what I went through.
Sleep No More makes you think about the possibilities of taking theater beyond its usual boundaries. It’s certainly not the first theatrical show to immerse an audience inside an unconventional space. Here in Chicago, Lookingglass once did a production of Mary Zimmerman’s Eleven Rooms of Proust with a similar conceit, which I missed, to my great regret. And other companies have taken a similar approach — but nothing as elaborate as what Punchdrunk has accomplished with Sleep No More.
If I lived in New York or if I had a chance to go back this summer, I would eagerly see Sleep No More again. Originally scheduled to close in late May, it has now been extended until Sept. 5. But more than anything, I am hoping that more theater companies find ways of putting on shows as ambitious, daring and unconventional as this. In the meantime, I am sure that my subconscious mind will be returning to the corridors of the Hotel McKittrick for a while when I drift off to sleep.
The weather was beautiful in Chicago on Memorial Day (May 30) — perfect for the free concert at Millennium Park’s Pritzker Pavilion starring headliner Justin Townes Earle and opening act Andre Williams. They made for a somewhat unusual pair — a 29-year-old country-folk singer and a 74-year-old blues and soul singer — but they’re both on Chicago’s Bloodshot Records. And they’re both entertainers with strong, distinctive personalities.
Backed by the Goldstars and a horn section, Williams strutted the stage, wearing some snazzy threads, only slightly cleaning up his somewhat lascivious lyrics for the all-ages audience. (Yes, he did sing “Jailbait,” and he also dedicated a song about “trying to score some blow” to his daughter.)
Justin Townes Earle was accompanied by just violin and upright bass, along with his own acoustic guitar. As he showed last fall at Lincoln Hall, he’s one of those singer-songwriters who can hold his own on the stage, even without a full band. His old-style country-music banter in between songs was peppered with polite references to the audiences as “ladies and gentlemen,” and his set was dominated by songs from his excellent 2010 record, Harlem River Blues — but why didn’t he play the song about his days as a teen in Chicago, “Rogers Park”? A highlight was his intense version of the Lightnin’ Hopkins blues tune, “I Been Burning Bad Gasoline.” It was good to see Earle playing to a large and appreciative audience.
I never saw any of the old Blackout Festivals in Chicago, which now seem to have grown legendary. After a hiatus of several years, the festival returned this weekend, sponsored by the same folks who run the HoZac record label — more or less the headquarters of Chicago’s burgeoning and fertile garage-rock scene. HoZac’s responsible for putting out a lot of roughly hewn, rambunctious and sometimes surprisingly catchy rock music. (The new LP by Chicago band Mickey is a great example of all that.) The two-day festival, held in a makeshift warehouse-like space dubbed the Velvet Perineum, was a showcase for HoZac’s bands as well as other likeminded groups. I caught almost all of it (other than the opening-night art show, and a couple of bands on Saturday, when I had to duck out of the Velvet Perineum to get some foods).
It was quite a fun time overall, with a lot of lively performances. The audience ebbed and flowed through the weekend, coming and going in between sets and acting somewhat manic-lethargic (moshing with reckless abandon for some bands, not even bothering to clap for other bands). The groups that inspired the most moshing on Friday (May 28) were the aforementioned Mickey, the Brides (who had the funniest stage banter) and the Spits (who started out their set wearing Ronald Reagan masks). Saturday’s biggest mosh moment came during the set by Nobunny, who (as expected) removed his pants halfway through the set, while continuing to wear his mangy, leporine headgear. Hearing Nobunny’s fans sing along to his songs, however, it was clear that his music connects on a melodic level, not simply as an excuse to slam bodies against one another.
Other highlights for me: Another Chicago band, Outer Minds, continue to impress me with their ’60s-flavored nuggets. Radar Eyes showed some impressive energy at the end of their set. Reading Rainbow played catchy songs with female-male harmonies and a good dose of buzz, too. Puffy Areolas played out on the floor, a bit like the Monotonix do, revving up the crowd with the relentless attack of their punk-rock feedback and saxophone. Closing out the fest on Saturday night, the legendary early ’70s band Nervous Eaters sounded best at the very end of their set, as they played the protopunkiest of their songs, including a fine version of “Loretta.” I was feeling pretty tired by that point, and I got the feeling that others were, too. The garage-rock marathon finally came to an end. But the music plays on, as I spin that new Mickey LP and write up my wish list for other HoZac records.
Squish Mickey Mickey The Happy Thoughts TV Ghost TV Ghost K-Holes K-Holes K-Holes The Brides Audience during the Brides The Spits The Spits Audience during the Spits Nones Nones Nones Outer Minds Outer Minds Outer Minds Outer Minds Radar Eyes Radar Eyes Radar Eyes Radar Eyes People's Temple People's Temple People's Temple Reading Rainbow Reading Rainbow Reading Rainbow Reading Rainbow Idle Times Puffy Areolas Puffy Areolas Puffy Areolas Puffy Areolas Timmy's Organism Timmy's Organism Nobunny Nobunny Nobunny Nobunny Nervous Eaters Nervous Eaters Nervous Eaters
Yes, it is hard to believe sometimes how unusual and wonderful the concerts promoted by the city of Chicago in the beautiful Millennium Park are. The summer season of free concerts got started Monday night (May 23) with … Bonnie “Prince” Billy? And Eleventh Dream Day as the opening act?
I love both of these acts, but they’re not exactly superstars or even what most people would think of as mainstream crowd pleasers. But over the past few years, the programmers in the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs have proven that they’ve got good taste and they’re willing to take risks. There’s been a shakeup since last fall, and I’m still trying to make sense of what it means that the city has moved around jobs and transferred some of these responsibilities to the tourism office. So far, so good — interesting and cool music is still being booked at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that it stays this way in the months and years to come. (Check out this summer’s concert schedule at Millennium Park here.)
The first act of the night Monday was Chicago’s venerable but still very lively indie-rock band Eleventh Dream Day, although it was questionable for a while whether they would actually play. Drummer and harmony vocalist Janet Beveridge Bean broke an ankle Sunday, and initially the band was planning to cancel the gig as a result. But Jim Elkington (who was in the Zincs and collaborated with Bean in the Horse’s Ha) was recruited to fill in on drums. Bean came out onto the stage in crutches and stood at her own mini drum set, singing throughout the set and offering some backup percussion. Elkington sounded pretty good, considering he’d just had one chance to rehearse the songs. It wasn’t quite the full Eleventh Dream Day experience, but the songs still sounded pretty great … and it made for an unusual and unique show. Bean joked that she was worried about keeping her job with the band. I don’t think there’s any need for her to worry about that, as her vocals came through as strong as ever Monday night.
Bonnie “Prince” Billy, aka Will Oldham, performed Monday with the same band he’s had with him last year, the Cairo Gang, which is led by guitarist Emmett Kelly of Chicago, and also includes Chicago singer Angel Olsen. Oldham was a bit more mellow than he’s been the past few times I’ve seen him, but he was just as expressive with his oddball yoga/dance moves, lifting his bare foot at skewed angles while he sang, cradling his guitar in his hands when he wasn’t playing it.
Unless I failed to recognize some of the songs (which is certainly possible, given how many records Oldham has put out), I believe that the bulk of songs he played Monday were brand-new ones, not yet released. He opened with “Troublesome Houses,” off of 2010’s Wonder Show of the World, and played another song from that same terrific album, “Go Folks, Go” just before the encore. But everything in between seemed to be new, with Oldham using lyrics sheets. The songs tended toward the quiet, with lyrics about spiritual seeking as well as the casual references to sex we’ve come to expect. At one point, he warned the audience to clap hands over the ears of anyone children in attendance, then proceeded to sing, “As boys, we fucked each other.” Another song mentioned sweaty thighs locked together. The first of the new songs he performed was almost a solo a cappella performance, with just a few eerie accents from the Steinway piano and the upright bass. The audience in the section of the pavilion near the stage fell almost completely silent as Oldham delivered this melody from the peculiar depths of his throat.
In its loveliest moments, the new material built to gospel-like choruses and impressive three-part harmonies featuring Oldham, Olsen and Kelly. More listens will be needed to decide how the new songs stack up — Oldham’s work usually needs repeat listens before it clicks with me — but it was a daring and beautiful performance. I was wondering what the people in the audience less familiar with Oldham’s work made of it all. It was steady, low-key folk-rock with tinges of jazz and gospel, the sort of music that requires close listening. Did it win over the audience or were people scratching their heads? It’s impossible for anyone to tell what everyone else is thinking in a crowd, but I got the sense that people were at least respectful and intrigued by what they were hearing.
During the encore, Bonnie “Prince” Billy played “There Is No God,” a single he’s releasing June 12 on Drag City, with profits going to Save Our Gulf and Turtle Hospital to support efforts to clean up and maintain waterways — a good cause, in the wake of the recent flooding along the Mississippi River basin. (Watch the video here.) After sounding spiritual in other songs earlier in the evening, Oldham now declared bluntly, “There is no god.” But the declaration wasn’t quite that simple. “There is no god,” he sang, “But that which surround the tongue/That which sees love in the chest/That which puts mouth on cock and vagina/That that is the best.” In his own odd way, Oldham reminds me of poets like Walt Whitman.
His occasionally vulgar lyrics made the spectacle of the concert in the park seem all the more subversive… or surreal, anyway. So the city of Chicago is paying this guy to stand in his bare feet on that fancy stage designed by Frank Gehry and blurt out lyrics about cocks and vaginas and sweaty thighs and how god doesn’t exist? Yep. Pretty cool, isn’t it?
Elvis Costello is billing his current tour as “The Spectacular Spinning Songbook,” and it lived up to that title Sunday (May 15) at the Chicago Theatre. It was indeed pretty spectacular — a highly entertaining show. And it was truly a “show,” not just a typical concert. Reviving a gimmick he featured in a 1980s tour, Costello gave audience members a chance to come up on stage and spin the big wheel, which had about 40 songs or “jackpot” slots on it (each of which would prompt Costello and the Imposters to play a mini set of songs on one theme).
It’s a great vehicle for someone like Costello who has a huge repertoire of great songs to play — giving Costello an excuse to vary up his set list from night to night and to have fun doing it. After the opening set of five songs, Costello put on a top hat and grabbed a cane, shifting into emcee mode. In addition to being an excellent all-around singer-songwriter, Costello is a bit of a ham. Speaking in the grandiose language of a game-show host, with heavy doses of irony, Costello guided Sunday’s audience through a diverse set of songs, letting audience members dance or sit on stage sipping drinks in a “lounge.” The show also featured a go-go dancer in a sort of cage, and a hostess who plucked people out of the audience. During the interludes when the wheel was being spun, the Imposters played instrumental music, including songs such as “Time Is Tight” by Booker T. & the MG’s.
Costello’s set leaned heavily toward his early records, and the Imposters sounded tight as they played driving versions of those classic songs. (Personally, I was thrilled to hear him do one of my favorite songs by him, “Man Out of Time,” from the Imperial Bedroom album.)
Throughout the night, Costello tossed in little bits of other people’s songs — songs that sound similar or share some of the same spirit. During “Uncomplicated,” he played a bit of Junior Walker’s “Shotgun.” During “Alison,” he briefly segued into two different songs by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, “The Tracks of My Tears” and “The Tears of a Clown.” One of the few songs that Costello radically changed for the live performance was “Pump It Up,” which he played at the piano with a bluesy feeling, adding a couple of verses and choruses from Ray Charles’ “Busted.” Perhaps most surprising was the final song of the night, at the end of a long, satisfying concert: Costello’s iconic version of Nick Lowe’s “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace Love and Understanding” briefly transformed in Prince’s “Purple Rain.” Odd choice, but somehow, he made it work.
