Author: Robert Loerzel

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ICE plays Saariaho

International Contemporary Ensemble — or ICE for short — played four pieces by Finnish avant-garde composer Kaija Saariaho Thursday (Nov. 19) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

Based in both Chicago and New York, ICE champions new music, performing in a variety of lineups — Thursday’s concert included a solo percussion piece as well as compositions played by larger ensemble that was more like a chamber orchestra.

My favorite piece of the evening was the first (and most recently composed), “Terrestre.” Flute, harp, percussion, violin and cello notes skittered around one another in a delicate dance. Flutist Claire Chase somehow managed to sing and play flute at the same time during some passages. In “Six Japanese Gardens,” Nathan Davis ably demonstrated the variety of sounds and delicate patterns one can created with nothing but percussion. Well, not nothing — the piece also includes some electronic background tracks created by Saariaho, which Davis triggered by pedal.

The second half of the concert featured two pieces that Saariaho wrote for chamber ensembles with electronics — “Lichtbogen” (1986) and “Solar” (1992). The electronic textures and treatments were subtle, barely even noticeable at times, other than moments like the climax of “Lichtbogen,” when the notes reverbed and echoed in ways you don’t often hear at a classical concert. The music floated along, and it was easy to loose track of the passing time, as Chase pointed during an onstage interview with Saariaho. The amorphous quality of the compositions reminded me of Gyorgy Ligetti’s “Atmospheres,” although Saariaho’s tones are less ominous.

It was interesting to hear Saariaho answer Chase’s questions during their conversation before the concert’s intermission. Saariaho talked about how nature inspires her music — “the symmetry of leaves … and the endless variation within the symmetry.”

In parts of “Lichtbogen,” Saariaho instructs the players to make visceral sounds with their instruments, such as the noise of strings being scraped. “They are not noises for me,” Saariaho explained. “They’re associated with some of the most beautiful sounds that we know — wind and whispering. They are very intimate sounds for us.”

That sort of intimate sound made ICE’s Saariaho concert an unconventionally beautiful experience.

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Jay Bennett Tribute at the Hideout

Sunday (Nov. 15) was the birthday of Jay Bennett, the talented musician who died earlier this year. His friends celebrated his life and music with a show Sunday night at the Hideout. It’s been months since Jay died, but the sorrow still feels fresh. Hearing folks like Edward Burch, LeRoy Bach, Steve Frisbie, the Dolly Varden band, Brad Elvis, John Peacock and Quartet Parapluie playing songs written by Bennett — or in some cases, songs by other people that he loved — it was hard for me not to get choked up.

I regret missing the first part of the show (I was at the opening night of House Theatre’s delightfully surreal Mark Guarino play with Jon Langford songs, All the Fame of Lofty Deeds), but I showed up in time to hear Quartet Parapluie’s exquisite string arrangements of “Songs That Weren’t Finished” and “Venus Stopped the Train.”

Burch was half of the Bennett and Burch duo that recorded The Palace at 4am (Part I), my favorite post-Wilco Bennett record, so it seemed appropriate that Burch was the focal point of this show, organizing it and functioning as emcee. Many of the performers shared stories about their experiences with Bennett, which added an element of humor to an evening that might otherwise have been unbearably sad.

A bunch of the musicians came together onstage at the end of the night, playing really nice, spirited versions of some of the best songs off Palace, including “Puzzle Heart,” “Talk to Me,” “Whispers or Screams,” “Shakin’ Sugar,” “Drinking on Your Dime” and “My Darlin’,” which slid into a cover of George Harrison’s “Isn’t It a Pity,” with everyone singing along. The last song of the night was one of the best-known tunes Bennett co-wrote with Jeff Tweedy, using lyrics by Woody Guthrie, the classic “California Stars.” Hearing this string of great songs, it became painfully clear what a great talent we’ve lost.

Photos from the Jay Bennett tribute.

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Shrinebuilder at the Empty Bottle

I don’t see a lot of heavy-metal concerts … probably because I don’t like heavy metal all that much. But stoner rock — now, that’s something I can get behind once in a while. What’s the difference? Stoner rock is just about as heavy as heavy metal, though at least some of the singers tend to sing, rather than growl or scream.

I’m not sure if Shrinebuilder is heavy metal or stoner rock or some other variety of underground metal, but the group’s self-titled debut album is the sort of hard rock that I actually like — thunderously loud at times, but not continuously screechy. This is a super group of sorts, featuring guitarist Scott “Wino” Weinrich (from Saint Vitus and the Obsessed), drummer Dale Crover (from the Melvins), bassist Al Cisneros (from Sleep and Om) and guitarist Scott Kelly (from Neurosis).

They played their dramatic songs Saturday night (Nov. 14) at the Empty Bottle, but with little of the onstage dramatic flourishes of classic metal bands. They curled their lips in the occasional snarl, but mostly they just pounded away on their instruments. Weinrich, Cisneros and Kelly took turns signing, and Shrinebuilder benefited from the variety of voices.
www.myspace.com/shrinebuildergroup

The opening band at the late show was a good match with Shrinebuilder — the local metal band Yakuza, which stands out from other headbangers by featuring saxophone alongside the typical shredding guitar riffs. Lead singer Bruce Lamont (whom you may recognize from his work as an Empty Bottle bartender) sang with vocal-cord-shredding intensity whenever he wasn’t wailing on his horns. Yakuza’s music included some touches of prog-rock grandeur. And it was loud.
www.yakuzadojo.com

Photos of Shrinebuilder and Yakuza.

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Meat Puppets at Schubas

I enjoyed listening to records by the Meat Puppets back in the ’80s — and I regretted the fact that I never saw them in concert. A few years ago, it seemed like I might never have that chance, since the band had gone on hiatus and bassist Cris Kirkwood was reportedly suffering from some pretty serious drug problems. In 2007, Cris emerged from limbo, however, reforming the Meat Puppets with his brother, Kurt. They were back in Chicago last week, playing three nights in a row at Schubas. I caught their set on Friday night.

I haven’t listened to the Meat Puppets all that much in recent years, but their old music instantly flashed back into my mind as I heard the Kirkwood brothers doing their unique combination of loopy guitar riffs, loping country rhythms and psychedelia. The music sounded heavier in concert than it does on record. In fact, this was one of the rare Schubas shows where I eventually felt compelled to move to the back of the room because of the overpowering volume. The bass and drum sounds were thumping a bit too loud in my eardrums up there by the stage.

Cris Kirkwood’s face was only intermittently visible, peaking out from a tangle of hair as he pounded away on the bass. His voice still blended together with Kurt’s in shaggy sibling harmony, and Kurt curled his lips as he played his guitar solos. He really seemed to relish the moment. Drummer Ted Marcus tied together the band’s somewhat spacious sound with off-kilter beats. And the Meat Puppets played many of their best songs, including “Up on the Sun,” “Plateau” (made famous by Nirvana) and “Backwater.”

The first opening band was Atlanta’s Winston Audio, which played hard rock with Southern flair and lots of hair being tossed around. The second band, Dynasty Electric, seemed like a mismatch with the rest of the bill, playing electronic pop — dance music accented with electric guitar and Theremin. They weren’t really playing my kind of music, but they made for some pretty pictures.

Photos of the Meat Puppets, Winston Audio and Dynasty Electric.

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Choir gets a little help from friends

As you may have heard if you follow the Chicago music scene, the local band Scotland Yard Gospel Choir was in an accident Sept. 24. As the band headed out on tour, its van crashed, injuring everyone in the group and destroying a lot of musical gear. The good news is that everyone survived. On Thursday (Nov. 12), the Hideout hosted a benefit show to help the SYGC pay its medical bills. The 1900s played, along with Brighton MA, a group featuring former SYGC member Matthew Kerstein.

As Brighton MA was playing, Scotland Yard Gospel Choir frontman Elia Einhorn got up on the stage. Until recently, Einhorn had been wearing a neck brace as he recovered from injuries to his head and vertebrae. He still looked a little bit stiff as he stepped up to the microphone, but he was all smiles. Elia announced that the most seriously injured member of his band, Mark Yoshizumi, had just been released from the hospital. Another Choir member who was seriously injured, Mary Ralph, was in the crowd, standing near the stage with a cane for support.

After previewing some strong new folk-rock songs, Brighton MA closed its set by playing three of the songs that Kerstein played with Einhorn back when they were together in Scotland Yard Gospel Choir. First, Kerstein sang “Bet You Never Thought It Would Be Like This.” And then, after Elia made his announcement and thanked the crowd, he played the harmonica solo that kicks off “Mother’s Son.” It felt like a truly celebratory moment as Matt and Elia sung together into the same microphone. Then the set closed with Elia taking over lead vocals for the buoyant “Tear Down the Opera House” (which SYGC originally released on the 2003 CD I Bet You Say That to All the Boys and then re-recorded on 2009’s …And the Horse You Rode In On.

Elia couldn’t dance around as much as he did when SYGC played this same tune in September at the Hideout Block Party, but he made it clear he isn’t going to let these latest setbacks stop him from making music. This morning, I dug out my copy of that 2003 CD and listened to it for the first time in a while. I was struck by the lyrics of “Would You Still Love Me If I Was in a Knife Fight,” in which Ellen O’Hayer sings: “I would still love you if you were in a car crash, your glasses smashed, your hair in a mess with broken glass. I’d come to see you inside your hospital room, I’d bring flowers and brush your hair and sing to you.”

Up next were the 1900s, a band I’ve seen, oh, countless time. Well, I guess I could count how many times I’ve seen them (and photographed them), but let’s just say I’ve been a regular at their shows over the past few years. It had been several months since the last time I’d seen them, however, and Thursday’s show reinvigorated my enthusiasm for this band’s delightful ’60s-influenced music. The 1900s debuted a few new songs, and also pulled off the unusual trick of reinventing some old ones. It sounded especially cool when the 1900s melded together two of the songs from their 2007 CD Cold & Kind, “Two Ways” and “Acutiplantar Dude,” bridging the songs with a psychedelic guitar jam.

For more information on how to help out the Scotland Yard Gospel Choir, visit http://www.bloodshotrecords.com/news/sygc-van-accident. And while you’re at it, buy one of their albums.

Photos from the Scotland Yard Gospel Choir benefit.

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Fanfarlo at Schubas

I’ve been singing the praises of Fanfarlo since discovering this British band in 2008 at SXSW. Fanfarlo finally played in Chicago for the first time last night (Nov. 9). I was starting to think they were avoiding our fair city for some reason, since they made an earlier U.S. tour that involved traveling straight from California to Philadelphia, bypassing Chicago. But at last, here they were, playing at Schubas. I wondered what kind of turnout Fanfarlo would get, since I often misjudge such things. They didn’t receive much press here in Chicago. In fact, I was irritated by a Chicago Tribune story that hyped the opening band, Freelance Whales, without even mentioning that Fanfarlo was the headline act. As it turned out, the show sold out during the day on Monday — probably due to a combination of the buzz about both bands.

I wasn’t that familiar with Freelance Whales, other than giving the songs on their myspace page one listen, but I liked what I heard. Hailing from Queens, they were a good match with Fanfarlo, playing the sort of rousing sing-along folk anthems that the Arcade Fire is known for. And a lot of the fans at Monday’s show were clearly familiar with the Freelance Whales already, singing right along. Definitely a group worth checking out.

And then it was onto the main act, and Fanfarlo received a similar reception from the audience. I had seen Fanfarlo three times at SXSW gigs last year and this year, and two of those shows were marred by technical difficulties or bad sound. Fanfarlo had no such problems Monday at Schubas, other than two brief moments of bad feedback caused by a musical saw. This was probably the liveliest show I’ve seen by Fanfarlo so far. Singer Simon Balthazar moved around more than at previous shows, doing a little jig of sorts during the instrumental breaks in the songs.

As with Freelance Whales, Fanfarlo is clearly influenced by the Arcade Fire. They play with a similar sense of communal spirit, switching instruments frequently, adding extra drum beats, raising all their voices high in chorus. It’s a little more on the folk end of the rock spectrum, though. While Fanfarlo uses some synth sounds, the emphasis in concert was more on mandolin, violin and acoustic guitar, with Balthazar’s dulcet voice carrying the melodies with assistance from violinist-singer Cathy Lucas.

Fanfarlo played several songs from its debut album, the excellent Reservoir, including “I’m a Pilot,” “Ghosts” and “Luna,” though I was disappointed that the band yet again chose not to play one of my favorite tunes, “Fire Escape.” The show could have been longer — Fanfarlo stopped performing after about an hour, with a number of good songs unplayed. The band did play at least one new song. Actually, I think there were two new songs, but maybe one of those was just some obscure track I failed to recognize.

Fanfarlo left me wanting more, but for that one hour, it sounded wonderful.
www.fanfarlo.com
www.myspace.com/fanfarlo
Listen to the Sept. 27 NPR interview with Fanfarlo’s Simon Balthazar and Cathy Lucas.

Photos of Fanfarlo and Freelance Whales.

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Mount Eerie at Lakeshore

The recent record Wind’s Poem by Mount Eerie is a weird, atmospheric sort of dream. It does indeed feel like a poem about wind. Phil Elverum (the singer-songwriter who for all intents and purposes is Mount Eerie) sings in a soft, almost whispered tone on many of the songs, while electric guitar buzzes much of the time with a droning quality somewhat like heavy metal. That combination of soft singing and occasional keyboard textures with the reverberating guitar strings is what makes Wind’s Poem so unusual — and so compelling. It’s simultaneously airy and subterranean. At moments, it reminds me of something you’d hear on the soundtrack to a David Lynch film.

Mount Eerie — Elverum backed by two keyboard players and two drummers — played the songs from Wind’s Poem Sunday (Nov. 8) shrouded in fog inside Chicago’s Lakeshore Theater. It was just as spooky and riveting as the record. Some technical difficulties with the venue’s sound system even added to the strange mood. For some reason, the speakers were picking up a radio frequency with someone’s conversation, and these disconnected snippets of dialogue punctuated the silences in between the songs. Elverum seemed a little disturbed by that, but he didn’t let it interfere with his performance of his serenely loud music.