SET LIST Overture (featuring “The Tersichorean Stylings of Miss Felicity Sisters”)
I Hope You’re Happy Now
Doll Revolution
Mystery Dance
Uncomplicated (with Shotgun, Junior Walker cover)
Radio, Radio (The Spectacular Spinning Songbook)
45 (SPIN 1)
This Wheel’s On Fire (The Band cover)/The River in Reverse (SPIN 2)
Living in Paradise (SPIN 3)
The Other Side Of Summer (SPIN 4)
Accidents Will Happen (SPIN 5) (“Time” Jackpot, SPIN 6)
Strict Time
Out of Time (Rolling Stones cover)
Next Time Around
Man Out Of Time
Element Within Her (SPIN 7) (“Girl” Jackpot, SPIN 8 )
This Year’s Girl
Girls Talk
Girl (Beatles cover)
(I Don’t Want to Go To) Chelsea (SPIN 9)
Beyond Belief (SPIN 10) (“Napoleon Solo” Jackpot, SPIN 11)
Pump It Up (with Busted, Ray Charles cover)
ENCORE 1:
A Slow Drag With Josephine
God’s Comic
Alison (with The Tracks of My Tears and The Tears of a Clown, Smokey Robinson & the Miracles covers)
ENCORE 2: (“Beauty or Beast” Jackpot, SPIN 12)
Rocking Horse Road (with Wild Thing, Troggs cover)
Waiting for the End of the World (with Gloria, Them cover)
Watching the Detectives
(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace Love and Understanding (with Purple Rain, Prince cover)
Never having been to Neil Young’s house, I can only imagine what it’s like inside.
And I imagine that, somewhere, he has a room that looks much like the stage did last night (May 6) at the Chicago Theatre. Maybe it’s down in the basement, a sort of musical rec room — the place where he goes to practice old riffs, write new songs, or just play. Play in the sense of playing with his toys. Neil Young’s solo concert Friday felt like a glimpse into that room, that space where he’s just playing for himself.
As he did during the first half (the solo portion) of a 2007 concert inside this same beautiful, historic theater, Young casually wandered around the stage in between some of the songs, looking at his instruments as if he were trying to decide what to do next. To some extent, this is surely an act that he’s putting on, since he was working from a set list. Was he toying with the audience, to see what sort of reaction he’d get if he walked up to the grand piano and then walked away from it, only to strap on an electric guitar? Or was he wandering around in his own little world, oblivious of the audience eagerly watching his every move? (Probably the former.) It’s not as if Young didn’t acknowledge the audience’s presence. At several points, he raised an arm above his head, like a baseball player stepping out of the dugout and tipping his hat after a home run. And Young has the odd, endearing habit of applauding himself — as he came out onto the stage at the outset of the concert and the audience broke out into cheers, Young clapped, too.
Three keyboards were arrayed around Young: an upright piano, an organ in an old, ornate cabinet, and a grand piano painted in splotches of orange and pink. He played one song on each — hauling these big instruments around the country with him like totems, as if each song must be played on the particular instrument to which it belongs. A wooden statute of an American Indian stood at the back of the stage, and Young walked over to it and touched it once, as if he were putting his hand on the shoulder of a friend. Later, when Young was playing “Cortez the Killer,” a song about the European conquest of American Indians, he walked back over to the wooden Indian. Facing away from the audience, Young played his solo to the statute, slapping the body of his guitar to make the notes reverberate.
This concert was mostly about guitar, and Young played a few of them over the course of the night. Wearing a white hat with a black band, a white sport jacket, black T-shirt and blue jeans, Young sat down with an acoustic guitar to start the concert, playing “Hey Hey My My,” “Tell Me Why” and “Helpless.” The acoustics in the big auditorium were perfect, and while Young looked pretty tiny from my seat halfway up the balcony, it sounded as if he were right next to me, plucking his guitar strings and singing those songs in a voice not all that much changed from how it sounded when he was a young musician decades ago. His harmonica solos on these acoustic numbers were one of the most remarkable things he did all evening — improvising, pushing, jumping across the melody with the same searching spirit he has demonstrated in so many terrific electric guitar solos over the years.
The harmonica also prompted one of Young’s few bits of stage banter. In between songs, he shook some water out of it. (Was that just his saliva? Or did he put the harmonica in some water? I couldn’t tell.)
“I was told it’s bad to put my harmonicas in water,” he said. “A manufacturer told me. ‘Bullshit,’ that’s what I say.”
Young played the songs from his most recent album, Le Noise, in the same solo-guitar style they use on the record, a sort of hybrid between the usual sounds of acoustic and electric guitar — one guitar echoing around the room with a sound that seems multilayered, as if each string is a separate instrument. As impressive as this was, I still think the songs on Le Noise are just good, not great. The record and this live performance of those songs mark an interesting new direction for Young, but the melodies and lyrics were no match for the classic songs that made up the rest of the set.
The other time Young spoke was when he finally sat down at one of the keyboards, the upright piano. He introduced a song apparently called “Leia” (the Sugar Mountain website reports that this is an unreleased song he played for the first time in 2010).
“A song now for all the little people,” Young said. “The tiny little people with big smiles. Those too small to be here tonight. … They wanted to come, but couldn’t come. Mom said, ‘Nope.’ And a song for Grandpa. He was able to get here.”
The sing-songy tune that followed did seem a bit like a children’s ditty. Young moved to the organ and strapped on a harmonica for “After the Gold Rush,” playing odd runs of notes with a circus calliope effect as he sang — changing one time reference in the lyrics. “Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 21st century,” he sang. And then he moved to the grand piano for “I Believe in You.”
Young also played electric guitar, using that instrument mostly for older classics. The hum of the strings was muted, muffled almost down to little more than bass notes, on the verses of “Down by the River,” but whenever he got to the chorus, the guitar came roaring to life. The riff from “Ohio” was loud and chunky from beginning to end, however, and Young’s iconic lyrics — dashed off three decades ago in reaction to a galvanizing tragedy — felt as urgent as if they were written today.
As the concert neared its end, Young returned to the electric guitar and stood a while, playing around with the hum and buzz his instrument was making, without allowing a melody to emerge from the noise too quickly. After a few minutes, it became clear that he was playing “Cortez the Killer.” Singing and playing electric guitar without a band can seem a little odd — acoustic guitar is the default instrument for a solo singer-songwriter, and hearing electric guitar makes you think, “Where’s the rest of the band?” Playing without a band had pluses and minuses for Young. It gave him freedom to stretch out his tunes, to let the notes hover a little bit longer before he sang another verse. And it focused our attention on every little nuance of the noise coming out of that guitar. But Young’s a master at playing epic guitar solos in the context of a full band, getting sparks of energy and inspiration from the other musicians playing behind him. That isn’t what this tour is about, however. The result was that much of Young’s guitar playing was more impressionistic: Instead of making symphonies that rise and fall with dramatic melodies, he was more interested in shaking his instrument and seeing what fell out. An impressive spectacle in its own way.
The last song before the encore was “Cinnamon Girl,” and when it came to that false ending — the moment when the song seems to end, just before that last little fillip of one guitar melody finishes it off — Young paused, as if he might not bother playing it. The crowd erupted into applause. Did people think the song was over? Or were they egging him on to finish that song? Young raised his hand in the air once again, acknowledging his fans, and then he finally played that little riff, repeating it several times, stretching out the song for just a minute longer.
Young (who played “Walk With Me” from Le Noise for his encore) was a marvel to see and hear Friday night. The concert wasn’t quite as epic as his 2007 show at the Chicago Theatre, but it was another excellent performance from this always-intriguing musician.
As a nice bonus, the concert also featured the great British singer-songwriter-guitarist Bert Jansch as the opening act. The understated Jansch played solo acoustic guitar, and the room filled with the sparkling, liquid sound of those bending strings. At the end of his set, he modestly remarked, “I want to thank you all for being so quiet and not throwing anything at me.” The theater was indeed pretty quiet, and Jansch seemed to impress the audience, which surely included many people unfamiliar with his music.
Tame Impala, a psychedelic rock band from Perth, Australia, headlined two sold-out shows this week at Lincoln Hall in Chicago. But as far as I was concerned (and I suspect the same is true for a lot of the people who attended these concerts), they were double-headliner gigs. I wanted to see Tame Impala, but I was even more interested in catching the first Chicago performance by Yuck, a London band getting a lot of buzz lately in indie-rock circles.
Yuck’s self-titled debut album is one of the year’s best records so far, and the songs sounded strong in concert Tuesday (May 3). Yuck’s tunes have some lovely, high-ranging vocals that remind me of power pop by the likes of Teenage Fanclub, but there’s a lot of crunchy guitar, too, with touches of Sonic Youth at its poppiest and a bit of the loopiness of Pavement. Yuck’s songs have some terrific guitar melodies — those bent notes — on top of the chords. www.myspace.com/yuckband yuckband.blogspot.com
Tame Impala’s 2010 album, InnerSpeaker, didn’t completely win me over. It’s a pleasant listen, but the songs came off better in concert, where there repetitive grooves got at least some of the crowd dancing. Or, well, swaying. Tame Impala plays psychedelic music of the hypnotic riff variety — lots of reverb and lots of those effects that make the chords sound like they’re slowly circling in and out of focus. As the band played, a screen showed live video from a camera pointed at an oscilloscope screen, and the music caused green lines to squiggle in circular shapes. But you really didn’t need that projection to visualize the music looping back on itself over and over again. Groovy stuff. www.myspace.com/tameimpala www.tameimpala.com
The evening started out with another “Y” band — Chicago’s Yawn — playing a set of upbeat indie pop that reminded me of Vampire Weekend. myspace.com/yawntheband
The Part Five is a Chicago band on the Cardboard Sangria label, which is also home to one of my favorite local acts, the psychedelic folk-rock group the Singleman Affair. And it’s led by singer-songwriter-bassist Gary Pyskacek, who’s played with the Singleman Affair. So I was foolishly expecting a similar sort of music when I popped the new CD by the Part Five, The Tightening, into my stereo.
What I heard was something quite different. There’s something vaguely… eighties about it. And in a good way. Then again, maybe what the Part Five is doing is a throwback to early emo music. That’s what Chicagoist suggested… mentioning a bit of a Police vibe.
The strength of these songs came through in a live performance Saturday night (April 30) at Quenchers. Pyskacek’s lively, jumping bass lines clicked together with Chris Brantley’s driving drumbeats and guitarist Brett Barton’s inventively melodic figures. Broken down into its individual parts, this might seem like some sort of art rock, but when it’s all added up, these are pop songs, with plenty of hooks. Looking around Quenchers, I thought: These guys could definitely be playing to a bigger audience. myspace.com/thepartv
The Chicago rock band Eleventh Dream Day has been together for a quarter of a century, but their recordings and live performances are still fresh and exciting. Celebrating the release of its latest record, the Thrill Jockey release Riot Now!, the group played Friday night (April 22) at Lincoln Hall, sounding as energetic and alive as ever. What’s the secret of these guys? Maybe it has something to do with the way they carry on as a sort of occasional endeavor, playing a few gigs a year rather than touring incessantly; recording a new album every few years instead of constantly going at it.
The new record is a keeper, with a bunch of songs that rank alongside the best Eleventh Dream Day has done. I won’t call it a comeback or a return to form, however, since I’ve never been disappointed with this outfit’s previous recordings or concerts. The band has been remarkably consistent over the years. In any case, Riot Now! is a document of Eleventh Dream Day in fine form. The band honed these songs in a series of gigs last year at the Hideout (I saw two of the four shows), then recorded them quickly in just a couple of days, without doing a lot of takes or overdubs. Not a bad way to capture a rock band’s live energy.
Friday night, Eleventh Dream Day launched into its show with several of the new songs, before going back to some of its oldest records, Prairie School Freakout and Beet. The new record features some terrific backup vocals from drummer Janet Beveridge Bean. That’s nothing new, but these songs blend Bean’s voice into the mix just about perfectly, adding an essential melodic layer. That same exciting blend of voices and noise came through in concert.
As always, Doug McCombs played some exceptional bass lines, both melodic and rhythmic, matching Bean’s driving percussion. And Rick Rizzo let loose with the sort of Crazy Horse guitar soloing we’ve come to expect from him. Rizzo pushed and pulled at its guitar as if it were a living animal he was struggling to control. Mark Greenberg played keyboards for most of the show, his chords thickening Eleventh Dream Day’s sound, but on the older songs — ones originally recorded with two guitarists — he switched to bass and McCombs added a second guitar. In both configurations, Eleventh Dream Day lived up to the title of that new album — Riot Now!.
Another one of my favorite local bands, the 1900s, opened the show, playing a nice set of their sparkling ’60s-style pop music, and a cool guitar rave out by Edward Anderson on “Two Ways.” The 1900s aren’t exactly in the same genre as Eleventh Dream Day, but the contrasting styles of these two Chicago bands complemented each other well.
It got as quiet as a church in Lincoln Hall Thursday night (April 21) in the moments in between songs. It wasn’t that the audience wasn’t applauding the mesmerizing, beautiful songs it was hearing from the band Low. Appreciative applause followed each song. But then, as the crowd waited for the band to begin another song, a hush fell over the room. What can you hear in such silence? I heard a deep respect. Fans who wanted to hear every note, who weren’t interested in making chit-chat. Low’s singer-guitarist, Alan Sparhawk, even joked about how quiet the crowd was, but he must be used to getting this sort of reception.
Low’s music demands it. On its early records, Low played music that was almost supernaturally quiet, with a slow, steady beat and whispered words. Over the years, Low has expanded its dynamic range, cranking up the volume and feedback on many of its songs, but there’s still a sense of quiet and a steady purpose behind the music. Low’s new record, C’mon, its first in five years, is outstanding. Recorded in a Duluth church, it captures the lovely vocals of Sparhawk and his wife, drummer Mimi Parker, in all of their choir-like glory.
Thursday’s concert featured many of the songs on the new record, and Lincoln Hall’s acoustics replicated that church atmosphere perfectly. Supplemented by bass and keyboards, Sparhawk and Parker blended their placid voices with subtle, steady rhythms to dramatic effect. Parker calmly stood as she played drums, using just brushes and mallets, no hard-tipped drumsticks, on a minimal kit: just two cymbals, a snare and a tom. Even when the music is in a low-key passage, Sparhawk had an intense look about him, tilting his head this way and that, squinting his eyes and scrunching up his face.
Of course, the concert also featured some of Low’s older songs, and those sounded wonderful as well. The concert concluded with a moving, progressively louder performance of “When I Go Deaf,” from the 2005 record The Great Destroyer — a song that faces the idea of losing the ability to hear songs with an oddly resigned attitude of acceptance. “When I go deaf/I won’t even mind/Yeah, I’ll be all right/I’ll be just fine…” The concept of not being able to hear music like the songs Low played Thursday night make is almost too sad to contemplate, however.
SET LIST:
Plus the encore: Murderer / Canada / Violent Past / When I Go Deaf
The opening act, Gaberdine, performed a nice set of moody folk-rock songs accented with cello and trumpet. A good match with Low, although more reminiscent of bands such as the Low Anthem and Bowerbirds www.myspace.com/gaberdine
To get an idea of how prolific the Acid Mothers Temple musical collective is, all you had to do was take a look at the merch table Wednesday night (April 6) at the Empty Bottle. The musicians sat behind a table covered with dozens of different CDs… and even that impressive display was far from complete. In fact, the band wasn’t even selling most of the Acid Mothers Temple albums that I own, including last year’s intriguingly experimental and atmospheric release, In A to Infinity. It’s hard to keep track of all the recordings this group puts out under its various incarnations.
On this tour, the band is calling itself Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso U.F.O., which is the longest-running and most famous version of AMT. Its latest record — and one that dominated Wednesday’s performance — is Pink Lady Lemonade — You’re From Outer Space, which is apparently some sort of sequel or makeover of a 2008 album of the same name by a different version of the band, Acid Mothers Temple & the Cosmic Inferno. Huh? Confused yet?
Beyond all the confusing nomenclature and baffling discography problems, Acid Mothers Temple stands out as a bunch of musicians who love to jam out. And that’s precisely what they did at the Bottle, with the four-musician lineup bending its tunes more toward the Jimi Hendrix guitar-rock end of the spectrum than usual. There were a few moments of needless goofing around, but for the most part, AMT bore down and dug into its epic songs, including the four-part, album-length “Pink Lady Lemonade.” The concert’s climax — before the encore — ended with one of the guitars hanging from the ceiling.
As far as I could tell, the members of Acid Mothers Temple made no reference Wednesday night to the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear troubles back in their homeland, it was hard not to think about it while watching these Japanese musicians. One of the concert’s most impressive and moving moments came when the band stopping playing its instruments for a few minutes and chanted a cappella. Like most of the audience, I had no idea what they were singing, but it felt like the voices were commanding: Stop what you’re doing and listen to this.
The Skull Defekts, a hard-edged band from Sweden, rocked the Hideout Thursday night (March 31), with some key assistance from Daniel Higgs, a veteran vocalist better known for his work with the band Lungfish. Higgs sings on the new Skull Defekts album, Peer Amid, which came out in February on Thrill Jockey. He looks and sounds like a full-fledged member of the band — a frontman, in fact. With his gray beard, Higgs resembled an Old Testament character or a crew member of an old whaling vessel as he commanded the stage Thursday with his unrestrained vocals. The rest of Skull Defekts — two drummers and two guitarists — never let up with their jagged punk-garage riffs. At one point, Higgs asked the audience, “Do any of you have skull defects?” When someone replied, “Yes,” a member of the band said, “Excellent.” (I’m paraphrasing from memory here.)
The evening started out with a couple of other Thrill Jockey bands, playing drone music — an interesting contrast to the Skull Defekts. Mountains created a beautiful, shimmering wall of sound. Zomes’ simple chords on a dinky ’80s-era keyboard seemed too simple, however. Mountains Zomes
I was unaware of the Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Emily Lacy until Jessica Hopper interviewed her for the Chicago Reader. The prolific Lacy has released some 15 mostly homemade albums, including last year’s Country Singer, a haunting collection of simply recorded and plaintively sung acoustic folk songs.
Lacy performed some of those songs as well as more experimental ones using looping pedals in a free concert Tuesday (March 29) at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, part of the same “Face the Strange” series of shows inside Puck’s Cafe that featured Disappears last week. The music was drenched in too much reverb, and Lacy’s toying around with the looping pedal to build choruses of her own voice didn’t always work. I would have preferred a concert that captured the quiet, direct sound of the Country Singer album, but Lacy’s striking voice and songs managed to pierce all of that unnecessary audio haze.
Robbie Fulks took a break from his ongoing, possibly never-ending series of Monday-night concerts at the Hideout this month. Kelly Hogan and Scott Ligon took over the spot in March. This Monday (March 28), they wrapped up their monthlong series of performances with a wonderful, intimate concert, featuring some of the songs Hogan plans to include on a new album.
Yes, a new Kelly Hogan album! It’s been way too long since the last one. And Hogan, who’s always been more of a song interpreter than a songwriter, is getting help from some great musical friends. Hogan and Ligon played several songs — some of them for the first time — that other songwriters gave her for possible inclusion on the new record: “Open Mind” by Jeff Tweedy, “I Like to Keep Myself in Pain” by Robyn Hitchcock, “Haunted” by Jon Langford, “Daddy’s Little Girl” by M. Ward, “We Can’t Have Nice Things” by Andrew Bird (with words by Jack Pendarvis) and “The Green Willow Valley” by the Handsome Family.
The set also included covers of songs by Les Paul and Mary Ford, the Louvin Brothers, the Magnetic Fields, Robbie Fulks, Catherine Irwin, the Everly Brothers, Vic Chesnutt, the Free Design and the Monkees. Scott Ligon played a new song he co-wrote with Terry Adams of NRBQ and his brother Chris Ligon’s hilarious scatological ditty “Poop Ghost.” And there was a wonderful rendition of Glenn Campbell’s old hit “Wichita Lineman.”
Hogan said Ligon is her “enabler,” helping her and encouraging her to make the new record. If the album captures the beautiful sound of their live performance, it will be a keeper.
UPDATE: Here’s some more info on the songs from Ms. Hogan herself. She tells me: “The Catherine Irwin song ‘Dusty Groove’ is also for the record, as is the Mag Fields ‘Plant White Roses’ and Vic Chesnutt’s amazing song ‘Ways of This World’ and Fulks’ awesomely creepy ‘Whenever You’re Out of My Sight.’ I think we did ten of the twelve album songs last night (didn’t get to the Edith Frost and John Wesley Harding ones — dang! we’ve played those every one of the other Mondays though…) I’ll be back in Chicago doing overdubs this summer and hope to squeeze in a few H/O shows then too.”
Few rock bands have ever crafted and performed instrumental music with the same power and majesty as the Montreal ensemble Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Nine years after releasing its most recent album and several years since its last tour, GY!BE is playing concerts once again, including three sold-out shows in Chicago — Saturday (March 26) and Sunday (March 27) at Metro, and one more, tonight at the Vic.
The term “orchestral rock” usually refers to bands sweetening their pop sound with the lush sounds of a string section; that’s not what GY!BE does, but if any rock band deserves to be called an orchestra, this one does. When the group reaches the dramatic climax of one of its compositions, it sounds like a cross behind a noisy rock band playing at full-on, feedback-drenched intensity (think Sonic Youth) crossed with dozens of violinists, cellists and trumpeters performing a classical score (think Mahler). Actually, there were just eight musicians onstage Saturday and Sunday at Metro making those thunderous chords. As rock bands go, that’s a big lineup, but GY!BE often sounds bigger than that number would suggest.
The eight musicians — three guitarists, two percussionists, one violinist and two bassists (one electric and one upright) — said barely a word to the audience over the course of the last two nights, concentrating intently on their dark, brooding and apocalyptic music. There weren’t many moments of obvious virtuosity. These players are more interested in blending its instrumental voices together than showing off as individuals.
As they played in near darkness, four film projectors sent flickers onto the screen behind them — visual poetry that matched the music, with images of garbage dumps, birds in flight, medieval churches and fire — including the disturbing image of motion pictures melting in the projector. (It seems appropriate that Wikipedia lists film projector Karl Lemieux as a member of GY!BE, bringing the total lineup to nine.)
The visual accompaniment added to the sense that these “songs” (if that’s even the right word) tell stories, despite the lack of lyrics. And no singing was necessary to convey emotion, either. It was music capable of raising goosebumps.
A recording of Saturday’s concert is posted on archive.org. GY!BE set lists can be difficult to decipher, given all of the band’s multiple-part compositions and its alternate names for songs, but this appears to be what the group played Saturday: Hope Drone / Storm (Lift Yr. Skinny Fists, Like Antennas to Heaven/Gathering Storm/Il Pleut à Mourir + Clatters Like Worry) / Monheim (Murray Ostril: “…They Don’t Sleep Anymore on the Beach…”/Monheim) / Albanian / Dead Metheny… / Floyd (Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls) / Gorecki (Moya) / Blaise Bailey Finnegan III
Sunday’s concert featured some of the same pieces, as well as three other songs: 12-18-99 (a variation or alternate name for 09-15-00?) / World Police and Friendly Fire / The Sad Mafioso.
Papercuts finished their concert at Schubas Wednesday night just early enough for me to head over to the Empty Bottle for another great show — the New York-based band White Hills, who released an excellent self-titled record of hard rock, space jams and experimental drones last year, making all of those sounds fit together with perfect musical logic and some relentless riffs. The band has a double LP concept album, H-P1, coming out June 21 on Thrill Jockey, “telling the story of a corrupt government that is run like and owned by corporations,” according to a press release, which also compares White Hills with Hawkwind. I’ve just started listening to the new record, and I can tell I’m really going to like it.
In concert, White Hills didn’t play much of its droning, instrumental music — just a few choice interludes of oscillating feedback. The rest of the show was all-out rock. Guitarist-singer Dave W. was wearing makeup that made him look like an outcast from Kiss or an Alice Cooper tribute act, and he let loose with the sort of hair-flailing guitar solos that the music demanded. The bassist who calls herself Ego Sensation was decked out in red, showing a lot of leg as she pounded away on those low notes that give White Hills’ songs some of their dark psychedelic flavor. This is a band not to be missed. www.myspace.com/whitehills www.thrilljockey.com/artists/?id=12183
The 2007 album by Papercuts, Can’t Go Back, is one of those records I keep going back to — a collection of catchy songs bathed in a sound reminiscent of ’60s psychedelia… or is it more like the ’80s revival of ’60s psychedelia? Something about Papercuts reminds me of bands from that era like the Rain Parade.