Here’s how Elverum explained his new record in an interview with The Believer magazine: “I’ve been writing lately about wind as this force for change and destruction, focusing on the destruction half of the destruction-and-rebirth cycle. But also win as an example of the personality that exists in dark nature. And specifically like when wind blows through trees and sounds vaguely like whispering, pretending that it actually is words. Like ‘What’s it saying? It’s saying something really intense.’ So that’s the idea of Wind’s Poem, thematically at least. There are a couple of different perspectives I sing from on the album. Sometimes I’m doing the voice of the actual wind, what it would say, and sometimes I’m speaking from my own perspective, the human observer, and sometimes there’s a duet between the two.”

Elverum sounds like the sort of artist who isn’t afraid of pursuing unusual ideas. On Sunday, it sounded like his destructive winds were blowing through Lakeshore Theater.
www.pwelverumandsun.com

The opening band was No Kids — a Vancouver group including the two keyboard players who performed in Mount Eerie, with Elverum on drums. While I give these musicians credit for their fine work during the Mount Eerie set, the ballads they played with No Kids didn’t excite me nearly as much.

Photos of Mount Eerie.

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Eccentric Soul Revue

I’m a firm believer in the idea that a lot of good music gets forgotten. For every classic-rock band you hear on the radio a zillion times, there are a zillion bands barely anyone’s ever heard of… and at least a few of those zillions are worth hearing. Chicago’s Numero Group record label has done an exemplary job of bringing new attention to some of the forgotten greats. The label has reissued folk and psychedelic music, but its best-known speciality is soul music. Numero has an ongoing series of albums called “Eccentric Soul,” featuring long-lost tracks by record labels that folded years ago. The albums (available on both CD and vinyl) are lovingly packaged, and the Numero folks have a great ear for picking out some noteworthy tunes you’ve probably never heard before.

Now, a few of the soul musicians championed by Numero are back on the concert stage. Some of them played this spring at Park West (a show that I missed, alas). On Saturday night (Nov. 7), the Eccentric Soul Revue was back — this time at Lincoln Hall, with a revamped lineup. The evening was a real blast. A younger soul group, JC Brooks & the Uptown Sound, served as the house band, keeping the music going almost nonstop for more than two hours as various singers stepped up to the mike. There was barely a pause as the horns kept blowing and the funky guitar chords kept twitching.

Things got started with some gospel harmonies, courtesy of Pastor T.L. Barrett & Choir. Their music is featured on the Numero CD Good God! Born Again Funk. After a couple of songs from JC Brooks & the Uptown Sound, Renaldo Domino took center stage. Domino hadn’t performed onstage since the early ’70s, but he certainly didn’t sound as if he’d been away that long. Like everyone else in Saturday’s variety show, Domino seemed completely at ease strolling the stage, wearing the sort of leisure suit he probably wore in concerts more than three decades ago. And his voice sounded great. His music, including the cool tune “Not Too Cool to Cry,” is on the compilation Twinight’s Lunar Rotation.

Saturday’s show added a couple of female singers who weren’t at the Park West show: Sharon Clark and Linda Balentine. They both had strong voices and strong personalities that came through during their brief appearances. I wish they’d had a bit more time to play more songs. Balentine played the A side and B side of the only single she ever recorded, an ultra-rare 45 with “Glad About That” and “You’re a Hard Habit to Break,” which Numero reissued on a collection called The Bandit Label. Clark’s music is available on The Young Disciples.

In between the sets by Clark and Balentine, the Notations harmonized on a string of soulful oldies, one of the highlights of the evening. Three of the singers took turns on lead vocals, each showing his own distinct style and personality.

The final act of the night was Syl Johnson, who used to be on the Twinight record label together with the Notations and Domino. (Numero plans to put out a collection next year of Johnson’s complete recordings from 1959 to 1972.) Johnson’s standout songs on Saturday included “Thank You Baby,” and he closed his segment of the concert with a spot-on cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River.”

Lincoln Hall was fairly crowded for the Eccentric Soul Revue, and the audience included both old and young fans. A fair amount of people danced and clapped along to the music, and the musicians seemed to be delighted at the response. It all came to a rousing conclusion when the choir returned, standing on the floor in front of the stage, and all of the evening’s performers joined their voices in a cover of the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

Photos from the Eccentric Soul Revue.

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Vic Chesnutt at Lincoln Hall

In the days before Vic Chesnutt played Thursday (Nov. 5) at Chicago’s Lincoln Hall, it became clear that ticket sales must have been slow. The venue started offering a two-for-one ticket deal. And sure enough, when Chesnutt showed up on Thursday, attendance was pretty sparse. That’s a shame for all those who missed the show, since it was one of the year’s best.

I’m a latecomer to the Vic Chesnutt fan club, having largely ignored him for years. I’m starting to make up for that, but I still need to fill in the many gaps in my collection of his recordings. I saw him do an acoustic solo set opening for Jonathan Richman earlier this year at the Empty Bottle, which really wowed me. And now I’ve seen Chesnutt perform a different kind of concert, with a six-piece band playing epic, swelling arrangements behind him.

Chesnutt mostly played songs from his new album At the Cut and 2007’s North Star Deserter, both of which he recorded for Constellation Records with a backing band that included members of the great Montreal collective Silver Mt. Zion (and its predecessor, Godspeed! You Black Emperor) as well as Fugazi guitarist Guy Picciotto. Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band made my favorite record of 2008, 13 Blues for Thirteen Moon, so I was thrilled at the prospect of seeing these musicians playing with Chesnutt. Not all of that group’s members were in the touring band that came to Chicago, but nevertheless the music had a similar feeling to the orchestral sweep of Silver Mt. Zion at its best.

In the center of it all was Mr. Chesnutt, sitting in his wheelchair, with a small, somewhat worn-looking acoustic guitar hanging over his neck with a tiny white string instead of a guitar strap. The way Chesnutt plucks at his guitar strings, he seems a little uncertain at first, as if he’s afraid he’ll forget the notes. He does hit the right notes, with a somewhat idiosyncratic sense of timing. Like the Empty Bottle show, this concert felt very spontaneous. The other musicians all trained their eyes on Chesnutt as he began most of the songs, plucking his guitar and singing in a seemingly fragile voice. They looked like they were waiting for their cues to start playing, feeling their way into the songs to match Chesnutt’s spirit.

The dynamic range of this concert was startling. At moments, Chesnutt was singing and playing all by himself as the audience quietly listened to each and every creak of the guitar strings and bend in his voice, almost like sitting in Chesnutt’s living room and attending an unplugged performance. And then the songs would erupt as the guitars, keyboards and bowed bass came in, making mountainous, majestic chords. And Chesnutt would rear back his head from the microphone and shout his words up to the mountaintop.

A highlight was the song “Coward,” which is the first track on the At the Cut album, one of the best showcases of what Chesnutt is capable of doing with these musicians. After the band left the stage at the end of the show, Chesnutt stayed and did one acoustic song. Then the group returned and played “Sponge,” from Chesnutt’s 1991 album West of Rome. The crowd was smaller than it should have been, but the fans who were there showed their appreciation with a strong round of applause as Chesnutt wheeled himself backstage.

It’s worth noting here that Chesnutt has not one, but two new albums out this fall. Although it isn’t even mentioned on his own Web site, Vapor Records recently released Chesnutt’s Skitter at the Take-Off, a spare, acoustic studio record he made in collaboration with Jonathan Richman, featuring some of the memorable songs he played at that Empty Bottle show in May. It’s a much different record from At the Cut, but both are recommended. A free six-song sample from At the Cut and North Star Deserter is available at http://vicchesnutt.com/home/audio/.
www.myspace.com/vicchesnutt

The opening act Thursday was Clare and the Reasons, who were quite a contrast from Chesnutt. A strange pairing? I suppose, although both of them seem like acts pursuing their singular visions for the music they want to play. Clare and the Reasons, whom I saw opening for My Brightest Diamond last year, played a delightful show of quaintly old-fashioned pop cabaret music from the new album Arrow, complete with violin, clarinet, trombone, kazoo and cool vocal harmonies. No musical saw, however — Clare reported that a zombie stole the band’s saw on Halloween. Gotta watch out for those kleptomatic zombies.
www.myspace.com/clareandthereasons
www.claremuldaur.com

Photos of Vic Chesnutt and Clare and the Reasons.

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A scary song: ‘The Exiled Men’

Listening this morning to Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis playing scary songs on Sound Opinions inspired me to offer my own choice for a Halloween tune. The song is “The Exiled Men” or “Dei Frealause Mein,” from the CD The Sweet Sunny North: Henry Kaiser & David Lindley in Norway. The only thing that might keep this song from scaring you is the fact that the lyrics are sung in Norwegian. But the liner notes in the CD illuminate the story being told. (Does anyone out there have the actual lyrics in Norwegian and/or English? I’d love to get the actual text.) Here’s how the liner notes tell the tale:

“The words tell the grim story of some exiled outlaws who set sail on Christmas eve — a time when nobody went out on the ocean due to the many strange spirits out and about at such times. They were shipwrecked near the Shetland Islands. Their boat froze in the ice and they stayed there for nine years. Finally they decided to resort to cannibalism in order to survive. They drew lots to decide who would be eaten first. Unfortunately the sailor among them lost and after the others ate him they realized that now there was no one to captain the boat. So they prayed to God and suddenly a big bird came from heaven and stood on top of the boat’s mast and a wind came and took the boat and the men away.”

This is a West Nordic ballad that may come from the Faroe Islands or Iceland, and on the CD, it is performed with chilling beauty by the Norwegian singer Kirsten Bråten Berg, accompanied by David Lindley on the Turkish saz.

Download “The Exiled Men” (mp3)

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Herman Dune, Julie Doiron and Wye Oak

The new Lincoln Hall music venue has sold out some shows in its first couple of weeks, but on Thursday (Oct. 29) it was one of those rather chilled-out evenings with a small crowd of music fans standing around the main floor while three performers delivered their songs unadorned and intimate.

First up was the Baltimore duo Wye Oak, who have released two records on the Merge label, including this year’s The Knot. Jenn Wasner sang and played guitar, belting out some strong notes and shaking her hair with abandon whenever it was time for a solo. Andy Stack isn’t singing as much as he did on the first Wye Oak record, but he pulled off the impressive feat of playing the drums and keyboards at the same time. As much as I liked the Wye Oak performance, I wonder if they could accomplish more with a couple of other musicians to provide more variety and color to their arrangements. Still, it was fairly catchy rock music.

The middle act in the lineup was Julie Doiron, who was in an extremely chatty mood as she played her music solo, taking lots of requests from the audience, basically playing whatever her fans wanted to hear. Doiron’s stage banter was pretty funny, and she seemed to be in a “don’t know when to stop talking” mood. Her songs sounded more fragile than they did when she played with a full band at the Empty Bottle earlier this year, but Doiron still knew how to rock even when she was just playing by herself. What a charming, honest performer.

The headliners were Herman Dune (or Düne), a duo from France whose music is sometimes labeled “anti-folk” … another one of those genre labels I can’t really figure out. The members of this duo call themselves David-Ivar Herman Düne (guitars and vocals) and Néman Herman Düne (drums). I had not heard much of Herman Dune’s music before seeing this show, and I was initially a bit put off by David-Ivar’s vocals, especially at the moments when he does funny, falsetto things with it. But over the course of this concert, I warmed up to their music. There was a plainspoken quality to the music, and at times, the chords had that classic Velvet Underground sound. Reminded me a bit of Smog (Bill Callahan).

Photos of Herman Dune, Julie Doiron and Wye Oak.

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Invasion From Iceland

It’s a rare pleasure to hear Icelandic musicians performing in Chicago. On Wednesday (Oct. 28), the Logan Square Auditorium hosted not just one, not just two, but three Icelandic acts. The headliners were one of the island nation’s better-known bands, Múm (pronounced “moom”), who are touring in support of their new album, the delightfully titled Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know. Actually, most of the songs they played were ones that I did know — including a lot from that new CD, which is one of the best that Mum has ever made.

When Múm began in 1997, the group was known for making electronic music with subtle textures. I enjoyed that music, and I’m sure there are fans out there who prefer it to Múm’s more recent recordings, but some of that early stuff was so chilled-out and low-key that it barely ever stuck in my mind afterward. Seeing Múm in concert, however, was a revelation, with more emphasis on the singing. Everything felt more organic and natural. There’s more of that feeling on recent records, including Sing Along…. There are some precious moments when Múm gets a little too cute for its own good, but then there are sublime hymn-like harmonies, when it sounds like this is a bunch of Icelanders getting together in a little room somewhere and singing to their heart’s content. Actually, that is exactly what it is.

And that’s what we were treated to on Wednesday, too. The mix of instruments included Melodica, cello, violin plus the usual keyboards, guitar, bass and drums. There wasn’t too much of the tinkly techno textures from the early Múm records, but there was a lot of joyous singing. In the final song of the main set, one of the band’s friends (a roadie? I’m not sure) came onstage and held up signs with the lyrics to the title song about singing along. It was a perfect way of summing up Múm’s communal spirit. http://mum.is

Singer, cellist and violinist Hildur Guðnadóttir was perhaps the liveliest presence on the stage during the Múm set, making sweeping gestures and opening her mouth as wide as she could to deliver the choruses. Guðnadóttir was also the first act of the night, playing an impressive set of her compositions on cello. She asked for quiet from the audience, and got it. Check out her music at www.hildurness.com. A free mp3 of her song “Erupting Light” is here.

The middle act on the bill was another noteworthy Icelandic group. It was the first Chicago appearance by Sin Fang Bous, the stage name for Sindri Mar Sigfusson, who’s also lead singer of the Icelandic band Seabear. Both of these bands play tuneful folk-pop, though the new album by Sin Fang Bous, Clamour, gives the songs more of a psychedelic or experimental sheen, with an eclectic variety of twinkly sounds livening up the songs. The live show featured less of that nuanced sound, with more emphasis on Sigfusson’s voice and acoustic guitar chords. Although the concert lacked all the glittering surfaces you hear on the record, it was still a good, heartfelt performance, and I look forward to seeing Sigfusson with Seabear if they show up in Chicago someday. (Maybe after they released their next planned album in 2010?) www.myspace.com/sinfangbous

Photos of Múm, Hildur Guðnadóttir and Sin Fang Bous.