Papercuts’ fourth album, Fading Parade, is out now on Sub Pop. It hasn’t clicked me with yet the way Can’t Go Back did — it may take more listens for these tunes to worm their way into my mind — but it does sound quite lovely. The band played its new and old songs Wednesday night (March 23) at Schubas, casting a spell with dreamy melodies, with singer-songwriter Jason Robert Quever’s vulnerable vocals pointing the way. Viewed from one angle, Papercuts’ music might seem retro, but I prefer to think of it as timeless. www.myspace.com/thepapercuts www.subpop.com/artists/papercuts
The apt opening act Wednesday was Still Corners, an English band with a cool psych-pop sound. The optical illusions and films projected on the screen behind Still Corners resembled the visual shows used by bands such as Caribou and Broadcast, and the sound was enthralling. www.myspace.com/stillcorners
Showing his usual self-deprecating sense of humor, Canadian singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith expressed surprise last night (March 22) that one of his new songs, “Believe It When I See It,” is in heavy rotation on BBC Radio 2. It’s the closest thing he’s had to a hit in years, which, as he noted, might be a sign of the apocalypse foretold by Nostradamus. Sexsmith was playing at Schubas Tuesday, touring behind yet another solid album filled with wistful and well-crafted pop songs, “Long Player Late Bloomer.” So what if he hasn’t had any real hits? His melodies are masterful, and his performances feel sincere.
Tuesday night, Sexsmith and his band of longtime backing musicians played quite a few of the songs from the new album — “along with the hits you grew up with,” he joked. An interlude of quieter tunes was especially nice. For the encore, Sexsmith played three of his most memorable older songs, “Lebanon Tennessee,” “Tell Me Again” and “Secret Heart.” (I didn’t make any requests, but if I had, I would’ve loved to hear his gem, “Riverbed.”) www.ronsexsmith.com
Opening act Caitlin Rose played a good set of country-tinged folk rock, displaying some strong vocals. www.myspace.com/caitlinrosesongs
The Chicago band Disappears’ new drummer — possibly just a temporary fill-in — is Steve Shelley, more famous for his work with Sonic Youth. Shelley’s been spending a fair amount of time playing gigs in Chicago over the last year or so, and there he was on Tuesday evening (March 22), when the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago hosted a free show by Disappears. Making the gig extra special was the addition of the two musicians who make up the Chicago band White/Light, Matt Clark and Jeremy Lemos. They’re the curators of this “Face the Strange” series of free concerts at the MCA, and for this show, they sat in with the band, adding a couple of extra layers of humming noise to the proceedings. Disappears easily shifted between those experimental stretches of elongated chords into crunchier rock songs with vocals, and Shelley helped to tie it altogether without ever getting flashy on the drums. Only complaint: The band played too short, clocking in at barely more than half an hour. More music, please! http://disappearsdisappears.blogspot.com/
It sounds like an unlikely pairing: Chicago alt-country singer-songwriter-guitarist-raconteur Robbie Fulks playing the music of Michael Jackson. But then again, Fulks has wide-ranging musical tastes, judging from all the various stuff he’s covered in his Monday-night shows at the Hideout. So why not Michael Jackson? “Billie Jean” has been a staple of Fulks’ live shows for a while, and last year Fulks released a full album of Jackson covers, Happy. On Friday night (March 18), he played those songs — plus some additional Jackson and Jackson 5 tunes — at Lincoln Hall.
Happy is essentially a novelty record — and not one of my favorite Fulks albums — but he clearly put a lot of work into arranging Jackson’s songs for the idiom of a country band. And the music made for a fun, lively concert featuring DayGlo sets, a few bits of theater, preposterous pajama-like costumes, children, the mandolin playing of Don Stiernberg, a rat puppet, and vocals from the always wonderful Nora O’Connor. It was a silly, festive, strange pageant. And then after all of the Jackson music, Fulks and his band played a mini-concert of their own songs. As he does just about every Monday night at the Hideout (although not in March, when Kelly Hogan and Scott Ligon are filling in), Fulks showed what a great all-around entertainer he is.
The Parting Gifts is a band that brings together Greg Cartwright — the singer-songwriter-guitarist who’s been the guiding light of the Reigning Sound and played in the Oblivians before that — with Lindsay “Coco” Hames, lead singer of the Ettes. The new band doesn’t sound all that much different from the Reigning Sound, but that’s not a bad thing. Under both names, Cartwright produces a seemingly endless string of concise, melodic tunes influenced by ’60s garage rock. The difference with the Parting Gifts is that the lead vocals switch back and forth between Cartwright and Coco, who adds a girl group vibe. (That’s not surprising, considering that Cartwright also did a record with Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las.)
Playing Friday at the Empty Bottle, the Parting Gifts made a strong case for the songs on their 2010 debut record, Strychnine Dandelions. As the set began, the band quickly buzzed through one tight, catchy rock song after another. Cartwright plays without a lot of fuss, keeping his guitar solos short and to the point. Coco’s a bit more lively, and her vocals were a key ingredient in the fun mix of sounds. The set lagged a bit at the end, as the band spent a little too much time between songs figuring out what to play, but it stayed fun whenever the music was going. It was the sort of music that made you want to shake a tambourine.
After avidly following the Drive-By Truckers through several great albums and something like seven concerts, I fell a bit out of touch with the group over the past few years. I barely paid attention to the Southern rock group’s 2010 album The Big To-Do, and I hadn’t seen them live since they co-headlined with the Hold Steady back in 2008. (Photos.)
So Saturday night’s concert at the Vic felt like getting reacquainted with some old friends. The latest album by the DBTs, Go-Go Boots, is a strong one, a whole new batch of memorable songs by the group’s two main singer-songwriter-guitarists, Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, with subtle melodic hooks and characters worthy of good fiction. It’s clear now that the departure of the band’s other voice, Jason Isbell, a few years ago hasn’t slowed down this crew one bit.
The prolific band has a lot of material to choose from, and Saturday night’s show leaned heavily on the recent songs, at least during its first half. The band even brought out some burlesque dancers to illustrate the song “Go-Go Boots.” As always, Hood grinned a lot as he sang or stomped around with his guitar, looking like he was having the time of his life. He’s one of those musicians who conveys a honest exuberance in every performance. Cooley’s more laconic, not as much of a showman, and there’s a laid-back, conversational style to his vocals. It’s the juxtaposition of those voices that makes the DBTs such a special outfit. Bassist Shonna Tucker sings a few songs, too, and she sounded more confident than she did on her original contributions, adding a nice female counterpoint to the guys. Filled out by Brad Morgan, John Neff and Jay Gonzalez, the Drive-By Truckers are a tight group that knows how to play buzz-saw guitar riffs as well as song with more of a soulful swing.
They went deeper into their catalog during the second half of the nearly 2 1/2-hour show, playing older songs such as “Shut Up and Get On the Plane,” “Let There Be Rock,” “Hell No I Ain’t Happy,” “72 (This Highway’s Mean)” and “The Living Bubba.” In the encore, Kelly Hogan came out and sang lead vocals on a smooth cover of the Staple Singers/Curtis Mayfield song, “Let’s Do It Again.” The evening ended with another track from the classic double-album Southern Rock Opera, “Angels and Fuselage,” with Hood singing the pleading chorus: “I’m scared shitless…” The band left the stage one by one, until drummer Brad Morgan was the only one left. The backdrop was a couple of banners designed to look like stained-glass windows containing the ominous bird-like monster that’s become the band’s symbol. Morgan’s drum kit had an extra bass drum sitting next to him, decorated with the words “Go-Go Boots” in the shape of a cross, and making the stage appear like some dark chapel of Southern rock. Morgan didn’t use that bass drum much during the show, but in the final seconds, he reached over toward it with his mallet and thumped out the last, dramatic beats of the night.
Earlier this week, I reported about the Chicago band the Singleman Affair — led by Daniel Schneider — on WBEZ’s Eight Forty-Eight program. (Hear it here.) After seeing the Singleman Affair perform several times over the past few years, it’s a delight to hear the group’s second album, Silhouettes at Dawn, at long last. It’s a beautiful record, with orchestral flourishes fleshing out Schneider’s smartly composed and passionately performed folk rock. The Singleman Affair celebrated the release of this record, the band’s second, with a grand show Friday night (Feb. 11) at the Hideout, featuring an expanded, seven-piece lineup. Schneider looked lost in the music as he rocked out on his acoustic guitar, and the rest of the band was with him every step of the way.
The opening act Friday was also notable — singer-songwriter Angel Olsen, who’s been seen lately touring with Bonnie “Prince” Billy. Her band last night included another regular with Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Emmett Kelly, on bass. Her gothic country-folk-rock songs sounded strong. Watch for a new Angel Olsen record next month. www.myspace.com/ghostgrocersings
The current issue of the Chicago Reader includes photos I took at the highly unusual Yo La Tengo concert Feb. 4 at Metro in Chicago. The venerable indie-rock band, which somehow manages to continue attract young audiences even as its members get older, has been spinning a game-show-style wheel at the start of every show this tour, determining the theme of the concert’s first half. An audience member spun the wheel at Metro, and it landed on “Spinner’s Choice.” Much to the consternation of some crowd members, the guy picked “Sitcom Theater” instead of, say, a full set of music by side project Dump or songs that start with the letter “S.”
And so, what happened next was the members of Yo La Tengo and their roadies holding scripts onstage and reading the Chinese restaurant episode of “Seinfeld.” I found this to be pretty amusing. Ira Kaplan does a great Jerry Seinfeld. (Video.) If nothing else, it was a strange spectacle to behold. Some people in the audience clearly weren’t happy, however, and as the musicians neared the end of the script, some of them began clapping impatiently, demanding some music. The band took it all in stride, which made it seem even more like some perverse “irritate the audience” stunt of the sort Andy Kaufman might’ve pulled off.
Then came an intermission — which did go longer than necessary — and a regular Yo La Tengo concert, if there is such a thing. It was a wide-ranging set of old and recent songs, including everything from mellow folkie and jazzy ballads to loud rockers and experimental improvisation. Somehow, all of it sounds like Yo La Tengo.
The opening act was solo guitarist William Tyler, who has played in the past with Lambchop. He was quite impressive on acoustic and electric guitars, showing a mastery of quiet, delicate songs as well as stronger blasts of noise.
Here, belatedly, are my choices for the best films of 2010. Even now, I feel like I’m not quite ready to decide on my list, since there are several significant, critically praised films I haven’t had a chance to see. But like any year-end list, this is just a snapshot of my opinion at the time. And as always, I faced some bedeviling questions about what qualifies as a 2010 film. I included a few films that played at the Chicago International Film Festival but haven’t shown up yet for regular runs in theaters. And I included a couple of films made in 2010 that finally showed up on Chicago screens in January. And I also tossed in The Secret of Kells, which got an Oscar nomination for the best animated feature of 2009 but didn’t show up in Chicago until 2010.
My list is dominated by foreign and independent films, which were simply more authentic and interesting than the bulk of mainstream movies in 2010. The Social Network, True Grit and the flawed but compelling Inception were near misses for me. I could see putting just about any of the films I ranked 11 to 20 in my top 10 — it’s a strong lot, in my opinion.
I edited together clips from the trailers for my top 10 films into the video below:
As I put these scenes together, it struck me just how violent and unsettling most of these films are — with Another Year and The Secret of Kells being notable exceptions. I didn’t set out to pick films with any sort of theme running through them, but many of these films deftly explore the cruelty that people inflict on one another all too often.
1. DOGTOOTH (Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, Greece)
Watch it if you dare. This is not an easy film to stomach, but it’s a brilliant depiction of how a closed society can go horribly awry. The society in question here is just one family, with a father who’s determined to shield his children from the outside world — twisting their sense of what’s real and what’s moral. The family unit comes to resemble a religious cult or totalitarian state in miniature. All of this unfolds with dark humor and painful violence. When this Greek film played last March during the Gene Siskel Film Center’s European Union Festival (one of the essential cinematic events each year in Chicago), the sense of shock was palpable in the room. As the closing credits appeared on the screen, a man in the back of the room said, “No! No! No!” — as if he couldn’t take what he had just seen. I turned around and saw a woman in the room behind him, sitting there with her mouth agape — looking a bit like one of those stunned audience members in The Producers witnessing “Springtime for Hitler.” It’s rare to see a film that shocks the system like this one. (Warning: Even the trailer, posted below, is disturbing.) FILM WEBSITE
2. WINTER’S BONE (Debra Granik, U.S.)
The best American film of 2010 presented a believable picture of backwoods ravaged by poverty and drugs. Jennifer Lawrence is great as the fierce young woman at the center of this drama, and the rest of the cast is strong, too. FILM WEBSITE
3. MY JOY (Sergei Loznitsa, Russia)
This odd journey through the Russian countryside may seem to meander, but it’s actually following a logical path toward its tragic conclusion. The film, which screened at the Chicago International Film Festival, make a radical break from formulaic screenwriting by going off on surprisingly long tangents — flashbacks to historical events involving some of the characters and places we see in the present day. And the central character goes through a stunning change halfway through the film. It unreels without any obvious explanation, sometimes feeling a bit like the films of the great Soviet-era director Andrei Tarkovsky. My Joy is likely to baffle or bore some viewers, but if you immerse yourself in its world, it’s quite compelling. FILM WEBSITE
4. MARWENCOL (Jeff Malmberg, U.S.)
A remarkable documentary about Mark Hogancamp, a man recovering from head injuries who constructs a miniature world with dolls — becoming an artist in the process. It’s a moving portrait of someone who doesn’t quite know how to relate to other people in the ways our society considers to be “normal.” FILM WEBSITE
5. CARLOS (Olivier Assayas, France)
See the long version — a five-hour epic biography of one of the most notorious terrorists in modern history. While the dramatic film does not exactly make him a sympathetic figure, it does portray him as human — an egotistical man hungry for his own strange sort of celebrity. The long version of the film never lags, making a strong argument for the notion that some stories deserve to be told on the screen at greater length. FILM WEBSITE
6. ANOTHER YEAR (Mike Leigh, U.K.)
Mike Leigh is quite simply one of the greatest filmmakers of the past few decades, capturing the rhythms and complexity of real life on the screen time and again, using his unique improvisational process of developing stories and characters in collaboration with his actors. Another Year is a subtle film, and at first glance, it may seem understated or even uneventful. But like the best of Leigh’s work, it feels unforced, almost like a documentary showing real people in their everyday lives. As in his last film, Happy-Go-Lucky, Leigh looks at the question of why some people seem to be naturally sunny while others seem cursed with unhappiness — but this time, it’s a more sophisticated study of the topic, with a wider range of characters. The whole cast is excellent, and the film’s emotional undercurrents sneak up on you. FILM WEBSITE
7. TUESDAY, AFTER CHRISTMAS (Radu Muntean, Romania)
This Romanian film about a husband committing adultery — and wrecking what seems like a perfectly fine marriage — feels honest. It doesn’t make any excuses for the man’s behavior, and it vividly shows the consequences of his action. When this film screened at the Chicago International Film Festival with director Radu Muntean in attendance, it sparked angry questions from audience members (mostly from women): Why would this man do something like that? As in real life, there was no easy answer. FILM WEBSITE
8. THE SECRET OF KELLS (Thom Moore, Ireland)
An amazingly beautiful animated film that draws on old Celtic books and artwork for its singular look. The screen practically bursts with colors and ornamental patterns, as the film tells a charming story inspired by Irish history. FILM WEBSITE
9. WHITE MATERIAL (Claire Denis, France)
Like other films by the great French director Claire Denis, this one doesn’t tell its story in a straight line. It’s a mystery, a montage of scenes flowing like a fever dream, pieces for us to assemble. One of the great actresses of our time, Isabelle Huppert, plays another one of her headstrong anti-heroines, this time in an African countryside exploding with violence. A powerful meditation on post-colonial conflict. FILM WEBSITE
10. BLUEBEARD (Catherine Breillat, France)
That macabre fairy tale concerning the king who has a penchant for killing his wives becomes an oddly compelling feminist fable in the hands of Catherine Breillat. It plays with the sort of understated dialogue that distinguished the films of Robert Bresson, along with a wicked sense of humor. FILM WEBSITE
11. The Social Network (David Fincher, U.S.)
12. Inside Job (Charles Ferguson, U.S.)
13. True Grit (Joel and Ethan Coen, U.S.)
14. Inception (Christopher Nolan, U.S.)
15. The Illusionist (Sylvain Chomet, France)
16. Greenberg (Noah Baumbach, U.S.)
17. A Prophet (Jacques Audiard, France)
18. Everyone Else (Maren Ade, Germany)
19. The Fighter (David O. Russell, U.S.)
20. Please Give (Nicole Holofcenter, U.S.)
RUNNERS-UP:
Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich, U.S.)
The King’s Speech (Tom Hooper, U.K.)
A Somewhat Gentle Man (Hans Petter Moland, Norway)
Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, U.S.)
The Kids Are All Right (Lisa Cholodenko, U.S.)
Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)
Skeletons (Nick Whitfield, U.K.)
Bunny and the Bull (Paul King, U.K.)
The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski)
King’s Road (Valdis Óskarsdóttir, Iceland)
Erratum (Marek Lechki, Poland)
Lebanon (Samuel Maoz, Israel)
The crowd was unusually diverse Monday night (Jan. 31) during the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s latest MusicNow concert at the Harris Theater — at least in terms of age and sensibility. These concerts tend to attract classical music fans — largely middle-aged and older people of the sort who have CSO season subscriptions — as well as younger audience members more interested in indie rock and experimental music. Of course, some of us are interested in all of these sorts of music. Monday’s concert featured a rare appearance by the cult German electronic duo Mouse on Mars, so it drew an even bigger contingent of the young folks than usual.
This made for some interesting people watching (and eavesdropping). An older woman sitting behind me — definitely a CSO subscriber type — was flipping through her concert program as she noticed an ad for a fundraising party called “Remix I: fusion.” She asked (I’m paraphrasing here), “Remix? What does that mean? I keep hearing that word but I have no idea what it means.” I think it’s safe to say “remix” is a regular part of the vocabulary for many of the younger electronica fans who were in attendance.
And then, when Mouse on Mars performed the world premiere of a composition for orchestral ensemble, it was interrupted a few times by smatterings of uncertain applause. I’m guessing the CSO regulars in attendance knew that it’s classical-concert protocol to wait until the entire piece is over and the conductor relaxes before clapping. Rock fans, on the other hand, are used to clapping whenever the music stops.
How you felt about the concert probably depended on your expectations. I suspect some Mouse on Mars fans would’ve liked to hear some music from their albums rather than focusing strictly on the new piece skik field. And what did the classical audience make of it? Perhaps critic Alan Artner was speaking for that part of the crowd in his review for the Chicago Tribune. As a rock-concert regular, I didn’t think twice about the way the show was staged, but Artner thought the smoke machines were “ridiculous” and the colored lighting was “unnecessary.”
For my part, I’m not deeply stepped in the music of Mouse on Mars, although I like what I’ve heard by the duo, which consists of Andi Toma and Jan St. Werner. I was eager to hear this collaboration. Like most pieces of music you hear in concert for the first time, it’s difficult to judge in terms of whether it’s a composition that will stand the test of repeated listens, but it was an intriguing, sometimes enthralling blend of Mouse on Mars’ glitchy electronic washes and beats with smartly arranged parts for strings and wind instruments.
The performance included parts 1, 2 and 11 of the new composition. What happened to the other parts? No clue. Maybe those are still being written. And it was hard to tell where one movement began and another ended, since there were more than two pauses. In one striking passage, the laptops, horns and strings joined together in a dissonant buzz that sounded like the Tibetan drones Philip Glass used on his Kundun soundtrack. At other moments, the music evoked styles ranging from Brazilian Tropicalia to the eerie, atonal atmospheres of Gyorgi Ligetti. Those pieces didn’t always fit together seamlessly, but the performance (conducted by André de Ridder) had the invigorating feeling of creative musicians trying out a new set of toys.
The most memorable part may have been when the string players moved their bows up and down without touching their instruments, making a rhythmic swishing. A few audience members giggled at the audacious musical gesture.
The first part of the concert was devoted to a performance of Argentine composer Martin Matalon’s 1996 piece Las siete vidas de un gato, which was conceived as a new soundtrack for the classic Luis Buñuel-Salvador Dali surrealist film Un Chien Andalou. The film, including that famous image of an eyeball being sliced, was projected during the performance. Matalon’s score was jaunty, zipping along at times like a slightly warped tango. A good piece of music, although it may try too hard to make this disturbing and darkly humorous film seem zany. The film had a stronger impact for me — a stranger juxtaposition of image and music — when I’ve seen it in the past with the recordings that Buñuel chose for it: excerpts from Richard Wagner’s “Liebestod,” the concert version of the finale to his opera “Tristan und Isolde,” and a recording of the continental tango “Olé guapa.”
One album that just barely missed my top 10 for 2010 was The Outsiders Are Back by Kings Go Forth, a very old-school-sounding soul band from Milwaukee. I saw Kings Go Forth for the first time last Friday (Jan. 21) at the Double Door, and the show proved that last year’s wonderful record is no fluke. In concert, the music sounded very close to the studio versions — not a note-for-note duplication by any stretch of the imagination, but a very impressive performance of songs that smartly use horns, guitar, bass, drums, keyboard and lots of vocals to make the sort of grooves and riffs that made 1960s and early ’70s Motown, soul, funk and R&B records so memorable.
There was no opening act, other than the DJs of the Soul Summit Free Dance Party, who did a fine job of getting the crowd moving, priming the dance floor for the excitement of Kings Go Forth. A couple of friends overheard some audience members predicting that the band was about to break into “Shout!” Um, sorry, dudes, but this is actually a band that plays original soul music (written by bassist Andy Noble), not the same cover songs you hear other bands doing over and over again. But I can see why someone would make that mistake, because these songs have the makings of classic tunes. I’m eager to hear what Kings Go Forth does next.
Reginald R. Robinson is a brilliant pianist and composer, in a genre that he seems to have almost entirely to himself these days: ragtime. The best way to catch up on this Chicago musician’s work is to buy his compilation Reflections — two CDs and one DVD — from his website, www.reginaldrrobinson.com. You’ll get the discs directly from Robinson himself, with an autograph. Robinson takes the style of ragtime composers who were popular at the turn of the 20th century, most notably Scott Joplin, and devises his own ingenious songs evoking that era.
Last week, Robinson performed with the Chicago Sinfonietta performed in concerts at Chicago Symphony Center (or Orchestra Hall, if you will) and Dominican University. I saw the performance Jan. 17 at Orchestra Hall, and it was quite a joy to see and hear Robinson’s ragtime syncopations mixing with a full orchestra in the piece titled Concerto for a Genius — featuring four of Robinson’s songs arranged for orchestra by Orbert Davis. As a hybrid of classical music and a form of “popular music” (although how “popular” really is ragtime?), it was reminiscent of the jazzy classical works of George Gershwin. Here’s a video of a performance of the concerto’s first part, “Mr. Murphy’s Blues,” in 2008 at the Auditorium Theatre:
If anything, I would’ve liked to hear Robinson’s piano more prominent in the arrangement. After the concerto, Robinson performed a mid-concert encore, playing a rollicking solo piece on the piano. His virtuosity in this little piece was astounding.
The concert by Robinson and Davis was the highlight of the concert’s first half, but it was aptly followed by a lovely performance of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, a concert version of his opera/musical, featuring passionate and impressive singing by Lisa Daltirus, Chauncey Packer and Donnie Ray Albert, plus the massed voices of the Chicago Community Choir. It felt like a classical concert melded with a gospel-song revival session. The concert was on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and so it seemed fitting that it concluded with Chicago Sinfonietta Music Director Paul Freeman leading the singers, musicians and audience in a stirring rendition of “We Shall Overcome.”
(Photo courtesy of Reginald R. Robinson’s website.)
The Tomorrow Never Knows festival was bigger than ever this year. It’s become the first major indie-rock event of the year in Chicago, expanding to three venues: Schubas, Lincoln Hall and now Metro. As it happened, though, the three shows I saw were all at Lincoln Hall. I took photos for the Chicago Reader’s Photo Pit page Jan. 14, 15 and 16.
The best bands I saw were Screaming Females (led by the outlandishly rocking guitar playing of Marissa Paternoster) and the always-lively Handsome Furs (who had a few new songs on their set list). Little Dragon delivered some fun, too, although the dance beat got to be a little monotonous as the show went on. “Super group” Mister Heavenly showed some potential with its songs, but the set felt rather awkward at times. Work on the stage banter, guys. I enjoyed the scrappy sound of the Cloud Nothings. Billygoat screened its own marvelous animated films during a set of mesmerizing instrumental music.