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Claire Chase at Velvet Lounge

Fred Anderson’s Velvet Lounge on Cermak is a jazz club, but on Tuesday (Oct. 27), it hosted a contemporary classical music performance. Claire Chase, one of the founders of the International Contemporary Ensemble, stood alone on the stage with her flutes and made some otherworldly noises with those innocent-looking pipes. This was not your grandmother’s flute music. Chase was playing some of the pieces she performs on her new record, Aliento, as well as a few others. Although she was solo for most of the show, she was almost always accompanied by electronic sounds and textures. In some of the pieces, her notes and even the sounds of the keys clicking on her flutes echoed and reverbed back at her, creating alien soundscapes. Fellow ICE member Eric Lamb joined her onstage for Brazilian composer Marcos Balter’s piece “Edgewater,” and the two of them slowly moved in tandem from one side of the stage to the other as their notes danced around one another. Chase closed the show with Paganini’s Caprice No. 24 for violin, using effects to transform it into a duet between “flute and gear.”

www.newfocusrecordings.com/Aliento.html
International Contemporary Ensemble and composer Kaija Saariaho will perform at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 19 at the Museum of
Contemporary Art. www.mcachicago.org

Photos of Claire Chase.

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Choir of Young Believers

A band from Denmark called Choir of Young Believers made one of my favorite records this year, This Is for the White in Your Eyes, and the group’s music sounded just as sublime in concert the other night (Oct. 26) at Schubas. The leader of this Choir, Jannis Noya Makrigiannis, sang beautiful melodies that put most rock tunesmiths to shame. Markigiannis knows how to write (and sing) a melody that makes dramatic leaps rather than sticking with less imaginative notes.

For all intents and purposes, Markigiannis is Choir of Young Believers, but he had a solid backup group (bass, drums and cello) that did an excellent job of playing live arrangements similar to the studio recordings. I’ve had trouble putting my finger on exactly what Choir reminds me of. The Ghostly International label’s Web site compares Choir’s music with classic pop music such as Roy Orbison. I can see that — the music Markigiannis is making with Choir feels like a Scandinavian take on the epic, quasi-orchestral pop music of Phil Spector — but there’s also something about it that reminds me of indie artists from the 1980s, and I hear similarities to other Scandinavian artists such as Loney Dear.

Performing the final show of Choir’s U.S. tour Monday night at Schubas, Markigiannis hit all the high notes. At the end of the main set, he even let loose on guitar, flailing around with charged energy. He returned without his backup band for one solo song during the encore — a cover of the Swedish band First Floor Power’s song “Goddamn Your Finger.” (Choir’s cover of the song appears on the various artists collection Saluting the Crunchy-Frog-a-logue.

Alas, Schubas was not nearly as crowded as it should have been for this show, although the folks who did show up clearly liked what they heard. Monday nights are always a tough night to draw a crowd, and on this Monday, these Danes were competing with a few other high-profile indie-rock shows in Chicago. The Schubas show also featured opening acts Chris Bathgate (doing some nice roots-rock with trumpet and trombone accents) and Brazil’s MoMo (whom I recently saw at the Chicago World Music Festival). It was a motley but interesting mix of musical styles.

http://ghostly.com/artists/choir-of-young-believers
www.myspace.com/choirofyoungbelievers

Photos of Choir of Young Believers.

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Frankenstein by the Hypocrites

When I heard that the audience would be onstage during Hypocrites theater company’s new staging of Frankenstein at the Museum of Contemporary Art, I wondered if we would be given pitchforks and torches. That didn’t happen. I suppose it would violate the fire code to allow a mob of theatergoers to chase after the monster.

However, the audience does chase around the actors, in a manner of speaking. This play, directed by Sean Graney, is being performed “in promenade,” which means that the audience is on the stage at the same time as the actors, who move in and around the spectators. Interesting concept, but difficult to pull off. I haven’t seen the earlier Hypocrites shows that were performed in promenade, though I have seen a couple of other plays using this device. With Frankenstein, the seating area of the MCA’s auditorium has been closed off with a curtain. Audience members sit or stand wherever they can, including benches scattered around the stage. When the actors need to move to a spot occupied by an audience member, they point in that direction as a signal to make way. The problem is that audience members frequently find themselves unable to see what’s going on. You have to keep moving around to get good vantage points, which didn’t bother me too much, but after a while, it got to be too much work just to get a clear view of the action.

More to the point: Does the fact that the audience is surrounding and mingling with the performers have anything to do with the theme of the play? There is one point when the Frankenstein monster is talking about mankind and he seems to be taking in the people surrounding him. At this moment, I got some sense of how the audience functioned as a sort of silent character in the drama. But it was just a passing moment. Perhaps the promenade concept would have worked better if the MCA stage had elevated areas for the actors or more than one overhead mirror to reflect the action.

The famous movie of Frankenstein starring Boris Karloff and its sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein, were not all that faithful to the original novel by Mary Shelley. This stage version isn’t either, although it seems to draw more from the book (which features an articulate monster) than the films. The original film plays on a screen above the play, with the actors occasionally using a remote control to fast-forward the flow of black-and-white images. Graney’s take on Frankenstein vacillates between contemporary and historic settings, or so it seems. Most effectively, it feels like a bad dream. The story jumps ahead at a few points, skipping over months of events. The result is the alarming sensation that Victor Frankenstein (John Byrnes) has conducted his dangerous experiments in a sort of nightmarish haze, waking up one day to realize what he’s done. Whenever Elizabeth (Stacy Stoltz) or “Strange Girl” (Jessie Fisher) show up, it feels like they’re dropping into Frankenstein’s lair from another dimension.

Matt Kahler delivers a strong, visceral performance as the monster, billed here as The Daemon. As in the book, the monster eloquently questions who he is and why Dr. Frankenstein has built him. The play’s final confrontation between monster and maker is moving and dramatic.

Frankenstein continues through Sunday (Nov. 1) at the MCA. www.mcachicago.org

Photo by Paul Metreyeon

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CSO’s new maestro comes to town

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has a new music director — or rather, to be precise, a music director designate. The renowned Italian maestro Riccardo Muti will take up the CSO’s baton in the fall of 2010. Muti is in Chicago now, however, conducting a few concerts this season as a sort of warm-up to his full-time duties next year.

I recently heard Muti give a talk at Orchestra Hall. At one point, he gently mocked young conductors who make faces and gesture wildly when they’re in front of an orchestra. Apparently in a jesting mood, Muti talked about how simple it is to conduct, using Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony as an example in his one-minute lesson on how to move your arms to the tempo.

On Saturday night, I got my first look at how Muti conducts, when he led the CSO and the Chicago Symphony Chorus in a performance of Brahms’ A German Requiem. As much as Muti talked about conducting with the simplest of arm movements, he performed with flowing gestures, sometimes looking as if he were shaping the music in the space in front of him, sculpting sounds out of thin air.

And what beautiful music it was. It was especially impressive to hear a couple of hundred voices from the chorus blending together in an almost seamless whole, sounding just as lovely whether they were singing softly or raising the volume to match the epic quality of the German Biblical lyrics.

On the first night that Muti and the CSO performed A German Requiem, a few overly enthusiastic folks in the audience apparently applauded too early. At least, that’s what Chicago Tribune critic John Von Rhein reported in his review. Brahms’ composition ends with a few moments of silence, and Muti still had his arms up when some people began applauding. Muti kept his arms up, as if to say: “Not yet.” On Saturday night, the audience held its applause until the right moment, when Muti had lowered his arms. And then the applause went on and on. It was a well deserved ovation for Chicago’s new maestro — and the terrific musicians and singers he’ll be conducting next year.

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Dead Man’s Bones at Schubas

As I said in my recent review of the CD by Dead Man’s Bones, this is one peculiar project. And so it was in concert, too. Dead Man’s Bones came to Schubas Wednesday night (Oct. 21) for two sold-out shows. I think it’s a fair assumption that a high percentage of the crowd turned out because the band includes film actor Ryan Gosling. And need I say that a high percentage of the crowd was female? Gosling could have doing just about anything on the stage, and a good number of these fans probably would have shown up anyway. But, given the way the crowd responded to the songs, it was also clear that these fans have been listened to the Dead Man’s Bones album, which sounds a bit like Daniel Johnston teaming up with a school choir to do a musical about haunted houses. (The vocals are on key more often than Johnston’s, however.)

The songs sounded much the same in the concert, with a chorus of children in white sheets and pale ghost makeup crowding onto the stage and singing many of the choruses, to the delight of the audience. One of the girls in the chorus took part into a miniature drama, involving her falling dead and then singing from behind a backlit sheet. The whole spectacle was campy and quirky to the extreme. Even the opening act, if you can call it that, was an exercise in ironic amateurism: a talent show that included an artist drawing a picture then singing, a belly dancer, and a magician.

I expect some people would find the whole Dead Man’s Bones show a bit precious, but I enjoyed it from beginning to end, and unlike many of the folks in attendance, I wasn’t even there to moon over Mr. Gosling. (Don’t forget that he has other collaborators in this band, including another singer-songwriter, Zach Shields.) The celebratory show had some of the zany sense of humor and the “let’s try something weird” attitude that animated the Flaming Lips at their best. It was certainly a very memorable night.

Photos of Dead Man’s Bones.

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Elliott Brood at Schubas

The Canadian trio Elliott Brood calls its music “goth country,” which is a fairly apt description. The group played Tuesday night at Schubas, combining banjo, guitar, ukulele and drums with gritty and sometimes growled singing. Despite the dark side of Elliott Brood’s music, the music came across as upbeat in the live performance. The band played with its own lights, including strings of twinkly little bulbs and some spinning red ambulance lights. A big banner with the band’s name hung from a frame in front of the drum kit, making the stage look like an old-fashioned carnival show. The highlight of the set came at the end, when drummer Stephen Pitkin passed out pie tins and wooden spoons to the crowd for some audience participation. And then, during the encore, opening act the Wooden Sky (who had put on a pretty good set of alt-country) joined Elliott Brood onstage for some dancing and singing along. Suddenly, the goth country tunes seemed like party music.

www.myspace.com/elliottbrood

The evening got off to a nice start with the moody songs of Chicago’s Speck Mountain — another band that might qualify as goth country, but with a slower, more drawn-out beat.

Photos of Elliott Brood, the Wooden Sky and Speck Mountain.

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Wilco does the arena-rock thing

After years and years of seeing concerts in Chicago, I had never actually gone to a show at UIC Pavilion until Sunday night, when Wilco played the first of two nights at the arena. I would so much rather see concerts at a small venue than some big concrete dome designed for sports events. But, alas, there are times when the bands you like become popular — wait, that’s a good thing, right? And then it no longer becomes possible to see the bands inside little rooms the size of Schubas. So you end up in a crowd of thousands of people inside a big concrete dome where the music echoes off the walls like the noise of passing airplanes. But then there can be moments when you feel a sense of awe that all these people around you like that music that you like, too. Maybe you even get a feeling of community.

This week, Wilco moved up to its biggest venue yet in Chicago (unless you count their two Lollapalooza performances). I’d prefer seeing Wilco in one of the big downtown theaters like the Chicago or Auditorium, but this time, they were in the less cozy confines of UIC. And, well, they put on a pretty great show Sunday night, despite the lackluster surroundings. Of course, I never doubted that Wilco was capable of putting on a great arena show, since this versatile, virtuoso band seems to be capable of doing just about anything leader Jeff Tweedy asks of it, from straight-ahead roots rock to stranger and more experimental art rock.

This lineup of Wilco, which has been steady for a few years now, sounded as good as I’ve ever heard them Sunday night. As these six musicians played songs from throughout the Wilco catalogue — including many songs originally played by different Wilco lineups — they made it all sound like one coherent body of work. The clattering curiosities in “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” were still there, but the noise that guitarist Nels Cline was making during that song made it sound more like something that today’s Wilco would record rather than a remnant from a previous Wilco era.

Cline was on fire Sunday night. Within seconds after the band came onstage and began playing the first song of the night, “Wilco (The Song),” Cline was flailing around wildly with his guitar like a maniac. And he kept it up during the second song, “A Shot in the Arm.” It seemed more like the frenzied climax of a concert than the opening. What got into this guy? It’s been clear that Cline is a very talented guitarist, who can run rings around most people, since he joined Wilco, but on Sunday night, he combined that virtuosity with a high level of passion and energy.

The rest of the band sounded great, too, of course. Wilco is, if nothing else, a true ensemble of six musicians who know how to blend their sounds together into a brilliant whole. As usual, Wilco played a sample of songs from throughout its albums. It was nice to see John Stirratt taking over lead vocals for the rarely played A.M. song “It’s Just That Simple,” and I was glad to hear a few songs from the album I love that a lot of other people dismiss, A Ghost Is Born. Wilco even dug out one obscurity, the bouncy ditty “Just a Kid,” from the soundtrack to The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie.

Tweedy asked the crowd to sing the lyrics to “Jesus etc.” and stepped away from the mike for virutally the entire song, and the crowd happily complied. The encore included a surprisingly long string of songs from Being There: “Kingpin,” “Monday,” “Outtasite (Outta Mind),” “Hoodoo Voodoo.” And then, just when it seemed like the show had ended after some 2 hours and 15 minutes, the band launched into one more song, the lively, absurd “I’m a Wheel.”

At one point during the show, Tweedy asked, “Having a good time? Enjoying the arena rock?” The answer was: Yes. But I’d still rather see Wilco somewhere other than an arena.

Set list:
Wilco (the Song) / A Shot in the Arm / Bull Black Nova / You Are My Face / I Am Trying to Break Your Heart / One Wing / Misunderstood / At Least That’s What You Said / Deeper Down / Impossible Germany / It’s Just That Simple / I’ll Fight / Handshake Drugs / Sunny Feeling / Jesus etc. / Theologians / I’m Always in Love / Hate It Here / Walken / I’m the Man Who Loves You / ENCORE: You Never Know / Heavy Metal Drummer / Just a Kid / Kingpin / Monday / Outtasite (Outta Mind) / Hoodoo Voodoo / I’m a Wheel

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Lincoln Hall opens

Lincoln Hall opened Friday in the same space where the 3 Penny Cinema used to show movies, on Lincoln Avenue just north of Fullerton. This is the same neighborhood where the Lounge Ax used to be one of the Chicago rock scene’s beacons. And with Wax Trax Records located just a short distance away, this stretch of Lincoln was a major destination for music fans. Not much has been happening in this part of Lincoln Park lately, as far as music goes, but that’s changing now with the opening of this new venue.

Run by the same fine folks who book so many great concerts over at Schubas, Lincoln Hall is three times bigger than its sister venue, holding about 500 people. I paid the place a visit for the first time on Saturday (Oct. 17) when Liam Finn was the headline act. To be honest, Lincoln Hall didn’t look all that big when I was standing on the main floor. It still has the cozy feel of a small venue, and that might be because the main floor’s capacity is only 169, almost exactly the size of Schubas. The difference is that there’s a large balcony with lots of prime viewing space along the railing. And boy does this room have a high ceiling. The long black drapes hanging behind the stage seem like they go up and up and up. The inside of Lincoln Hall looks a bit like a small music club where the ceiling has been lifted up. The place doesn’t have as much character as Schubas — at least, not yet. The place is brand spanking new after all. I appreciated the lack of posters, advertisements and decorations on the walls of the music room. With lots of stained wood and wrought-iron railings (at least, that’s what they looked like), Lincoln Hall is a classy-looking place. The decor is restrained — not all that exciting, maybe, but hey, the music’s what makes the excitement, right?

The sound at Saturday’s show was excellent. From what I read in the Chicago Tribune, it seemed as if the owners held off for a week on their official grand opening while they work out bugs like sound quality, but I didn’t see any bugs that needed to be worked out on Saturday. The sound was crystal clear. Even when I was standing near the stage, I didn’t really feel much need to use earplugs. I think that’s because the loudest speakers in the place were the ones hanging up on the ceiling way above my head. I did notice at one point that I was picking up too much sound from the bass amp on the stage, throwing off the balance of the mix I was hearing, but that’s probably an unavoidable thing for people who stand right next to the band.

I was up in the balcony for just a few minutes at the beginning of the night, and I thought the view of the stage from up there was excellent. The views were good on the main floor, too, of course. Nice sight lines all around. I’m told that about 300 people were there for Saturday’s concert, and with that many people, it was comfortable moving around. We’ll see what it’s like when it sells out.

At Saturday’s concert, a team of employees helped the bands set up and remove their equipment in between sets. There’s a sound board on the side of the stage as well as a large control station at the back of the main room. It all looks highly professional.

But… Memo to the guys running the lights: Would you mind laying off a bit on all those red lights? This is a problem that’s not unique to Lincoln Hall. Lots of music venues seem to think that concerts look cool when the musicians are bathed in a red or pink haze. And I doubt if most fans think there’s anything wrong with that. As a photographer, however, I hate red light. It really makes for lousy pictures. Those red lights knock out just about every other color in the spectrum, and all you’re left with is an image that might as well be black and white. There were a lot of red and pink lights Saturday night, especially when Liam Finn was playing. Once in a while, there was a burst of white light, and to me it felt like: Hallelujah! At last I can take a decent picture. So, if it’s not too much to ask, a little bit more of that white light would be fabulous, guys. I’m just saying…

Saturday’s show started off with Greycoats, who sounded a bit like Coldplay, playing polished pop-rock. Next up was the Chicago band Unicycle Loves You, which played some pretty good power pop. Nice melodic hooks and a tight sound, though I’d like to see Unicycle scruff things up a bit more.

Headliner Liam Finn usually puts on an entertaining show, and he was in good spirits Saturday night, especially when he used his looping pedals to go a little bit nuts with guitar solos and drum solos on top of the chords he’d just been playing. His mellower ballads sounded lovely, too. Finn treated the crowd to a couple of loud and lively cover songs. Noting that his sound guy was celebrating his birthday, and that it was also the birthday of someone in the audience, Finn played a rocking version of the Beatles’ “Birthday.” And during the encore, he cranked out some great Neil Young riffing on “Cinnamon Girl,” noting: “I wanna play in a Neil Young cover band!”

For more details on Lincoln Hall, see www.lincolnhallchicago.com

Photos of Liam Finn, Unicycle Loves You and Greycoats.

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Dead Man’s Bones: CD Review

When film and TV actors make records, the results can be pretty embarrassing. Just listen to the Golden Throats collection to hear some of the most misguided music ever recorded. It’s hilarious, but I doubt if any of the people involved intended it to be hilarious. In all fairness, though, some actors do have musical talent. It’s almost natural that people in the performing arts would cross over from one field of entertainment to another. Last year, Zooey Deschanel proved that she’s more than just a pretty face (and talented actress) when she teamed up with M. Ward as the musical duo She & Him, recording some delightful old-fashioned pop songs. I’m not yet convinced I should spend much time listening to music by Keanu Reeves, Russell Crowe, Billy Bob Thornton or Scarlett Johannson, but I’ll try not to be too dismissive about them just because they’re movie stars.

The latest film star to cross over into music is Ryan Gosling. OK, so he’s not really a huge star, but he is a fairly popular film actor who made his name with starring roles in indie films Half Nelson and Lars and the Real Girl and more mainstream movies including The Notebook. And now, he’s recording music with a group called Dead Man’s Bones, with another actor, Zach Shields, as his main collaborator. Their self-titled debut album is out now on the prestigious Anti label.

This is not your typical movie-star vanity recording project. This is one strange record. It sounds like something you might discover in a Salvation Army bin of used records, like some old recording project from a grade school that went awry when a couple of slightly demented musicians were put in charge of the choir. Is the lo-fi oddness of this whole thing a calculated move by Shield and Gosling? Sure, I suppose it might be, but so what? I don’t doubt that some people are going to hear this and say it’s yet another movie-star musical endeavor gone bad. But Shields and Gosling have come up with an oddball artifact that’s entertaining and frequently haunting.

Their signing sometimes resembles the howling of ghosts in a haunted house, while the guest vocalists from the Silverlake Conservatory of Music Children’s Choir make it all seem very naive and innocent. It helps that most of the songs are fairly catchy, like primitive rock, gospel and folk tunes being played late night in a basement with little more than acoustic guitar, piano and tambourine. The record meanders off a few too many times, but so do most dreams — and more than anything else, this record feels like a dream. At the end of it, you wake up, trying to remember what just happened. Did you really hear what you think you just heard?

www.myspace.com/deadmansbones
www.deadmansbones.net

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Scot-U.K. invasion

Does everything sound better in a Scottish accent? Sometimes I think so, but that’s probably just a personal quirk of mine. I do love the sound of Scottish singers, the way that burr bends the words. If you’re like me and you like Scottish music, the Empty Bottle was the place to be on Monday night. Two of the three bands were from Scotland: headliners the Twilight Sad and the cheekily named We Were Promised Jetpacks. Earlier on their tour, these bands were playing together with another Scottish outfit, Frightened Rabbit, but on this leg of the tour, they teamed up with a great band from Brighton, England, BrakesBrakesBrakes.

It seemed like the band playing second, We Were Promised Jetpacks, drew the most fans in Chicago, judging from the way the crowd responded, singing along to many of the lyrics. But all three bands received strong applause and deserved it. BrakesBrakesBrakes is known as Brakes in England, but the band calls itself BrakesBrakesBrakes in the U.S. to avoid a legal conflict with an American band called Brakes. As far as I’m concerned, these blokes are THE Brakes, so I’d rather just call them Brakes.

I’ve been a fan of Brakes since the band released Give Blood in 2005, and the group’s latest CD, Touchdown, is another strong recording. Opening Monday night’s show, Brakes slammed through a series of quick songs, tossing off these punk, post-punk, country and rock gems like musical haikus. Several of the songs end abruptly, as soon as Brakes have said everything they want to say. The shortest song of the night was so short that Brakes played it twice: the 2005 political commentary “Cheney,” which consists of about 30 seconds of the name “Cheney!” being chanted over and over followed by the eloquent plea: “Stop being such a dick!” The band also threw in a cover of Camper Van Beethoven’s “Shut Us Down,” but the highlights were some of the now-classic songs from Brakes’ 2005 debut and new tracks like the catchy “Don’t Take Me to Space (Man)” and the wistful “Leaving England.” And in case anyone was thinking that Brakes are a bit like Art Brut, guitarist Tom White kicked off one song by asking the rest of the band, “Ready, Art Brut?”

We Were Promised Jetpacks played most of the songs from their recent debut record, These Four Walls, stretching some of that out. Not that this was anything like jam music. It was just that these lads seemed to love feeling the pulse of their riffs and rhythms, so they luxuriated in that sound. And so did the crowd. Singer Adam Thompson knows how to belt. I was amazed at how far back he got from the microphone at some points, signing at maximum volume, his voice rising above all that other noise. Noting that this was the last night of their U.S. tour, Thompson said he was looking forward to going home to Scotland. “I need my mom and my mashed potatoes,” he said.

Fellow Glaswegians the Twilight Sad raised the intensity level even higher for a riveting, cathartic set at the end of the night. Playing songs from the band’s excellent 2007 CD Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters as well as the new Forget the Night Ahead, the Twilight Sad played loud, passionate post-punk. Lead singer James Graham holds the mike in his hand and roams the stage, raising his eyes to the ceiling or dropping down to his knees like a man who’s nearly overcome with the music and words passing through his mouth. When the band finished its set with guitars pressed into amplifiers for squalls of feedback, it was clear that there would be no encore. That ending was too climatic to follow up with another song.

Photos of the Twilight Sad, We Were Promised Jetpacks and BrakesBrakesBrakes.

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Loney Dear returns

On Saturday night (Oct.10), as I was coming out of the play Fedra at Lookingglass, I decided on the spur of the moment to head over to the Bottom Lounge for a concert by Sweden’s Loney Dear. I showed up in time to see most of the set by Asobi Seksu, which was properly loud and shoe-gazy… But then I was disappointed to see that a number of Asobi Seksu fans left before the set by headliner Loney Dear. This terrific Swedish band ended up playing to a fairly small crowd. Maybe the crowd wouldn’t have looked so small if this show had been at a smaller venue like Schubas, where Loney Dear has played in the past, but the Bottom Lounge room tends to dwarf the audience. The Bottom Lounge vibe is OK for a rock show, but when the music’s mellower or folkier (as it is with Loney Dear) the old-fashioned concert-hall vibe at a place like Schubas somehow seems more fitting.

Since the last time I saw Loney Dear, I’ve been listening more to the band’s most recent CD, Dear John, which has a number of wonderfully subtle songs. I especially like the hushed, heartfelt track “Harm/Slow,” and I was glad to hear the Bottom Lounge quiet down as Loney Dear main man Emil Svanängen sang “Harm” (I believe he sang only the first song in this two-song medley).

I didn’t have my camera, so I can’t offer any of my own photos from the Loney Dear show, but check out this cool set of images from Kirstie Shanley

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Califone goes to the movies

The Chicago band Califone’s music has always been cinematic, with lots of atmospheric touches, so it was not all that surprising to learn that Califone leader Tim Rutili was making a movie. On Saturday and Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Rutili’s film, All My Friends Are Funeral Singers, screened while the band played along to the soundtrack. Or something like that. You see, Califone has a new album, which is also called All My Friends Are Funeral Singers, but it’s not really a soundtrack. It includes some music that appears in the film, but it also has other songs.

And when Califone played in front of the movie screen this weekend at the MCA, the band was also appearing in the film up on the screen. The film is about a haunted house in Indiana, and the members of Califone play a ghostly house band. The way the film was shown, you could hear some music from from the film, while Califone supplemented that soundtrack with even more music — rattling, jangling percussion and droning guitar, keyboards, violin and banjo. Rutili sang a bit, when the film left space for a couple of actual songs, but most of the time, it was more like Califone was adding emotional accents to the film as it unfolded. The music and images meshed together artfully.

Rutili’s film was pretty impressive in its own right. This is the sort of independent film that probably wouldn’t make it much further than the film-festival circuit, short on plot, heavy on mood, but it’s imaginative and well crafted, with decent acting. Like Califone’s music, the film is spooky and a little rough around the edges. Seeing it with a live supplemental score was a memorable experience.

After the movie and an intermission, Califone came back and played about 40 minutes of music without visual accompaniment, including several of the songs from the new album that don’t actually appear in the film. The band ambled through these songs, taking a couple of long pauses due to a broken string… which led to some humorous stage banter. Rutili remarked that it was an unprofessional set, which Califone can get away in its hometown but perhaps not in other cities. Maybe so, but it made the performance seem all the more intimate.

www.myspace.com/califonemusic

(Photo from All My Friends Are Funeral Singers by John Adams.)

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Faust at the Empty Bottle

Along with bands like Can and Neu, the originators of the early ’70s German art rock known as krautrock included Faust. On Wednesday (Oct. 7), Faust played in the Chicago for the first time in more than decade. If Faust’s guitarist-bassist-singer-general-all-around-mischief-maker Jean-Hervé Peron had his facts right, Faust hasn’t played here since a gig at the Lounge Ax in 1994. At the Lounge Ax show, Faust was down to two musicians: Peron and drummer Werner “Zappi” Diermaier. For this return concert, Faust had expanded, with guitarist-keyboardist James Johnston and guitarist-singer Geraldine Swayne. “This time, we are a bit more numerous,” Peron said.

Faust is known for its unusual stage antics, breaking the boundaries of what bands are expected to do in concert, and Faust did not disappoint at the Empty Bottle. A cement mixer was sitting on the floor in front of the stage, and I began to get worried that I was standing too close to this machine. Some Bottle employees got things ready by breaking beer bottles inside the mixer. During the first song, Peron signaled to Faust’s roady that they machine should be turned on. It started spinning around, making a churning rhythm that served as the beat for Faust’s first song of the night. Peron dropped some rocks from plastic cups into the cement mixer, then he got down onto the main floor and threw more beer bottles into the cement mixer with a whipping motion of his arm. (At this point, I was backing away from the machine as much as I could, since bits of rock and dust were flying.)

Later in the show, Diermaier took out some sort of power sander, threw off a bunch of sparks, and applied the power tool to his cymbals. (I’m pretty sure at least one provision of the fire code was violated at this show.) During one improvised number, Swayne left the stage and painted an abstract picture on the wall next to the stage. Some of the audience sat down so more people could see what she was painting, but the Bottle’s layout didn’t make it easy to experience what was going on. And then, during the encore, Peron and Swayne led as much of the crowd as they could over to the other side of the Empty Bottle’s bar, where Swayne played piano. Peron got on top of the piano and sang unamplified. Then he gestured to the audience with a bottle of bleach.

Throughout all of this activity, Faust played classic songs and some new ones. The music was dominated by strong bass grooves. Faust pulled together its clattering, thumping sounds with an offbeat sense of how different musical voices can mesh. As Diermaier recalled, somewhat touchingly: “People said this is bullshit, but we kept on playing it. I’m talking about krautrock.”