THE DIG TITLE TRACKS SCREAMING FEMALES SCREAMING FEMALES MISTER HEAVENLY MISTER HEAVENLY MISTER HEAVENLY CLOUD NOTHINGS CLOUD NOTHINGS OBERHOFER OBERHOFER JAILL HANDSOME FURS HANDSOME FURS HANDSOME FURS HANDSOME FURS BILLYGOAT ALEX WINSTON LITTLE DRAGON LITTLE DRAGON LITTLE DRAGON LITTLE DRAGON
GRINDERMAN Nov. 22 at the Riviera. Nick Cave was pushing himself up against the crowd, letting the fans in front touch with him their hands as he spouted his funny, vulgar, erudite and/or raunchy lyrics. Grinderman’s albums are almost but not quite non-stop rock, and the show was similar, whipping up even more intensity. Cave let out a few more blood-curdling screams than he does in the studio, and his bandmates sang the call-and-response backup vocals like people yelling for help in an emergency. Read More / Photos
BONNIE “PRINCE” BILLY Sept. 28 at Ronny’s. The new songs were transformed into sprawling, loose-limbed, full-band arrangements. … Will Oldham took the stage and removed his flip-flops, revealing his pink-painted toenails. Oldham’s fingernails had pink nail polish, too, and his eyes were underlined with black makeup. The eyeliner was smeared on the left side of his face, looking like a bruise. As usual, Oldham’s face was covered with bristly hair, including a walrus mustache. As he sang, Oldham often contorted his legs and arms as if he were improvising some yoga moves. … As Oldham writhed and the band filled out the songs with an almost jazzy sense of exploration, it reminded me sometimes of Van Morrison from the Astral Weeks era. Read More / Photos
ROBBIE FULKS RESIDENCY all year long at the Hideout. One of the most delightful things happening in live music in Chicago is the ongoing residency by Robbie Fulks on most Monday nights at the Hideout. As a series, this perhaps deserves a special place outside my top 10 concert list, but let’s give Fulks the kudos he so richly deserves and just say that live music rarely gets better than this. He played 38 dates at the Hideout in 2010, and a fellow fan who’s been keeping track of the set lists tells me he’s played more than 400 different songs over the course of those shows. Fulks doesn’t just do the same sort of set every week. He plays with a revolving set of other musicians and singers and sometimes organizes the shows around themes, such as tributes to Alex Chilton or ’70s country music. I feel like something of a slacker because I made it to only five Fulks Hideout shows. (I saw Fulks perform with Nora O’Connor Feb. 8 and Dec. 27, with the Hoyle Brothers April 5, with Greg Cahill April 26, and with Robbie Gjersoe and Jenny Scheinman Aug. 23.) Fulks is a terrific guitarist, very skilled at acoustic finger picking, the sort of musician who can quickly learn new songs and improvise. He’s also an excellent songwriter, a good singer and one of the funniest, smartest raconteurs around. All of that, plus his great taste in music and musicians, adds up to an experience that’s truly enchanting to witness. The sets I saw with O’Connor were probably my favorites — she’s such a beautiful singer — but the other sets included many highlights, too. At the show with Gjersoe and Scheinman, it was exciting to see the three musicians skillfully finding their way through some songs they clearly hadn’t rehearsed, playing with a sense of improvisatory exploration — and doing it with a light sense of humor about it all. Photos from Feb. 8 / / Photos from April 5
THE NATIONAL Sept. 26 at the Riviera. Lead singer Matt Berninger began the concert closely hugging his microphone, but as the show went on, he became more animated, bouncing his microphone stand like a toy. During instrumental passages, he paced the stage, raising his clenched fists, like someone fighting off voices in his head. Berninger’s dance is awkward, lacking the typical rock-star moves, but it feels authentic. He seems to be expressing the emotion and energy he’s feeling from these songs in the only way he can. … It was thrilling how the National’s songs built to dramatic climaxes … During the final song, “Terrible Love,” Berninger walked out into the audience, singing out in the midst of the crowd’s voices for several minutes. Read More(Note: The photo above is actually from a different National show, their set this summer at Lollapalooza.)
THE ARCADE FIRE Aug. 8 at Lollapalooza in Grant Park. The seven musicians in the Arcade Fire are still swapping instruments and working up a sweat as they pound away with their violins, guitars, keyboards and even a hurdy-gurdy. The songs from the new album The Suburbs, sounded strong, but older songs provided the cathartic climax of the concert, as the audience sang along with “Rebellion (Lies)” and “Wake Up.” It was as if the crowd was defying the lyrics Win Butler had sung earlier in the new song, “Month of May” — “Now, some things are pure and some things are right/But the kids are still standing with their arms folded tight.” These kids were not just standing there with their arms folded tight. Read More / Photos
TITUS ANDRONICUS July 17 at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Union Park. From my review for Signal to Noise magazine: The Bruce Springsteen influence was obvious from the opening seconds of the first song, “A More Perfect Union,” when singer Patrick Stickles yelled out the lyrics: “I never wanted to change the world, but I’m looking for a new New Jersey, because tramps like us, baby, we were born to die!” Guest players on horns and strings gave the songs a sense of grandeur resembling Neutral Milk Hotel, as Stickles and his bandmates flailed around with their guitars every chance they got. An American flag was draped over the front of the keyboard, and the Stars and Stripes dangled from Stickles’ guitar, too. Titus Andronicus is hardly your typical bunch of patriotic flag-wavers, but the band’s lyrics show a deep appreciation of American history and the long struggle to secure our freedoms. Amid the loud, rollicking chords and Stickles’ keening, emotion-drenched vocals, the crowd chanted, “U.S.A.! U.S.A! U.S.A.!” Read More / Photos
JÓNSI April 28 at the Vic. The concert built from a hushed quiet in the early songs to a cathartic burst in the encore, with Jónsi singing in a falsetto that was often angelic and occasionally demonic. The set itself was a masterpiece, with a shifting series of projected images making the stage feel like a cabinet of wonders. Photos
JANELLE MONÁE March 29 at Schubas. She wowed me with her strong voice and her sense of drama. I also noticed some interesting almost orchestral flourishes in the song arrangements. She and her backing musicians came out onto the stage in druid robes for a Spinal Tap-esque entrance, with a fog machine going, and the whole show had an air of spectacle about it, despite being at little ol’ Schubas. Photos
RICCARDO MUTI CONDUCTS THE CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Sept. 19 at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park. It was a great spectacle to see so many thousands of people cramming into the park to see (or at least hear) the debut of the great maestro as the CSO’s new musical director. The fans waved Muti flags as he nimbly led the orchestra through a lovely outdoor concert, making even the most familiar pieces of music (such as the Fantasy-Overture from Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet) sound fresh. Photos
TUNNG Nov. 17 at Schubas. The spirited, sing-along and dance-around-like-a-fool side of Tunng was on full display when the group came to Chicago for the first time in three years. Given Tunng’s reputation as something of a folk-rock group, who would’ve expected Mike Lindsay to don a pair of goofy glasses that would’ve been appropriate for Bootsy Collins? … This was quite a joyful musical affair. Read More + Photos
RUNNERS-UP
SYL JOHNSON Nov. 27 at the Old Town School of Folk Music.
PHOSPHORESCENT Aug. 5 at the Empty Bottle
LCD SOUNDSYSTEM July 17 at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Union Park
LIGHTNING BOLT July 18 at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Union Park
JUSTIN TOWNES EARLE Sept. 18 at Lincoln Hall
SUPERCHUNK June 20 at the Taste of Randolph Street
FANFARLO April 7 at Lincoln Hall
THE TALLEST MAN ON EARTH May 28 at Lincoln Hall
THEE SILVER MT. ZION MEMORIAL ORCHESTRA May 27 at Schubas
CARIBOU July 12 at Millennium Park
IGGY & THE STOOGES Aug. 29 at the Riviera Theatre
CONDO FUCKS and ELEVENTH DREAM DAY May 16 at the Hideout
JENS LEKMAN Jan. 3 at the Viaduct Theater
ANDREW BIRD Dec. 16 at the 4th Presbyterian Church
THE FLAT FIVE Dec. 10 at the Hideout
GUIDED BY VOICES Oct. 13 at the Riviera
THEE OH SEES Sept. 16 at Lincoln Hall
From the opening notes to the very end, High Violet continually strikes that tricky balance that the National is known for — somehow sounding dazed and tense at the same time. The National has made some great records before, particularly 2007’s Boxer, but this one feels like an almost perfect distillation of its tightly wound, tamped-down anthems. Unsettling phobias run through the lyrics about ghosts, zombies, circus geeks and swarms of bees, but the majestic music feels more like a tonic to scare off the fear.
San Francisco singer-songwriter and all-round musical genius Kelley Stoltz has made a string of top-notch records that hearken back to the golden era of the ’60s, playing most of the instruments himself. His latest record continues in that vein, but it leans more toward the Kinks and the Troggs, with the rawer sounds of ’60s garage rock. The compositions are still beautiful, with smart chord changes and guitar and bass lines that accomplish so much in a few simple turns, but it’s all a bit rougher around the edges. There’s one cover, a catchy take on an obscure 1965 British single, “Baby I’ve Got News For You,” by Big Boy Pete — and it’s a terrific match with Stoltz’s originals.
Will Oldham, who most often calls himself Bonnie “Prince” Billy these days, is one highly prolific singer-songwriter, with a complex, hard-to-track discography. He’s been on something of a roll with his last several recordings, and the latest is one of his best yet, a collaboration with the Cairo Gang, otherwise known as Emmett Kelly, a talented Chicago musician with a sensitive approach to playing the guitar. When the two of them play live together (something that really ought to be seen), you can feel how they’re feeding off one another. And that comes through on this strong set of 10 mostly acoustic songs. In a review earlier this year for Signal to Noise magazine, I wrote: Oldham has never sung better, gently catching all the subtle nuances of his melodies. His lyrics read like poetry on the page, but somehow even his archaic turns of phrase feel natural when he sings them. … Oldham dares to let his mind take him to places other songwriters avoid. On the last track, the elegiac “Kids,” he sings from the perspective of an aging man who’s afraid of moving, fearful of losing his ability to sing. If anything, Oldham sounds more fearless than ever. The two Bonnie “Prince” Billy shows I saw Chicago this fall were great, featuring Kelly and a full band. But this earlier, apparently unamplified duo concert by Oldhan and Kelly — captured on amateur video at Monster Island Basement in Brooklyn — looks even more amazing. The clip below begins in the middle of one song, “With Cornstalks or Among Them,” and continues with the song, “The Sounds Are Always Begging.”
Arvo Pärt is one of the great living composers, and this year ECM released a recording of the first symphony he’s written in 37 years. The symphony is not really the form of music he’s known for, and this is not a typical symphony. Although Pärt has a full orchestra at his disposal — the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen in 2009 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall — the symphony often sounds more like a piece of chamber music. It opens with serenity and stillness, like glimmers of light blinking in a night sky. But the same formulas that bind together the stars take on another, more menacing aspect as the symphony unravels over the course of three movements, arriving at a strangely tense and unresolved climax — unresolved except for the slight, almost passing resonance of a bell ringing at the very end. Like much of Pärt’s music, it feels mystical and soulful. (Here is a short essay I wrote about Pärt for a feature on classical music’s most inspiring people in the summer 2010 issue of Listen magazine.)
The 1900s have been one of Chicago’s best bands over the past few years, and they emerged from some apparent turmoil with a slightly reconfigured lineup on this new record —sounding as strong as ever. The music isn’t quite as lushly orchestrated as it was on their superb 2007 album Cold and Kind, but the melodies are just as inventive, the words are great pop-song poetry, and the vocals by the trio of lead singers have never been so lovely. Another addictive collection of sweet songs with a bittersweet tinge.
Phosphorescent — which is essentially one guy, singer Matthew Houck, plus whatever musicians he assembles — has made good records in the past, but he/they seem to have found a new sense of purpose after doing a Willie Nelson tribute record in 2009. The result is the year’s best country record — or should we say alt-country? Country-rock? Forget all those labels. These are just great songs from top to bottom, with arrangements reminiscent of classic, old-time country and western.
No doubt, the Sadies are one of the most talented guitar bands you’ll ever see in concert. Using barely any effects pedals, they’ll show you how guitar, bass and drums are played by people who really, really know how to do it — but they also put that virtuosity to the service of the songs they’re playing, rather than simply showing off. And over their past few records, they’ve also matured into strong songwriters. The Sadies’ previous album, New Seasons, was my favorite of 2007. The new one ranks a notch below that one, but it’s a nearly unassailable bunch of tightly arranged roots-rock tunes, concluding with an incredible overture of sorts — the accurately named track “10 More Songs,” which crams a whole album’s worth of majestic guitar riffs into 4 minutes and 15 seconds.