Opening act Bobby Conn played with Monica Boubou on violin and electronic drum beats, slamming through a series of hard-edged disco-glam-prog tunes. And then Boubou joined in with Faust for a couple of songs. It was a strange night. I survived, but I don’t recommend standing next to the cement mixer.

Photos of Faust and Bobby Conn.

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Youth Group at Schubas

After seeing the story of London’s Black Plague and listening to some delightful classical music during Black Violet (see my previous post), I stopped at Schubas last night (Oct. 6) for a show by Australia’s Youth Group.

I’ve enjoyed Youth Group’s 2005 album Skeleton Jar and the group’s 2006 album Casino Twilight Dogs. Both are filled with smart, melodic tunes that stick in your head. At times, Youth Group verges on the sort of mellow indie pop played by groups like Death Cab For Cutie, but there’s also a quality to the guitar lines that reminds me more of ’60s psychedelic rock channeled through contemporary indie rock. I’m less familiar with Youth Group’s latest CD, The Night Is Ours, but those new songs sounded pretty good alongside the old ones on Tuesday night.

The heart of this band is the hirsute singer-guitarist Toby Martin, who has the sort of fine mellow voice that’s perfect for carrying an anthem like “Forever Young.” That voice also meshes well with the louder guitars on Youth Group songs. The band doesn’t reinvent its songs in concert, but it does play them with a sort of insistent intensity. Schubas was not sold out for these musicians who’d made the trip from Sydney, but the room filled up somewhat by the time Youth Group played, and the audience showed its appreciation for what it was hearing. (I just wish the band had played one of my favorite songs off their last album, “Sorry.”)

www.myspace.com/youthgroupmusic
www.youthgroup.com.au

The first act of the show was the Wiitala Brothers, who were celebrating the release of a new CD. They sounded like a pretty solid rock duo, closing their set with a couple of nice, melodic ballads. Next up was Other Girls. Not surprisingly, Other Girls was actually four guys (following the trend of all-male bands like Girls and Women). They sounded an awful lot like other recent bands such as the Walkmen, with that style of strained singing, so I can’t say they were all that distinctive, but they won me over with their energy.

Photos of Youth Group, Wiitala Brothers and Other Girls.

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A ‘Graphic’ Concert: ‘Black Violet’


Combining music with pictures and stories is nothing new, but the multimedia project Black Violet does it in a way that’s pretty unusual. It’s both a series of classical music concerts (performed by Chicago’s Fifth House Ensemble) and a serialized graphic novel (by Ezra Clayton Daniels). The project got under way last night (Oct. 6) at the Chicago Cultural Center with the first of three “acts.” 5HE (as the chamber group calls itself for short) played music by Johannes Brahms, Walter Piston, Jonathan Keren, Heitor Villa Lobos and Greg Simon, while a series of comic-book-style drawings about the Black Plague striking London in the 17th century were projected on a screen behind the musicians.

In a way, the experience was similar to watching an animated film with a live soundtrack, except that the pictures were not actually animated. The protagonist of this story is Violet, a black cat who’s trying to survive on the streets of London at a time when people superstitiously believed that black cats were spreading the plague. Violet and the other characters speak in cartoon bubbles, so watching the story unfold on the screen felt like reading a book.

What about the music? As with just about any combination of instrumental music with pictures or stories, it’s hard to say what precisely the music has to do with the images or narrative, other than setting a tempo or creating a mood. The music seemed appropriate for the story, even if it didn’t offer any direct commentary on Violet and her travails. Some of the pieces that 5HE performed were split apart. The various movements of Brahms’ Horn Trio Opus 40 were interspersed among the works by other composers, for example. I especially enjoyed the delicate, playful flute-and-bassoon duets in Villa Lobos’ “Bachianas Brasilerias” No. 6. Piston’s Divertimento for 9 Instruments gave the large ensemble a chance to show what it can do with a full array of players. And Keren’s “Hungary Is Far Away” and Simon’s “Kites at Seal Rock” added a more contemporary inventiveness to the concert.

Black Violet will be performed again at 8 p.m. Thursday (Oct. 8) at SPACE in Evanston. Then comes Act 2 (7 p.m. Feb. 1 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 8 p.m. Feb. 4 at SPACE) and Act 3 (7 p.m. April 5 and 8 p.m. April 8 at SPACE). The shows at the Chicago Cultural Center are free, but tickets at SPACE are $20. I hope to catch the rest of this series — to find out what happens to Violet, and also to hear some wonderful music.

Watch a “trailer” for Black Violet.

And speaking of shows that combination music with pictures and stories, this Saturday and Sunday, Califone is playing a live soundtrack at the Museum of Contemporary Art for a film by band leader Tim Rutili, All My Friends Are Funeral Singers.

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Vertebrats reunion

The Vertebrats, one of the great original rock bands from the University of Illinois campus in Champaign-Urbana back in the early ’80s, reunited this past weekend to celebrate their 30th anniversary. I did a story for the “Eight Forty Eight” show on Chicago Public Radio WBEZ 91.5 FM about one of the more fascinating aspects of the Vertebrats — the fact that the band’s song “Left in the Dark” has been covered by at least nine other musical acts, including the Replacements, Uncle Tupelo and Courtney Love. You can stream or download that radio story on the WBEZ site. (And here is the article I wrote about the same topic for Pioneer Press in 2003.)

But there’s a lot more to the Vertebrats than that one song, as great as it is. The Vertebrats were together at a time (1979 to 1982) when it was much harder for bands to record their music and release it than it is today. As a result, it was quite a while before any of their songs came out on CD. A couple of decades after the Vertebrats were history, Parasol Records put out a collection of their studio tapes called A Thousand Day Dream and a compilation of live recordings, Continuous Shows. You can buy the CDs from Parasol. Listening to those old tapes, some of them recorded as demos, you wonder what the Vertebrats might have been able to accomplish if they’d stayed together and landed a record deal. Then again, maybe it’s better to have the band in a sort of treasured time capsule, specific to those few years.

The Vertebrats have reunited a few times, playing a show or two in Champaign and drawing a crowd of their faithful fans. Three of the original Vertebrats (Kenny Draznik, Matt Brandabur and Jimmy Wald) got together this past weekend, playing Oct. 2 at Cowboy Monkey and Oct. 3 at the High Dive. Bassist Roy Axford was unable to make it to the shows due to a death in his family, but two stalwart members of the Champaign music scene ably filled in: Mark Rubel on Oct. 2 and Paul Chastain on Oct. 3. And with original Vertebrats drummer Wald playing rhythm guitar now, John Richardson took over on drums.

The band sounded great both nights, playing a whole slew of catchy garage-rock anthems with a direct, unassuming attitude. Draznik delivered most of the lead vocals, sounding not all that different from the way he sounded years ago on those tapes, and Brandabur added the spiky guitar licks that gave those songs jolts of strange energy. A sizable group of Vertebrats fans danced almost nonstop near the stage — and at the end of the second show, a fair number of them got onto the stage. Vertebrats songs kept running through my head on Sunday after seeing these two shows. Don’t hold your breath for another chance to see the Vertebrats in concert, but do check out their recordings.

During the Oct. 2 show at Cowboy Monkey, three Champaign groups played short sets of a few songs each before the Vertebrats took the stage: Milktoast, the Outnumbered and the Dream Fakers. I especially would have liked to hear more songs from the Outnumbered, who played a reunion show on Memorial Day weekend, but this wasn’t really their night. As members of the band noted, they were finally getting a chance to play on the same bill with the Vertebrats, a band that broke up just around the time that the Outnumbered formed.

Photos of the Vertebrats, Milktoast, Outnumbered and Dream Fakers.

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Van Morrison does ‘Astral Weeks’

For a few years now, it’s been trendy for musicians to perform live versions of entire albums from their back catalogues. Bruce Springsteen was in Chicago recently, playing all of “Born to Run.” And last Tuesday night (Sept. 29), it was Van Morrison’s turn. Playing to a sold-out Chicago Theatre, Morrison performed every song from his 1968 album “Astral Weeks.” Although it’s praised by many critics as one of the best records of all time, “Astral Weeks” is not exactly filled with hits. If Morrison had wanted to please audiences with a bunch of radio hits, he probably would have chosen to do his 1970 album “Moondance.” Instead, he played the strange half-jazz, half-orchestral vamps of “Astral Weeks,” the album that established his reputation as a vocalist who can mumble, moan and holler with a sort of mystical intensity.

A lot of the music on the original “Astral Weeks” felt like it was improvised. The musicians sounded as if they were feeling their way into the songs, tiptoeing around Morrison’s dominating voice. So it was no surprise that Tuesday night’s performance was not a note-for-note duplication of the record. In fact, Morrison even juggled the order of songs. Instead of closing the suite with “Slim Slow Slider,” he played that song third and moved “Madame George” into the final slot.

Morrison was in fine voice Tuesday, delivering the songs in his distinctive throaty tones. Morrison’s a highly emotive singer, wringing so much feeling out of every note, and yet he never visibly demonstrates much passion onstage. Hiding his eyes behind dark glasses and wearing a hat, Morrison shows little flair for showmanship, other than occasionally rearing back his head when he’s singing an especially demanding note. He never says a word to the audience. The only time he said anything audible on Tuesday was when he wanted more volume in his monitor and he barked, “Turn it up!” to someone off in the curtains.

Morrison simply isn’t the kind of performer who acts out the drama of his songs onstage, but that doesn’t mean his singing is any less impressive. He sang the tunes from “Astral Weeks” with what seemed like fresh emotion, while his nine-piece band played trembling arrangements similar, but not identical, to those on the record.

“Astral Weeks” (which Morrison also released recently on a live CD) was the second half of Tuesday’s concert. Earlier in the night, he sang a couple of his best-known hits, “Brown-Eyed Girl” and “Have I Told You Lately,” along with several more obscure songs from his later albums. Morrison and his band sounded at time like lounge lizards, but these talented musicians were versatile, easily shifting into blues, folk or garage rock.

When the “Astral Weeks” section of the concert came to an end, Morrison picked up a harmonica and launched into the extended solo that opens “Mystic Eyes,” a song he did in the mid-’60s with his original rock band, Them. A couple of minutes later, “Mystic Eyes” slid right into Them’s biggest hit, “Gloria.” Morrison and his musicians spelled out the song’s title with those famous call-and-response vocals, and the theater came alive.

And then Morrison was gone. Almost as soon as he’d left the stage, the house lights in the Chicago Theatre came on. It was clear that Morrison was going to follow his usual pattern of not doing an encore. It was also clear from the applause that his fans would have liked another song. But that’s the thing about seeing a Van Morrison concert: You know he’s not going to give you everything you want, but what you do get from him is still pretty great.

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New plays in Chicago

Short reviews of a few plays I’ve seen lately.

AN APOLOGY FOR THE COURSE AND OUTCOME OF CERTAIN EVENTS DELIVERED BY DOCTOR JOHN FAUSTUS ON THIS HIS FINAL EVENING by Theater Oobleck — Another masterpiece in miniature by Evanston playwright Mickle Maher, who wrote one of my favorite plays of recent years, The Strangerer. I did not see An Apology… the first time that Theater Oobleck presented it several years ago, with Maher in the title role. This time Colm O’Reilly plays Doctor Faustus, while David Shapiro takes on the unusual role that O’Reilly played in the original production: a silent Mephistopheles, who just sits and listens for the entire play as Faustus delivers his desperate, dying monologue. Even the way that audiences enter the Chopin Theatre basement’s performance space to see An Apology… is dramatic and peculiar. I won’t give away much at all about this show, because as much of it as possible should be a surprise. Maher’s writing is a brilliant, black-humor variation on the Faust legend about a man selling his soul to the devil. This version goes off in some strange directions, including a riff on 7-Eleven stores. O’Reilly delivers every single syllable with sad-eyed intensity. The entire experience is riveting, and not to be missed.
www.theateroobleck.com

ANIMAL CRACKERS at the Goodman Theatre — This re-creation of a 1928 musical-comedy show starring the Marx Brothers is a pretty unusual thing to see on a major stage in 2009. Like the movie based on the play (one of my favorite screen comedies), Animal Crackers is wildly uneven. The scenes featuring Groucho, Chico and Harpo are hilariously madcap, but the romantic subplots featuring everyone else are often clunky. So, no, the play by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind is not a great one, and if the Marx Brothers hadn’t starred in it, it probably would be forgotten. The Goodman production does a decent job of making those non-Marx scenes tolerable, or even enjoyable, especially when the cast is signing and dancing. Joey Slotnick, Jonathan Brody and Molly Breenan bring a lot of fun and panache to the Groucho, Chico and Harpo roles. Seeing them perform is a bit like watching a tribute band re-creating the songs of a more famous artist. The Marx Brothers were so fabulous that you can’t help enjoying this, even though it’s just a good imitation of the real thing. Go into this show with the attitude that you’re about to experience an old-fashioned piece of entertainment, a glimpse of what stage comedy was like more than 80 years ago.
www.goodmantheatre.org

THE MERCY SEAT at Profiles Theatre — Once again, playwright Neil LaBute bluntly probes the darkness of the human mind. Or should I say: the male mind? Like many of LaBute’s films and plays, The Mercy Seat features a man who doesn’t follow the better angels of his nature. This one-act, two-character drama takes place in New York on Sept. 12, 2001. Ben (Darrell W. Cox) and his lover, Abby (Cheryl Graeff), argue about some big life decisions in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Ben is a craven coward, with an appalling plan for dealing with some of the problems in his life. At moments, Abby seems to be enabling Ben’s cowardice, but at other times, she attacks him with acidic fury. Cox and Graeff are both superb in these difficult, complex roles. Like most of LaBute’s work, this play is not exactly what you would call a pleasant experience, but it is ultimately powerful and emotionally wrenching.
www.profilestheatre.org

Theater Oobleck photo: Kristin Basta. Goodman Theatre photo: Eric Y. Exit. Profiles Theatre photo: Wayne Karl

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Os Mutantes at Subt

Os Mutantes were one of the great bands from the late ’60s/early ’70s era of psychedelic Brazilian music known as tropicalia — but most of us American rock fans didn’t discover these “mutants” until much later. Some of the group’s original members reunited in 2006, playing at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago among other venues, performing its technicolor tunes for a new generation of fans. And now Os Mutantes has released its first new album in 35 years, Haih… Ou Amortecedor…. It’s a reunion of questionable authenticity in one sense — only one member of Os Mutantes’ original core trio, Sergio Dias, is in the new version of the band. But Dias and the six other musicians he has assembled certainly have the same spirit as the original Os Mutantes, and one thing that’s especially exciting about the new record is the participation of another Brazilian tropicalia legend, Tom Ze, who co-wrote six of the 13 songs with Dias.

Os Mutantes played Sunday night (Sept. 27) at Subterranean in Chicago. I would have thought this band could fill a bigger venue in Chicago, but I suppose tropicalia remains a somewhat obscure genre, beloved by a small cult. It was a little disappointing to see these musical legends playing in front of such a small crowd, but by the end of the night, the audience was clapping and calling out with such rabid enthusiasm that all of my disappointment vanished. This was one of the best receptions I’ve seen any group get in Chicago for a while, and the Brazilians were beaming with big smiles on the stage as they brought down the house.

Classic songs from the early days of Os Mutantes (available on the highly recommended collection Everything Is Possible!) dominated the first part of the show, then the band played several songs from the new record in the middle of the set. The new songs fit quite well with the old ones. And then the band returned to some of its oldies at the end of the show. Singer Bia Mendes did a fine job singing the female vocal parts originally handled by Rita Lee.

What was striking more than anything else was Dias’ guitar playing. I hadn’t realized just what a virtuoso he is, and it was wonderful watching him playing peculiar psychedelic riffs, along with some guitar licks that even sounded a bit like Thin Lizzy or the Byrds. And then he really stretched out on some long guitar solos, including an amazing extended version of “Ando Meio Desligado” near the end of the set. For its encore, Os Mutantes played one of its strangest early epics, “Panis Et Circenses,” and it was a delight to hear the band singings its kaleidoscopic harmonies.
www.myspace.com/osmutantes66

The opening band was Brooklyn-based DeLeon, which claims to perform “15th Century Spanish indie rock infused with the deeply mysterious and entrancing cadences of the ancient Sephardic tradition.” The group sang some of its songs in Ladino, the Judaeo-Spanish language, and I preferred those to the lyrics translated into English. A couple of the songs had some lovely counterpart harmonies, and most of the songs were pretty good. But DeLeon was playing without two of its regular members, including the drummer, using prerecorded backing tracks that reduced the sense of spontaneity.
www.myspace.com/ilovedeleon

Photos of Os Mutantes and DeLeon.

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Death at the Empty Bottle

Death, with members of Rough Francis
Death, with members of Rough Francis

One of this year’s best records was actually recorded back in the mid-’70s, but this is the first time most of the music has ever been released. The band was called Death, and it played something that sounded an awful lot like punk rock. That’s not what you’d expect three African-American brothers from Detroit to play in that era (or any era, for that matter), but these guys liked what they heard from groups like the Stooges, MC5 and Alice Cooper and put their own stamp on that proto-punk sound. Death’s demo tapes finally surfaced this year when Chicago label Drag City put them out under the title …For the Whole World to See. I was initially attracted to this album by the great story behind it, which you can read here in a New York Times story with the apt headline: “The Band That Was Punk Before Punk Was Punk.”

But beyond having a great back story, this is also a great album, with both the sheer force of classic punk and inventive bass, guitar and drum parts kicking together in those slightly irregular patterns that are the key ingredient in so many great rock songs. Death’s music reminds me of bands that came later, including Television, the Dirtbombs and the Damned, though it’s doubtful anyone in those bands ever heard a note of Death.

Death has reunited for just a handful of shows, including a concert Saturday (Sept. 26) at the Empty Bottle. (It was a late show, so I was able to catch both this concert as well as the earlier Schubas show by the Rural Alberta Advantage.)

The original lineup of Death was brothers David Hackney (on guitar), Bobby Hackney (bass and vocals) and Dannis Hackney (drums). David died, so for these reunion shows, Bobby and Dannis are being joined by a replacement guitarist, Bobbie Duncan. The big question was whether these guys would be able to pull off the terrific songs they recorded 35 years ago.

The answer is yes. But with an asterisk.

When Hackney brothers and Duncan rocked out on the Death songs, it sounded great. In case you hadn’t noticed all those cool bass lines, drum rolls and riffs on the original record, they came through loud and clear in concert, and Bobby Hackney nailed the lead vocals (skipping past a few high notes). The crowd loved it, and a rambunctious mosh pit broke out, a twisting mass of young bodies colliding with one another in front of the stage. The Hackney brothers must have found all this a little strange — a mob of mostly twentysomething white kids going nuts over the music they wrote more than three decades ago in complete obscurity.

Death
Death
Death
Death
Death
Death
Death
Death
Death
Death
Death
Death, with a picture of the band’s deceased founding member David Hackney

Here’s the asterisk, however: The guys in Death did not quit playing music after Death disbanded in the mid-’70s. They went on to play R&B under the name 4th Movement and reggae under the name Lambsbread. And on Saturday night, they supplemented the Death songs with a number of these R&B/reggae tunes, which were not the greatest fit with the punk repertoire. Some of the fans respectfully waited through these songs for another chance to mosh. A few people in the back of the room were less respectful, shouting out things like, “This song sucks!” From what I could hear, the reggae and R&B songs were just so-so, nothing as distinctive as the Death songs. One or two of these songs would have been sufficient. The Death show also came to a grinding halt on two occasions, when the musicians huddled onstage in darkness trying to work out technical difficulties or some other unspecified problem, with bothering to tell the audience what was going on. During one of these unexplained breaks, some people in the crowd got into some sort of shouting match. The whole thing felt weird. But then Bobby Hackney stepped back to the microphone and simply said, “Death!” and everything seemed to be right again, as the band charged into “Freakin Out.”

Death, with members of Rough Francis
Death, with members of Rough Francis
Death, with members of Rough Francis
Death, with members of Rough Francis
Death
Death

At the end of the set, the members of opening act Rough Francis (including a second generation of Hackneys) joined forces with Death for the anthemic “Politicians in My Eyes.” For an encore, Death played an unreleased song from the Death era, which Bobby introduced as one of his late brother’s favorites, a song with “Rock and roll!” in the chorus.

Overall, the show was a mixed success, with moments of triumph along with a few fumbles. Still, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Rough Francis played a strong opening set — so strong that some audience members tried to get them to play an encore. The first band of the night, Tyvek, played primitive punk rock with an offbeat, catchy sensibility.
www.myspace.com/deathprotopunk
www.dragcity.com/artists/death

Rough Francis
Rough Francis
Rough Francis
Rough Francis
Rough Francis
Rough Francis
Rough Francis
Rough Francis
Tyvek
Tyvek
Tyvek
Tyvek
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Rural Alberta Advantage

The Rural Alberta Advantage put out an excellent record last year called Hometowns, with a sound that reminded me of Neutral Milk Hotel. The record received more attention this year after the Saddle Creek picked it up for wider release, and the trio — Nils Edenloff, Amy Cole and Paul Banwat — came to Chicago last night (Sept. 26) for the second time in a couple of months. Their late show at Schubas sold out, so an early show was added. Clearly, more people are discovering this band, so expect them to be playing bigger venues in the future.

Edenloff, who grew up in Alberta and sings about his home province in some of the sings, is the singer-songwriter-guitarist-keyboardist at the center of the Rural Alberta Advantage. The strong melodies of his songs really came through during the early show at Schubas, with some lovely harmony vocals and glockenspiel or keyboard accents from Cole and energetic drumming by Banwat. These are songs you know you’ll want to hear again. The band supplemented its set with a couple of cover tunes, both of which Edenloff played as solo acoustic numbers: “S.O.S.” by ABBA (always one of the few ABBA songs I’ve really liked), and “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor. Man, I didn’t expect them to play that song, but even that tune (which I always thought of as a cheesy cliche) came off pretty well.
www.theraa.com
www.myspace.com/theraa

The opening act Saturday at Schubas, the Love Language, also delivered a vibrant set of its songs. I saw this band in the spring at the Hideout, and they impressed me yet again this time, with catchy songs and plenty of energy.
www.myspace.com/thelovelanguage
thelovelanguage.blogspot.com

Photos of the Rural Alberta Advantage and the Love Language.

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Daniell, McCombs and Rose


Chicago musicians David Daniell and Doug McCombs have teamed up for a beautiful new album on the Thrill Jockey label called Sycamore. This is the sound of two guitarists playing off each other, building lovely sonic sculptures. There are touches of jazz rhythm, some ambient texture and dramatic rock flourishes, but it’s really uncategorizable instrumental music. Daniell and McCombs played a CD release party Thursday (Sept. 24) at the Hideout, but unlike the typical CD release party, these guys weren’t just playing songs from their new album. The music seems to be part composed, part improvised, so what we heard Thursday night was one continuous performance without any pauses, featuring all three drummers on the album. John Herndon (who plays in Tortoise with McCombs) drummed during the opening part of the show, then Steven Hess sat down at a second drum kit. For a few minutes, Herndon and Hess played together, then Herndon got up and let Hess take over. A similar transition happened later when Frank Rosaly took over on drums. Each drummer brought his own style to the mix of sounds, as Daniell and McCombs dueted, interweaving the sounds of their two guitars.
http://www.thrilljockey.com/artists/?id=12220
Thrill Jockey is offering a free download of the Daniell-McCombs track “F# song.”

The opening act, Jack Rose, was well worth seeing in his own right, playing some very impressive solo acoustic guitar compositions. Rose plucked fast arpeggio chord patterns, but his songs were anchored by slower, more distinctive melodies, sometimes played on a single string. It made for some hypnotic listening.
www.myspace.com/jackrosekensington

Photos of David Daniell and Doug McCombs and Jack Rose.

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World Music Festival

As it does every year, the Chicago World Music Festival offered a chance to hear many different kinds of music from all over the planet. I sampled several bands during the festival and wished I’d been able to see and hear more. Last Saturday (Sept. 19) at Martyrs’, the Bosnian group Mostar Sevdah Reunion played a nice set of songs featuring singer Ilijaz Delic, an older fellow whose voice is beautifully weathered. The headliners that night were a Romany or Gypsy octet from Hungary, Parno Graszt, who really got the crowd dancing with speedy, intricate rhythms. They were a true delight.

www.myspace.com/mostarsevdahreunion
www.myspace.com/parnograszt

The festival concluded on Thursday (Sept. 24) with an open house featuring nine bands on three stages at the Chicago Cultural Center. This showcase is always a highlight of the festival, although it does get so crowded that it can be difficult to move around from one room to another. I caught a cool set of jazz by the Polish trumpet-and-drums duo Mikrokolektyw, the entrancing music of Iraqi-American oud virtuoso Rahim Alhaj, and a lovely set of slightly psychedelic Brazilian folk-rock by MoMo. I definitely want to hear more from all of these artists, as well as some of the other World Music Fest acts that I didn’t get a chance to see.

www.myspace.com/mikrokolektyw
www.myspace.com/rahimalhaj
www.myspace.com/momoproject

Photos of the Chicago World Music Festival.

How long has Chicago been hosting world music concerts? The tradition goes back way longer than 1999, when the World Music Festival started. As I reported in a Sept. 19 story for Chicago Public Radio, WBEZ, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition was a world music festival of sorts. My story for WBEZ’s “Eight Forty Eight” show is posted online here.

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The Antlers at Subterranean

The Antlers were one of the bands I caught for a few minutes as I was racing around Union Park during the Pitchfork Music Festival earlier this summer. I liked what I heard, but it wasn’t the best way to experience a new band. Since then, I’ve been listening to the Antlers’ album, Hospice, and it just keeps burrowing deeper into my brain. This could be one of the year’s best CDs. The subject matter is dark — this is a song cycle about a terminally ill child in hospice — and yet, like some narratives about painful topics, Hospice feels cathartic at times, soothing at other moments. The music shifts, too, from soaring and powerful rock to hushed meditations. Singer-songwriter Peter Silberman often sings in a falsetto, and the music sometimes sounds a little like Radiohead, a little like the Arcade Fire, but original in the way these influences blend together.

The Antlers played Monday night (Sept. 21) at Chicago’s Subterranean, and the songs sounded beautiful live. The set included all the songs on Hospice except the first two tracks (“Prologue” and “Kettering”), plus the song “Cold War” for the encore. Silberman and his bandmates (Michael Lerner on drums and Darby Cicci on keyboards and bass pedals) delivered the music like a pretty typical band, without a lot of showmanship. In his stage presence, Silberman offers few hints that he is singing lyrics that seem to be revealing private secrets. He’s not one of those musicians who turns songs into dramatic shows. Just as well, I suppose — the music might be just too much to take if he did. I still sensed that the Antlers fans in the crowd who knew the songs well were feeling some of that catharsis in the way they responded.

myspace.com/theantlers
www.antlersmusic.com

Photos of the Antlers.

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Last night of Wire Fest

I feel like I slacked off a bit last week when I missed most of the Wire Festival, a.k.a., “Adventures in Modern Music,” an annual showcase of some of the strangest music around, which the British magazine Wire curates and the Empty Bottle hosts. I’m sure I missed a lot of provocative music during the first four nights of the festival. I did catch the final night on Sunday (Sept. 13). The club seemed less than half full, but it was an excellent night of the sort of challenging music that Wire Fest is known for.

First up was Woods, a really cool band from New York with one of this year’s noteworthy records, Songs of Shame, whom I saw at SXSW. The core of this band’s songs are catchy rock tunes sung in a high falsetto, which remind me a bit of Canned Heat or Neil Young or something from that early ’70s era — but twisted through an experimental, improvisational, psychedelic vibe. Woods also played some extended instrumental jams, building their sound around drones and tape loops. Actual cassette tapes are part of the Woods’ sonic arsenal. Cool stuff.

The next band was the Subarachnoid Space. Never heard of ’em. They put on a pretty impressive set of heavy instrumental rock — heavy metal and art rock without any singing. The music was loud, but it was also fairly diverse within the limits of heavy instrumental rock. The third act of the night, Zola Jesus, was Chicago singer/composer Nika Danilova and two keyboardists, playing chilly techno pop, but with slightly stranger vocal melodies than the usual techno pop.

The headliners were Phantom Orchard, a collaboration between two highly respected experimental musicians, drummer Ikue Mori (who was working a laptop instead of drumming at this concert) and harpist Zeena Parkins. Their music included quiet, delicate tapestries of harp notes dancing over bubbly electronic textures. But Phantom Orchard also cranked up the volume and discordance for some sharp, piercing compositions as well.

Photos from Wire Fest.