The Tallest Man on Earth — the stage name for Sweden’s Kristian Matsson — is a very traditional, acoustic-guitar-picking folk-rock singer-songwriter. It’s an old genre, but it’s far from exhausted, and Matsson is doing it as well as just about anyone right now. His dexterity on the guitar is impressive, and he’s surprisingly lively in concert, rarely standing still for more than a minute or two. But he’s mostly worth watching because of his gift for memorable melodies and words.
It was hard not to wonder if the first Grinderman record would turn out to be a one-off stunt by Nick Cave. He recorded under a different name than usual, working with a subset of the musicians who play in his bigger band, the Bad Seeds, and the experience seemed to give him a jolt of electricity. It’s a good thing Cave reassembled Grinderman for a sophomore record, which is just as raging and raw as the first one, running over with black humor in the lyrics and an unstoppable power in the ragged blues-punk guitar riffs. This year, the middle-aged Cave showed the kids how to rock. (Warning: The first of the videos below, “Heathen Child,” is NSFW. It’s also insanely, wonderfully weird.)
If only other young pop and R&B divas were as inventive and daring as Janelle Monáe. Her ambitious debut runs a wide gamut, from an orchestral introduction to bouncy dance music and elegant ballads, with a sci-fi theme running through the whole thing. She made her record the way she wanted to, and she had the director’s vision — and the powerful, nimble voice — required to pull it off.
AND THE NEXT 50 … in roughly descending order:
11. Kings Go Forth: The Outsiders Are Back (Luaka Bop)
12. LCD Soundsystem: This Is Happening (DFA/Virgin)
13. The Arcade Fire: The Suburbs (Merge)
14. She & Him: Vol. 2 (Merge)
15. Mavis Staples: You Are Not Alone (Anti-)
16. Nina Nastasia: Outlaster (Fat Cat)
17. Dios: We Are Dios (Buddyhead)
18. Sharon Van Etten: Epic (Ba Da Bing)
19. Tunng: …And Then We Saw Land (Thrill Jockey)
20. Best Coast: Crazy For You (Mexican Summer)
21. Deerhunter: Halcyon Digest (4AD)
22. Caribou: Swim (Merge)
23. Avi Buffalo: Avi Buffalo (Sub Pop)
24. Midlake: Courage of Others (Bella Union)
25. Kronos Quartet with Alim & Fargana Qasimov and Homayun Sakhi: Rainbow: Music of Central Asia Vol. 8 (Smithsonian Folkways)
26. Dr. Dog: Shame, Shame (Anti-)
27. Black Mountain: Wilderness Heart (Jagjaguwar)
28. A Broken Consort: Crow Autumn (Tompkins Square)
29. Laura Marling: I Speak Because I Can (Astralwerks)
30. The Vaselines: Sex With an Ex (Sub Pop)
31. Spoon: Transference (Merge)
32. The Black Angels: Phosphone Dream (Blue Horizon)
33. The Besnard Lakes: The Besnard Lakes Are the Roaring Night (Jagjaguwar)
34. Owen Pallett: Heartland (Domino)
35. Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra: Kollaps Tradixionales (Constellation)
36. Woods: At Echo Lake (Woodsist)
37. Cave: Pure Moods (Drag City)
38. Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings: I Learned the Hard Way (Daptone)
39. Justin Townes Earle: Harlem River Blues (Bloodshot)
40. The Fall: Your Future Our Clutter (Domino)
41. Laura Veirs: July Flame (Raven Marching Band)
42. White Hills: White Hills (Thrill Jockey)
43. The Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O.: In O to Infinity (Important)
44. Belle & Sebastian: Write About Love (Matador)
45. Charlotte Gainsbourg: IRM (Elektra/Asylum)
46. Clogs: The Creatures in the Garden of Lady Walton (Brassland)
47. Gil Scott-Heron: I’m New Here (XL)
48. Jónsi: Go (XL)
49. The Love Language: Libraries (Merge)
50. Barn Owl: Ancestral Star (Thrill Jockey)
And then there were, oh, about a hundred more records I heard from 2010 that I liked — if only I had more time to absorb them all.
LIGHTNING BOLT — JULY 18 AT THE PITCHFORK MUSIC FESTIVALSLEIGH BELLS — JULY 18 AT THE PITCHFORK MUSIC FESTIVALJOHNNY & THE LIMELITES — JULY 22 AT LAURIE’S PLANET OF SOUNDCAP’N JAZZ — JULY 31 AT WICKER PARK FESTIVALMAVIS STAPLES — AUG. 6 AT LOLLAPALOOZATHE BIG PINK — AUG. 6 AT LOLLAPALOOZAJIMMY CLIFF — AUG. 6 AT LOLLAPALOOZATHE BLACK KEYS — AUG. 6 AT LOLLAPALOOZALADY GAGA — AUG. 6 AT LOLLAPALOOZASTARS — AUG. 7 AT LOLLAPALOOZAMETRIC — AUG. 7 AT LOLLAPALOOZASOCIAL DISTORTION — AUG. 7 AT LOLLAPALOOZAEDWARD SHARPE & THE MAGNETIC ZEROS — AUG. 7 AT LOLLAPALOOZAFRIGHTENED RABBIT — AUG. 8 AT LOLLAPALOOZATHE ARCADE FIRE — AUG. 8 AT LOLLAPALOOZATHE ARCADE FIRE — AUG. 8 AT LOLLAPALOOZAWANDA JACKSON — AUG. 27 AT FITZGERALD’SIGGY & THE STOOGES — AUG. 29 AT THE RIVIERATHEE OH SEES — SEPT. 16 AT LINCOLN HALLJUSTIN TOWNES EARLE — SEPT. 18 AT LINCOLN HALLBONNIE “PRINCE” BILLY — SEPT. 28 AT RONNY’SBONNIE “PRINCE” BILLY — SEPT. 29 AT LINCOLN HALLGUIDED BY VOICES — OCT. 13 AT THE RIVIERATHE VASELINES — OCT. 28 AT LINCOLN HALLMONARCH — OCT. 31 AT THE HIDEOUTMIYA MASAOKA’S “LED KIMONO,” NOV. 20 AT THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART CHCIAGOGRINDERMAN — NOV. 22 AT THE RIVIERA THEATREGRINDERMAN — NOV. 22 AT THE RIVIERA THEATREGRACE POTTER & THE NOCTURNALS — DEC. 4 IN THE CHICAGO BLUEGRASS & BLUES FESTIVAL AT THE CONGRESS THEATEREDWARD SHARPE & THE MAGNETIC ZEROS — DEC. 4 IN THE CHICAGO BLUEGRASS & BLUES FESTIVAL AT THE CONGRESS THEATERTHE FLAT FIVE — DEC. 10 AT THE HIDEOUT
EBONY BONES — FEB. 6 AT GREEN DOLPHIN STREETROBBIE FULKS — FEB. 8 AT THE HIDEOUTTINARIWEN — FEB. 28 AT THE OLD TOWN SCHOOL OF FOLK MUSICTHE IKE REILLY ASSASSINATION — MARCH 1 AT SCHUBAS A SUNNY DAY IN GLASGOW — MARCH 3 AT SCHUBASMUCCA PAZZA — MARCH 6 AT ST. PAUL’S CULTURAL CENTEREFTERKLANG — MARCH 8 AT LINCOLN HALLWOODS — MARCH 15 AT LINCOLN HALLPERE UBU — MARCH 14 AT LINCOLN HALLJANELLE MONÁE — MARCH 29 AT SCHUBASSERENA-MANEESH — MARCH 31 AT THE BOTTOM LOUNGEFANFARLO — APRIL 7 AT LINCOLN HALLWHITE MYSTERY — APRIL 17 AT PERMANENT RECORDSJÓNSI — APRIL 28 AT THE VICDELTA SPIRIT — APRIL 30 AT THE KALYX CENTER, MONTICELLO, ILLINOISELEVENTH DREAM DAY — MAY 2 AT THE HIDEOUTCONDO FUCKS — MAY 16 AT THE HIDEOUTMONO — MAY 22 AT THE EMPTY BOTTLEBESNARD LAKES — MAY 24 AT THE PRITZKER PAVILIONTHE TALLEST MAN ON EARTH — MAY 28 AT LINCOLN HALLANDRE WILLIAMS — MAY 29 AT SCHUBASCOCOCOMA — JUNE 5 AT DO-DIVISION STREET FESTWARPAINT — JUNE 6 AT DO-DIVISION STREET FESTYAKUZA — JUNE 5 AT THE BEAT KITCHENYAKUZA — JUNE 5 AT THE BEAT KITCHENSHE & HIM — JUNE 7 AT THE PRITZKER PAVILIONMATMOS & SO PERCUSSION — JUNE 12 AT THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART CHICAGOSUPERCHUNK — JUNE 20 AT THE TASTE OF RANDOLPH STREETCARIBOU — JULY 12 AT THE PRITZKER PAVILIONROBYN — JULY 16 AT THE PITCHFORK MUSIC FESTIVALTITUS ANDRONICUS — JULY 17 AT THE PITCHFORK MUSIC FESTIVALLCD SOUNDSYSTEM — JULY 17 AT THE PITCHFORK MUSIC FESTIVAL
Earlier this year, I contributed a short article to the Chicago Reader’s “Best of Chicago” issue about The Flat Five, naming this local group the “Best Cover Band That Plays One Gig a Year.” At least, that has been this group’s performance pattern since mid-2007. Each December, this super group of singers and players convene for one night of performances at the Hideout. This year, that blessed night arrived on Friday (Dec. 10), with two sets at the Hideout. But as it happens, the Flat Five are going to play at least one more show this winter, Jan. 7 at Evanston Space. As I wrote in the Reader, it sure would be nice if that Flat Five played more often.
Who are the Flat Five? Even if you don’t know the band name, you may recognize the names of some of the members: Kelly Hogan, Nora O’Connor, Scott Ligon, K.C. McDonough and Gerald Dowd. For these gigs, Alex Hall ably filled in for Dowd on drums, adding some accordion, too. (Dowd is on tour, so he wasn’t available.) While they all have ties to the alt-country scene, what they do in the Flat Five is more like a combination of supper-club cabaret with rock cover band. Beautiful harmonies and a quirky, smart selection of songs originally written by people such as Harry Nilsson, the Beach Boys, the Free Design, Spanky and Our Gang, XTC alter-ego the Dukes of Stratosphear, the Zombies and Bobby Hebb. (Plus a few songs by Scott Ligon’s brother, Chris Ligon.) The Flat Five practiced a repertoire of about 45 songs this time, and they spread out quite a few of those over the two sets Friday night, with just a few repeats.
As in past years, it was a true delight to hear these voices joining together on songs such as “Sundays Will Never Be the Same,” “Kites Are Fun” and “This Will Be Our Year.” And how many other “cover bands” do a “four-fer” of songs by Nilsson? There was rock, jazz, ballads, country, even a little bit of gospel. And it sounded glorious.
On first listen, the new album by the 1900s, Return of the Century, sounds not quite as lush as the Chicago group’s earlier orchestral pop. But it doesn’t take long for these 11 songs to reveal their catchy little intricacies. This is a beautiful pop record — pop in the old-fashioned style, with well-crafted melodies and arrangements packed into songs lasting just a few minutes each, with the sort of love-song lyrics that seem like poetic glimpses into someone’s diary. The 1900s have gone through some lineup changes since putting out their debut, Cold & Kind, in 2007, but the band still has three great vocalists — Edward Anderson,Caroline Donovan and Jeanine O’Toole — and the blend of those voices continues to define the sound of the 1900s. Violinist Andra Kulans and bassist Charlie Ransford are still with the band, too, doing the crucial work of filling out the bright sound.