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Bloodshot Party at the Hideout

This year’s Hideout Block Party, which took place Saturday (Sept. 12), was scaled down from the two-stage, two- or three-day festivals of the last few years. It seemed almost like a return to the old days, when the Hideout hosted an annual party out on Wabansia Street in front of the bar. And the theme of this year’s festival was the 15th anniversary of Bloodshot Records, an alt-country record label whose artists have played at the Hideout many times over the years. It was beautiful, sunny day — some of the best weather Chicago’s had all summer — and a perfect time to celebrate two great Chicago institutions, the Hideout and Bloodshot.

I showed up just in time to hear the last song by the Sanctified Grumblers, a new acoustic-blues outfit featuring Rick Sherry of Devil in the Woodpile. Then came three of the Mekons — Jon Langford, Sally Timms and Rico Bell — doing a casual acoustic set. A reunion set by the Blacks was one of the big draws for me, and these guys sounded as good as they ever have. This may have been the last time we’ll see the Blacks for a while, though one can always wish.

Bobby Bare Jr. delivered the goods with his set, which featured a strong band including David Vandervelde on guitar and a quick run-through of Bare’s best songs as well as a cover of America’s “I Need You.” (!) Like most of the performers on Saturday, Bare thanked Bloodshot for everything the label has done. Or as he put it, “I’d like to thank Bloodshoot for putting up with all my bullshit … and making us feel like big shots in Chicago. Why are all you people staring at me? I don’t understand. Do I owe you money?”

Moonshine Willy was the band that started it all for Bloodshot Records, and the group reunited for its first show in 10 years Saturday, playing some old-timey country-folk.


The least country-sounding band of the day was next, Scotland Yard Gospel Choir, who have a fine new record coming out this week called …And the Horse You Rode In On. This “choir” is from Chicago, but as its name indicates, it’s a very British-sounding band, with lots of influence from Belle and Sebastian, the Smiths and other UK pop geniuses. Elia Einhorn’s lyrics are almost amusingly frank on the new CD, and he sprinkles in several Chicago-specific references. SYGC was lively on Saturday, bouncing through a set of lovely pop ditties. (I’m using “ditties” in the best sense of the term.)

Scott H. Biram calls himself a one-man band, but he’s basically a guy who plays the blues on acoustic guitar and cranks up everything really loud and dirty-sounding. A little bit of Biram goes a long way for me, but I see that he made some new fans Saturday. He was followed by the Deadstring Brothers, who sound a lot like the Rolling Stones doing country-rock in the “Dead Flowers” era. This Detroit group’s lineup has changed a bit since the time I saw them a few years back, and I wish they’d played more of the songs I know from that era, but it still sounded pretty strong.

I was really impressed with the set by Alejandro Escovedo. I’ve admired his music for several years without fully joining the Escovedo cult, but after Saturday night’s riveting performance, I can see why he inspires such fervent worship in some fans. During the first few songs of the set, his band blended rock with chamber strings in a driving style that isn’t typically for orchestral pop, and I loved the way Escovedo roamed the stage, staring intently at the various musicians as they were soloing. Thanking Bloodshot, Escovedo remarked, “They gave me a break when I couldn’t buy one.”

Was there any way the party could have ended other than a set by the Waco Brothers, replete with leg kicks, guest singers (Rico Bell and Escovedo), rocking covers of songs like “I Fought the Law” and the Wacos’ most rollicking hits? I don’t think so. The party really felt like a party.

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Amazing Baby and Entrance Band

The Brooklyn band Amazing Baby came to Schubas in Chicago on Friday night, and they made Schubas look like a miniature rock arena, complete with lasers, billowing fog and strobe lights. It’s good to see a band with a sense of showmanship, although I wondered at times if Amazing Baby was overdoing it. The music was pretty good, but it was overpowered by the band’s attempt to present a rock spectacle on that little stage. Amazing Baby’s at its best when some strong ’60s-style melodies shine through the polished mix. I’d like to hear them experiment more.

The opening band, aptly named for that slot, was Entrance Band, whom I saw recently opening for Sonic Youth. This trio sounds great when it gets psychedelic. Not so great (in my opinion) when it starts to sound more like ’70s hard rock. There were lots of long jams during their set Friday … a little too long, but there were some intense moments when Entrance Band’s three players really clicked together.

Photos of Amazing Baby and Entrance Band.

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Redmoon’s ‘Last of My Species’

Chicago’s Redmoon theater certainly knows how to put on a big show. Its annual outdoor “spectacles” feel like theatrical performances that are simply too big to be contained within the walls of a theater, with actors ranging across landscapes in motor vehicles or soaring way above the audience’s head. The latest Redmoon play, Last of My Species: The Fearless Songs of Laarna Cortaan, which opened this weekend at South Belmont Harbor, is no exception.

Billed as Redmoon’s first “concert,” Last of My Species, is supposedly the U.S. debut of Norwegian singer Laarna Cortaan. It doesn’t take much deduction or detective work to figure out that Cortaan is a fictional character, and the Redmoon folks throw the audience a few knowing winks about this joke. But the show does indeed start out like a concert, with the songs introduced by an emcee speaking in a humorously fake Scandinavian accent. As Laarna sings, an armada of musician/singer/dancer types assembles around her, sometimes pretending to play fake instruments, sometimes holding surreal masks of enlarged faces in front of their heads.

The “concert” comes apart after some technical difficulties (which are part of the show). Cortaan storms off. An ingenue charms the crowd with her simple music. Cortaan storms back. A musical duel ensues. The ingenue engages in a sensual series of acrobatic moves with a man at the top of a ladder.

No, there really isn’t much plot to this show, which is typical of Redmoon spectacles, but it all moves with the logic of a dream. It may not be profound, but Last of My Species does offer a sort of running commentary on the whole experience of going to a concert without resorting to a lot of obvious jokes. And most importantly, it’s consistently entertaining. The music is quite good, including songs in a variety of styles, ranging from properly bombastic prerecorded music to intimate live performances. The sets, costumes and, um, vehicles present a delightfully surreal panorama. The few pieces of dialogue and narration sparkle with humor. And wow, that sequence of acrobatic moves were thrilling to watch.

Once again, Redmoon has inspired me by imagining an improbable theatrical performance and bringing it to life on a huge scale.

Last of My Species: The Fearless Songs of Laarna Cortaan continues with performances at 7 p.m. Sept. 10, 11, 12 and 13. For details, see www.redmoon.org

See my photos of Redmoon’s Last of My Species.

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Autolux at the Empty Bottle

The California band Autolux released one fairly cool CD in 2004 called Future Perfect, and then… Well, to be honest, I assumed that Autolux was yet another one of the countless bands I’d simply lost track of. I figured they must have made other records that had escaped my attention. But, no, as it turns out, Future Perfect remains their one and only CD. For some reason, Autolux is touring, and the band came to Chicago’s Empty Bottle on Friday night (Aug. 4). Appropriately, during a lull between songs, someone in the crowd shouted out, “When you are going to make another record?” The sarcastic response from singer-bassist Eugene Goreshter was that the band was making a record at that very moment, communing with the crowd in the “original peer-to-peer network.” Uh, OK. But seriously, guys — when are you going to make another record?

In any case, it was a good show, thanks to Carla Azar’s energetic drumming, varied vocals by Goreshter and Azar, and solid guitar playing of Greg Edwards. At Autolux’s best moments, the band pulsed with strong, thumping sounds. The show did lag a bit at times, though. Maybe a better sense of pacing would have made it a little closer to perfect. It was sort of fun to see the band play one song twice in a row — following a broken guitar string on the first run-through. Some fans insisted on hearing the song again (I’m sorry — does anyone know which song it was? I forget) … and one guy even wanted to hear it a third time.

There were two opening acts, and the middle band on the bill, Mini Mansions, put on a pretty impressive set. The trio has an odd lineup on stage: one guy on keyboards, one guy on bass, and one guy switching back and forth between guitar and drums. Getting a full-time drummer would be a plus, but the quality of the songwriting came through. The unusual cover of Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” was nice.

As for the first band of the night, Avagami — well, let’s just say I would have enjoyed the evening more if I’d shown up around the time Mini Mansions started playing. Avagami’s goofy shtick wore thin very quickly for me.

Photos of Autolux and Mini Mansions.

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Vivian Girls at the Empty Bottle

Where have I been lately, you may ask? Yes, it’s true, the Underground Bee has been in a sort of quasi-hibernation lately, not reporting much on concerts in Chicago or anything else. There simply haven’t been that many concerts in town the last couple of weeks that I felt compelled to see. And I was busy with other work, including an out-of-town trip for several days.

Trying to get back into the swing of things, I went to see the Vivian Girls on Sunday (Aug. 30) at the Empty Bottle. It seems like these three gals have been playing an awful lot in recent months, including a set at the Pitchfork Music Fest that I missed because of scheduling conflicts. Yesterday, they not only played at the Bottle, but also made a 6 p.m. appearance at Permanent Records, playing acoustic during the in-store gig. They did not sound the least bit acoustic Sunday night, however, cranking up the feedback as they ran through songs from their 2008 self-titled EP and a few new ones. If you want to believe the Chicago Tribune’s Greg Kot, the new Vivian Girls CD coming out Sept. 8, Everything Goes Wrong is “a more ambitious effort in every way.” I haven’t heard it yet myself, but I’m looking forward to it. In concert, the new songs didn’t sound that much different from the old ones — more fuzz-drenched primitive garage rock with girlish vocals. It was a lively set, climaxing with a fun bit where the three Vivians switched instruments even as they continued making noise for the final song.

The opening acts were a pretty good match with the Vivian Girls: Daylight Robbery hammered away at its post-punk songs, then the Beets sang queasy harmonies over rickety acoustic guitar and thwacking drumbeats. The Beets had a dummy on the stage, which spent some of the show vomiting green fluid into a plastic garage can. What a class act!

Photos of the Vivian Girls, Daylight Robbery and the Beets.

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Shellac and Shearwater at Pritzker

Now, this was one strange scheduling change. The concert originally planned for Monday evening (Aug. 10) at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park was Malian singer Rokia Traore with opening act Shearwater. Unfortunately, Traore had to cancel her tour, then the city replaced her on the bill with … Shellac?!? That’s right — the hard-hitting rock band led by Chicago’s most famous record producer, Steve Albini. They were a strange pairing with Shearwater — and it seemed like at least a few African music aficionados showed up last night thinking they were to going to hear the much mellower sounds of Rokia Traore, only to find their ears pounded by Albini & Co. Truth be told, I’m not that big a fan of Shellac. They are good at what they do, but it’s just not the sort of music I enjoy listening to all that much. You have to get them props, though, for the power and precision of the pulverizing performance last night.

Shearwater is more to my liking. It was originally seen by many people as a sort of side project to Okkervil River, since Shearwater singer-songwriter Jonathan Meiburg also plays sometimes in Okkervil. But it’s very clear by now that Shearwater is very much its own entity. Meiburg has a nice voice that floats up to high notes while he and his band play complex arrangements that mix the atmospherics of art rock and folk rock. For a band that can sound awfully delicate on some songs, Shearwater was strong, even driving at times last night.

Photos of Shellac and Shearwater.

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A non-Lolla musical weekend

I may not have been at Lollapalooza, but that didn’t stop me from seeing some great music over the past four days.

First up was an unrelenting set by the Warlocks on Thursday night (Aug. 6) at the Empty Bottle. The band’s latest album, The Mirror Explodes, is a good one, and the Warlocks’ live show is still a fuzz fest filled with throbbing guitars and the sort of chords that the Velvet Underground used to play, all shrouded in tons of fog. Some of the more enthusiastic fans at the Bottle were yelling, “More smoke! More smoke!” I missed the first two bands of the night, but got there in time for the opening set by the Morning After Girls, who were a good match with the Warlocks — leaning a little more toward jangly and psychedelic ’60s music but with plenty of loud fuzziness.

Photos of the Warlocks and the Morning After Girls.

The Morning After Girls don’t actually have any girls in their band, and neither does the San Francisco group known as Girls, who played Friday night (Aug. 7) at the Hideout. (You might think Girls does include a whole bunch of girls if you saw this publicity photo, however.) I’ve been listening to the Girls song “Lust for Life,” which is not to be confused with the Iggy Pop song of the same title, ever since it was posted as a free mp3 at www.sxsw.com. Lead singer and main Girl Christopher Owens sounds very British, almost like Bob Geldof, and this song reminds me a lot of the songs collected on Rhino’s DIY series by bands from the late ’70s and early ’80s that were moving from punk rock into more melodic pop. It’s a terrific tune, one of my favorite new songs from 2009.

But Girls don’t have an album out yet — their debut, simply called Album, comes out Sept. 22 on True Panther. That makes me wonder why they would do a national tour without much product to sell or promote. They deserved a bigger crowd than they got Friday at the Hideout, but it’s cool that they’re getting some buzz from Pitchfork, which promoted the “Lust for Life” video today. Girls delivered a decent performance Friday at the Hideout, though I felt like I was watching a band that hasn’t fully figured out its sound. Maybe that’s not a bad thing. At one minute, Girls sounded like late ’50s or early ’60s pop balladry. Then there were great tunes like “Lust for Life” and “Hellhole Ratrace” (available on a 10-inch vinyl single), played without much feedback on the guitars, all the better to emphasis Owen’s fabulously whiny quasi-Brit vocals and his endearing melodies and lyrics. And then the group cranked up the feedback for a couple of louder songs that were more like VU raves. Not everything worked, but when it did, it was great. I bought the “Hellhole Ratrace” single at the merch table and was hooked by that song, too, when I got home. Can’t wait for the album.
www.myspace.com/girlssanfran

The opening band Friday, Chicago’s Smith Westerns, would have been worth the price admission all by themselves. Like Stranger Waves, this is another awfully young local band (pre-drinking-age, I think) playing energetic, dynamic garage rock that sounds like the sort of stuff garage bands around here played in the mid-’60s or punk bands played in the mid-’70s. There’s more than noise to these guys, who have some strong melodies in between those riffs, and the way their twist around onstage makes it all seem incredibly fun. Their new self-titled album is well worth getting.
www.myspace.com/smithwesterns

Photos of Girls and Smith Westerns.