The new songs sounded strong when the 1900s played Friday (Dec. 3) at the Empty Bottle. In fact, while Return of the Century is a bit on the mellow side, these songs had more rock in them live — partly because Anderson added a touch more fuzz to his guitar lines. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen the 1900s over the last several years, and they haven’t failed yet to put on a good performance. It was fabulous to see them in action again. www.myspace.com/1900s
Longtime Chicago soul singer Syl Johnson’s been getting a lot of attention the past month, thanks to the Numero Group’s release of the wonderful six-LP and four-CD box set Complete Mythology. If you haven’t read or heard any of the press coverage, it’s all well worth your time. Johnson also put on a terrific show last Saturday (Nov. 27) at the Old Town School of Folk Music. More on that in a minute.
One impression you get from reading about Johnson is how challenging of an interview he can be, given his tendency to quickly jump from one subject to another. Peter Margasak described this particularly well in his Chicago Reader cover story, “The Real Syl”. And the Chicago Sun-Times’ Dave Hoekstra captures this bizarre quote from Johnson as he ostensibly answers a question about his classic (or should-be-classic) tune, “Is It Because I’m Black”:
“I was saying a woman doesn’t make as much as a man if they’re on the same job. The man don’t mean no harm. In fact, the holy Quran says man is a step above the woman. That’s true — in some spots. To make a long story short, I had squirrels in my eaves. I had to go out to Addison to get a squirrel trap. I glued the nuts in there. They’re very smart animals. But I got ’em. And every last one was a male. Isn’t that incredible?”
Um… OK.
Yesterday, The New York Times jumped onto the Syl Johnson bandwagon with another story. Echoing the other journalists, Ben Sisario noted: “In conversation, Mr. Johnson is as tricky to follow as the twists in his career. Alternately shouting and cooing into the phone, he made bold declarations like “I am a multifaceted genius” and told long stories about the old record business that ended with his victimization at the hands of ineffective promo men. He sang snippets from his songs and blew bluesy harmonica melodies.”
The Numero Group posted a transcript Sisario sent the record label of the first part of his phone conversation with Johnson:
Syl (picking up the phone, semi-shouting): “….now what’s the problem?”
Me: Uh, hi, is this Syl Johnson?
“Yeah, this is he.”
This is Ben Sisario from the New York Times.
(shouting) “Who is this?”
My name is Ben Sisario. I’m calling from the New York Times.
“Oh yeah! I’ve been looking for your call. How do you spell it?”
S-I-S-A-R-I-O.
“What’s the first name?”
Ben.
“Ben?”
Yes, sir.
“Like Ben….?” [I think he was starting to sing the Michael Jackson song, but at the time I didn’t catch that.]
Like Benjamin Franklin.
(laughs) Oh wow—that’s on the what, dollar bill and shit? Who on the dollar? George Washington. Benjamin Franklin on the what? Ten?
He’s on the hundred.
Oh! That’s the shit I like, the hundred! (laughs)
How are you?
“I’m cool and the gang, man.”
Now, getting back to the concert Johnson performed last week at the Old Town School. The evening had a celebratory feeling, as Johnson was finally getting more widespread recognition for the great music he’d recorded years ago after spending a long time in relative obscurity. The set included some of the tracks that the Numero Group dug up for the box set — songs that Johnson barely remembered recording and had apparently never performed live. “I’ve never heard this before in my life, I swear,” he said before one song.
Otis Clay sang a bit with the 14-piece band, and Gene Chandler of “Duke of Earl” fame made a surprise appearance, but Johnson was the center of attention almost all night, dressed in a sharp red suit and showing few signs of age in his vocals as he sang great numbers like “Is It Because I’m Black?” and “Take Me to the River.” The band, especially the horn section, did not seem completely rehearsed, having some trouble early on knowing exactly when to end a song, but that just added to the loose, jam-session vibe of the music. It was a little odd, however, when the horn section packed up before the encore, prompting Johnson to exclaim, “Shit, I ain’t got no band with me!”
Based on what I’d read about Johnson, I expected he would probably deliver a speech of some sort during the show — and he more than fulfilled that expectation with a long statement before the final song. He complained about not getting royalties from the old records he’d made for the Twilight and Twinight labels and going to court to get money for the samples of his music that turned up in numerous hip-hop tracks.
“It took me 40 years to get my shit back,” he said. His advice to other musicians? “Cut a deal with a record company, but not your knees, because you will get fucked.” But when it came to the Numero Group, he had nothing but praise. “They’re and they’re straight,” he said. “I never got a penny until this Numero Group. … They’re the first people after 40 years to give me a royalty check for fucking Twilight-Twinight Records.”
The band finally had to nudge Johnson to play one more song, and he closed the night with “Sock It to Me.” What a memorable night it was.
The Nov. 29 issue of The New Yorker has a wonderful essay on Keith Moon’s drumming by literary critic James Wood. Reading this appreciation of Moon’s insanely great drumming made me think of the following article, which I wrote in 2007 for Pioneer Press Newspapers, looking back on two concerts the Who performed in the northwest suburbs in the late ’60s. There are many musicians I’d love to travel back in time to see — to see them when they were their prime or when they played to small crowds before they became huge stars. Near the top of my fantasy list: The Who in the 1960s or early ’70s.
The Who at the First Monterey International Pop Festival, just a few days after their concert at the Cellar in Arlington Heights.
ONCE UPON A TIME, a brash young rock band from England descended on Chicago’s northwest suburbs, smashing guitars and making a loud and rebellious racket. Forty years later, fans vividly remember when the Who came to town. The Who’s earliest U.S. concerts included a June 15, 1967, stop at the Cellar in Arlington Heights on and a July 31, 1968, show at the New Place between Cary and Crystal Lake.
Paul Sampson, now a Crystal Lake resident, owned the Cellar, a teen club at the corner of Salem and Davis streets that hosted concerts by Chicago bands such as the Shadows of Knight as well as touring acts like Cream. The building is now an auto repair shop, not far from the Arlington Heights post office.
“The most distinct thing that I remember about the Who was Peter Townshend coming to my office,” Sampson says. “He says, ‘I can’t go on. I’ve got guitar-string problems.’” Sampson recalls thinking that Townshend was “a little spoiled,” a quality common in that era’s rock stars. “I thought, ‘Give me a break,’” Sampson says. “Needless to say, I let him know that he wouldn’t be paid if he didn’t go on. It just doesn’t work that way. I guess he found it within himself to go out and take care of whatever the issues were.”
John Sennett, who now lives in Schaumburg, was a 13-year-old Arlington Heights kid when he went to see the Who that night. “I had all their albums, including their monumental first, My Generation,” Sennett says. “My brother Michael was in a band called the Reejuns. They played some of the Who songs, so I was quite in touch with the Who. They were very ‘tough’ at the time. A street band, singing songs of the street, of the youth.”
A critic for the Chicago Tribune noted that the Thursday night concert got started late, after 20 minutes of “electronic troubles.” The Who ended up playing for only 15 minutes, the newspaper reported, “but it was sweet and loud.”
Sampson doubts the concert was that short. “No, no, I do not recall that,” he says. “I’m pretty sure if they had gone on for 15 minutes, there would have been reservations at the end. … Generally, when a group came in, they were contracted for 45 minutes. The total onstage routine … had to be close to that.”
Kirby Bivans, an Evanston musician in a band called the Other Half, was in the audience. Answering questions by e-mail from his current home in Switzerland, he recalled: “Pete Townshend was having problems with his amplifier and they had a little roadie who was scurrying back and forth behind the amplifiers to try to fix the problem. Pete’s solution was to ram his guitar neck into the amplifiers and sometimes he would knock them over, causing the roadie to cover his head and tried to get away; it was both shocking and comical. We would see the roadie run back to the front of the building and get another amplifier top and bring it back and connect it, only to have it malfunction again causing Pete to ram his guitar neck one more time into it. And sometimes Pete would just throw his guitar neck as high as he could and it would get caught in the chicken wire, which was only about three feet above his head. That would cause him to get really angry and he started pulling it down.”
Sennett says the Cellar’s acoustics basically consisted of noise echoing off concrete walls. “That’s the way we liked it,” he says. “Hard guitar chords and tough vocals along the tracks, in a warehouse.” He saw Sampson looking through the glass window of the Cellar’s control booth, which was above the crowd. Sennett remembers Sampson looking “elated.”
“They were really loud,” Sampson says. “It was ‘bang, crash, bang, crash.’ It was a bit of smasheroo-type thing. I don’t know how much musical value one got out of that, but it became one heck of an act. That’s what they were famous for.” Sennett remembers “bass and drums pounding till the walls shook.”
As the Who finished their set, Townshend smashed his guitar. “Their last song was ‘My Generation’ of course, and during the song the little roadie lit some smoke bombs and we all started choking,” Bivans said. “Someone opened the fire doors and we all tried to get out as fast as we could, along with the Who. The band jumped into a waiting black Cadillac limousine and drove away as fast as they could.
“After the show, the guitar player in my band came up to me, and I said to him, ‘I just ran into Keith Moon.’ He said, ‘Far out! Did he say anything to you?’ I said, ‘No I really ran into him; he almost knocked me over trying to get out!’”
After the concert, a fan asked Townshend what he would use for his guitar the following night. “Glue it back together,” he responded, according to the Tribune.
The next day, the Who played the first of two nights at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, followed by the First Monterey International Pop Festival that Sunday, which D.A. Pennebaker filmed for the documentary Monterey Pop.
Sennett says the experience of seeing the Who at the Cellar had a lasting impact on him. “Their pounding chords and disruptive nature drove my personality throughout my youth,” he says. “Playing in a small venue like the Cellar made the Who one of us — no different, except they knew how to play excellent, earth-shattering music.”
Paul Wertico, an acclaimed jazz drummer who lives in Skokie, was a student at Cary-Grove High School when the Who came back to the area for another concert in July 1968. Wertico was already a fan, especially of Moon’s drumming. The Who played in the courtyard of a small club called the New Place, which was in an unincorporated area between Cary and Crystal Lake, on Route 31 less than a mile south of Northwest Highway. After the opening bands finished playing, the audience waited, anxiously wondering where the Who were. Their equipment was onstage, but there was no sign of the band.
“I was standing maybe three feet from the stage, and all of a sudden, a helicopter lands in back of the fence, and they hop over the fence,” Wertico says. “There was a mad crush to the front of the stage.”
Recalling the Who’s famous personas, Wertico says, “I remember (John) Entwistle being really staid and just looking out. He was watching Keith and he was really playing. The other three guys were going completely ape. Roger Daltrey’s twirling the microphone. He’s got tape on the microphone so it doesn’t fall off. And Townshend’s doing all those windmills. Keith broke so many drumsticks. We were wondering if they were broke to begin with, because it was so ridiculous the number of sticks he broke during that performance. Is he using sticks that were cracked already?”
The Who were so loud that they knocked out the power seven times that night, and each time, Keith Moon continued drumming as the electricity went out. Then came the smashing finale.
“All of a sudden, Townshend put his guitar through one of the high-watt amplifiers,” Wertico says. “And Daltrey’s doing the same thing, taking his mike stand and destroying stuff. And Keith’s knocking over everything. Part of Pete Townshend’s guitar landed right in front of me, and this big guy who worked for the Who just jumped and grabbed it. It was so exciting, it was just unbelievable.”
The show left a big impression on Wertico. “The thing that blew my mind was they went through that whole thing of trashing their equipment in a place like that,” he says. “That’s amazing to me. You’d think they’d just save that for the big shows. They did not go on autopilot. They could have been playing for a million people that night. It was stunning, the amount of energy and the amount of joy. That’s what made me want to be a musician, that spirit.”
of the great musical mysteries of the past decade has been the lack of new songs by Gillian Welch. Her first four albums left little doubt that she’s one of today’s best songwriters. But eight years have gone by since her last album, 2003’s Soul Journey. She hasn’t been a recluse during that time. She’s continued to perform concerts, and she backed up her longtime partner and musical collaborator, David Rawlings, on his project, the David Rawlings Machine. But it’s been a long time since we’ve heard a new batch of songs by Welch.
2. WINTER’S BONE (Debra Granik, U.S.)
3. MY JOY (Sergei Loznitsa, Russia)
5. CARLOS (Olivier Assayas, France)
6. ANOTHER YEAR (Mike Leigh, U.K.)
7. TUESDAY, AFTER CHRISTMAS (Radu Muntean, Romania)
8. THE SECRET OF KELLS (Thom Moore, Ireland)
9. WHITE MATERIAL (Claire Denis, France)
10. BLUEBEARD (Catherine Breillat, France)