Saturday night was the only Lolla-related show I saw over the weekend: the Lollapalooza after show at the Hideout featuring the Low Anthem and Joe Pug. Pug was the headliner, but the Low Anthem were the main reason I was at this show. Although they played early in the day at Lollapalooza on one of the small stages, this Rhode Island trio was near the top of my list of bands I wished I were seeing at Lolla. Their new CD, Oh My God, Charlie Darwin, has some superb folk-rock with beautiful high vocals. The opening track, “Charlie Darwin,” is one of my favorite songs of the year, with a haunting melody and lovely lyrics. The Low Anthem is on a prominent record label, Nonesuch, and an NPR critic recently played “Charlie Darwin” as one of 2009’s best songs, but the buzz about them seems to be building slowly right now. I chatted before the show with a couple visiting from London, who said the Low Anthem seems to be more popular over in the UK at the moment, thanks in part to getting the lead CD review in MOJO magazine.

They sang some hushed, very pretty songs at the Hideout, and the crowd watched in what seemed to be silent awe. The two guys and one gal in the Low Anthem switched off on instruments throughout the whole set. I especially like the spooky sound of Jocie Adams playing the crotales — a percussion instrument featuring metal disks attached to a horizontal bar, which she played with a bow. Clarinet and horn were also part of the musical mix, and the more rocking rootsy songs seemed to fit right in with the more mellow ones. (The first few times I listened to the new CD, the louder, grittier songs seemed jarring compared to tracks like “Charlie Darwin,” but after repeated listens, the album is feeling more like a unified whole to me.)
www.lowanthem.com
www.myspace.com/lowanthem

Joe Pug was up next. He’s a talented singer-songwriter from Chicago who plays folk rock firmly rooted in the style of Bob Dylan and more recent folkies like Steve Earle. I rather like Pug and his music, which I’ve gotten to know since he starting giving away copies of his EP on his Web site. But I was somewhat shocked to see the sort of crowd response Pug got on Saturday at the Hideout. The place was sold out, and after the Low Anthem was finished, a bunch of hard-core Joe Pug fanatics moved up to the front of the room. A lot of people were singing along to a lot of Pug’s lyrics, and when they weren’t singing along, they were letting loose with yelping exclamations of appreciation for Pug’s music — “Yow! Ow!” and the like. To be honest, all of this boisterous adulation got on my nerves a bit, but I was extremely impressed with the fact that Pug has developed such a devoted following since the last time I saw him doing an opening set at Schubas. If Saturday’s show is any indication, Pug could be the next Chicago musical to hit it big. He puts on a lively performance for someone in the singer-songwriter category, grinning often as he plays, and his backup band brought out the more rocking side of his music.
www.joepugmusic.com
www.myspace.com/thejoepug

Photos of the Low Anthem and Joe Pug.

On Sunday night (Aug. 9), Scotland’s Trashcan Sinatras made a rare visit to Chicago, playing at Schubas. It was the band’s first Chicago concert in several years, and the audience at the sell-out show included folks who driven from as far away as Detroit. The Trashcan Sinatras play light, melodic pop of the sort that the Go-Betweens and Aztec Camera were known for, but they play it with enough punch that it avoids slipping into sappiness. (Alas, I can’t say the same for Sunday’s opening band, Brookville.) It was a charming show filled with tuneful songs, and the crowd loved it. These were clearly some devoted Trashcan fans, seeing as how they sang along with many of the key lyrics. The band seemed to be eating up the adulation, and they played a long encore with four songs. It was a wonderful way to wrap up a Lolla-free musical weekend.
http://trashcansinatras.com
www.myspace.com/thetrashcansinatras

Photos of the Trashcan Sinatras and Brookville.

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No Lollapalooza for me

I never went to Lollapalooza back when it was a traveling show. I’m sure I missed some good times, but with headliners like Jane’s Addiction, I just never felt that excited about going. There was a lot of “alternative rock” in the ’90s era, whether it was grunge or whatever, that never connected with me. I never felt like I was part of that scene.

When Lollapalooza re-emerged as a one-location festival right here in Chicago, I did get excited. And for the past four years, I’ve attended the festival, posting reviews and photos here on Underground Bee, and also reviewing the fest for publications such as the Southtown Star. This year, I’m not going. Why not?

Well, it was a complicated decision, and some of my reasons are personal questions that really don’t have anything to do with other people’s decisions on whether to go. (Could I land a gig photographing and/or reviewing the festival that would actually involve me getting paid? Do I have the time to devote to three days of music followed by a day or two of writing and photo editing?)

But the bottom line was that this year’s lineup simply doesn’t interest me all that much. In particular, the headliners are bands that I either dislike (the Killers) or feel apathetic about (Depeche Mode, Jane’s Addiction). The lineup at last month’s Pitchfork Music Festival was better, and Millennium Park’s Pritzker Pavilion has had a more interesting selection of diverse musical acts spread out over the summer than you’ll see at Lollapalooza.

If I were to attend Lollapalooza as a music journalist with a free press pass, I feel it would be my obligation to write about the headline acts, and frankly, I just don’t have that much to say about those bands. And if I were to attend Lollapalooza just as a paying fan — well, there is enough good music over the course of the weekend that I’m sure I could enjoy myself, but with three-day passes going for $205, it doesn’t seem worth it.

I’m not encouraging everyone else to say no to Lollapalooza. Anyone who’s a big fan of those headline bands will probably have a great time. You could also hear some good music even if you blow off the headliners. In my case, most of the middle- and lower-tier Lolla acts that I like are bands I’ve already seen. In some instances (including Neko Case and Andrew Bird), I have seen these performers many times. And somehow, the idea of seeing them amid the crowds at Lollapalooza just isn’t that appealing to me.

I do feel a twinge of regret that I’ll be missing these bands: Other Lives, Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, Andrew Bird, the Low Anthem, Constantines, TV on the Radio, Animal Collective, Neko Case, Lou Reed, Band of Horses, Bat for Lashes, Ida Maria, Lykke Li, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Deerhunter, Heartless Bastards and Amazing Baby. But for the most part, I’d rather wait to see them in some other venue, some other time.

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Nina Nastasia at the Hideout

Singer-songwriter Nina Nastasia spent a couple of nights earlier this week (July 26 and 27) playing at the Hideout in Chicago, recording the shows for a planned live album. I was there on Sunday night, and it was an excellent, intimate show. Nastasia was sitting on a chair (elevated a bit above the Hideout’s normal stage) with her acoustic guitar, while a violin and viola player added chamber-music accompaniment that ranged from delicate to dramatic. It was a lovely setting for Nastasia’s songs — and an interesting contrast to the acoustic-guitar-plus-jazzy-drums arrangements on the album she did a couple of years about with Jim White. At times, Nastasia sang with a touch of that lonesome sound you hear in old-time country music. In other passages, she delivered her words with the timing of a jazz singer or a storytelling vibe.
www.myspace.com/ninanastasia
www.ninanastasia.com

The opening act on Sunday was Paletazo (a.k.a. Chicago singer-songwriter Chris Hansen), who played straight-up folk rock. (The live set sounded a lot less raw than the songs at www.myspace.com/paletazosongs.) The music sounded especially good when 1900s member (and Hideout concert booker) Jeanine O’Toole joined in on harmony vocals for a few songs.

Photos of Nina Nastasia and Paletazo. (I did not take a whole lot of photos at this show, since it was so quiet and I didn’t want the clicking of my camera to show up on that live recording or disturb the ambience.)

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Pitchfork Fest, Day Three

What I saw on day three of the Pitchfork Music Festival:

The first half of this day, I was too peripatetic to absorb full sets of music. Rushing around, trying to get pictures, I feel like I did not experience enough of the music. That’s my own fault… though I do sometimes long for music festivals without so much overlapping music.

In the first part of the day, I caught a few songs by The Mae Shi, which seemed rather jagged. And a few songs by Michael Columbia, which seemed more like artsy jazz rock. Kind of interesting.

Frightened Rabbit put on a strong set — I did catch almost most of that one. The studio recordings by Frightened Rabbit don’t thrill me all that much, but they’re awfully good as a live act. Vocalist Scott Hutchinson really gives his all, singing with terrific intensity and whipping around his guitar at the climax of the songs.

Blitzen Trapper were good, too. At times, this band seems a bit too much like the cheesier aspects of early ’70s country, folk and Southern rock, but when they hit their mark with a good song, like “Furr,” it sounds marvelous. A sunny park was a good setting to hear their harmonies.

I wanted to see the sets across the park by two Chicago bands, Dianogah and the Killer Whales, but getting back and forth started to become a hassle. I did see Dianogah long enough to grab a couple of photos.

Pharoahe Monch is a hip-hop act I was not familiar with, but I liked what I heard of his set. He had a good rapport with the crowd and his personality came through onstage, which is key at any hip-hop concert.

Women were playing across the park, and I caught just a few songs. I saw Women previously at the Bottom Lounge, and their record is pretty good. There’s something strange and slightly twisted about their music. I’m wondering if it will develop into smoother or stranger stuff as the band develops.

The Thermals rocked out with a lively set. And hey, I did see all of this show. I was surprised that they included so many covers in their set, including songs by Sonic Youth, Nirvana and Green Day, but hey, what the heck. Judging from the hard-hitting melodic punk-pop sound of the Thermals, those are all probably songs that the band loves to hear, so why not play them?

The Walkmen played a pretty impressive set, from what I saw and heard (which was the first three songs and the last couple of songs). I’ve always liked their intensity, and that came through in this performance for sure. It looked like singer Hamilton Leithauser might burst some of the blood vessels in his neck at the rate he was going. I gladly would have watched the entire Walkmen set, but I wanted to see…

Japandroids — Wow! I like the debut record by this guitar-and-drums duo from Vancouver (it comes out Aug. 4 in the U.S. on Champaign-based Polyvinyl), but I wasn’t prepared for how exciting the live show would be. First of all, from the standpoint of a photographer, it’s great when musicians jump around and shake their hear. Not only did guitarist Brian King do that — he also had a fan blowing back his hair! And he liked to climb up onto the drum riser to get closer to his bandmate, David Prowse. There was so much energy on that stage, it was impossible not to have fun watching it.

For the rest of the day, I stayed on the north end of the park and watched the two main stages. Alas, this meant missing the bands playing down on the B stage: DJ/Rupture, Vivian Girls, Mew and the Very Best. I was especially hoping to see the lovely Vivian Girls in daylight for a change from the dimly lit SXSW show I saw. Oh, well… The park was too jam-packed to get back and forth easily. And besides, I did want to hear the full sets by the bands playing on the big stages.

M83 showed how you can make electronic pop music rock. Main man Anthony Gonzalez twiddled knobs on his electronic gear, played guitar and sang, while Morgan Kibby (who had a strip of blue across her face around the eyes) added lovely vocals, helping the songs to soar at key moments. The drummer played behind a clear-plastic shield.

Grizzly Bear is a band I admire without completely loving. Their new CD, Veckatimest, is quite good, with lots of Brian Wilson-esque touches, though the band always seems to hold back a little bit from delivering the big choruses it’s undoubtedly capable of. The aim seems to be more mysterious, ethereal music that flirts with pop. The crowd on Sunday evening applauded vigorously when Grizzly Bear took the stage, and the set did seem a little livelier than previous Grizzly Bear concerts I’ve seen. They let the songs rock a bit more than usual, which was a good thing. But for most of the Grizzly Bear concert, I was standing across the field, waiting for my chance to get into the Flaming Lips photo pit. The Lips’ stage crew and Wayne Coyne himself were getting their stage ready by this point, which was pretty distracting. I tried to pay attention to what Grizzly Bear was playing across the park, but it started to get lost in the anticipation for the Flaming Lips.

Photos of Day Three of the Pitchfork Music Festival.

The Flaming Lips agreed to take part in the “Write the Night” part of the Pitchfork, playing some of the songs voted on by fans who bought tickets. However, their show turned out to be not all that much different from a typical Lips concert. The fans are partly to blame for that. I mean, I love “Do You Realize,” “Fight Test” and “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots,” but they always do those songs, so why vote for those? The Lips ended up playing those songs, plus other well-known staples “Race for the Prize,” “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song” and “She Don’t Use Jelly.” They played two new songs, which sounded pretty good. And they dug out just a few old obscurities: “Mountain Side” from A Priest Driven Ambulance, “Bad Days” from Clouds Taste Metallic (which I was glad to hear) and “The Enthusiasm for Life Defeats Existential Fear.” It was a good show — fun and audacious as ever, with confetti canons blaring, people dancing in goofy costumes, and Wayne Coyne riding over the crowd in his trademark bubble. I would have liked to have heard some other deep cuts, though. I mean, my favorite Lips song of all time is “The Spark That Bled,” and I would have loved hearing that or just about anything else from The Soft Bulletin. I did enjoy hearing “Yoshimi” played with just electric-piano chords and the audience singing along.

Taking pictures of the Lips turned out to be a big challenge. Two groups of 20 photographers each were allowed into the photo pit for one song each. I was in the group in the pit during the second song, and managed to grab a few good shots, but far from what I would have liked. Then we were escorted around the back of the stage and ended up pretty far back on the field. I lucked out in a way, though — my 300mm lens was able to capture some shots from all the way back there, thanks to the bright lighting.

And if I had been closer to the stage, I might not have enjoyed myself quite so much. People who were up close told me it was alarmingly crowded and hazardous — a riskier place to stand than the raucous crowd at Friday’s Jesus Lizard show. The WBEZ blog describes what was going on up there: “An impenetrable wall of teenagers refused to budge and started lashing out at the VIPs on the other side of the fence. They tore down the green netting on the fence and attempted to tear down the fence altogether.” Yikes. That seems like the opposite of the spirit that the Flaming Lips communicate from the stage with their joyful spectacle. I’m glad I was far away from that scene. From where I was standing, the Lips brought the Pitchfork Fest to a beautiful and climactic ending.

Photos of the Flaming Lips.

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Pitchfork Fest, Day Two

What I saw on day two of the Pitchfork Music Festival:

Cymbals Eat Guitars seems to be getting a lot of hype. The band had good energy, and I liked the lead singer’s humble attitude. The songs seemed a little generic, though. Sort of boiler-plate 2009 indie-rock.

The Dutchess & The Duke played some cool songs with a loose garage-rock attitude, but more of a sing-along, folk-rock vibe than the standard loud stuff. A Chicago band I’m sure I’ll be seeing again soon.

Plants and Animals — I’d seen this Montreal band twice in the last year at Schubas, so I did not make a point of seeing them again, but I did make my way back to that end of the park in time to catch their last few songs. They were great for the most part, although the new song they played seemed to be veering more towards a jam-band sound. Don’t go there, guys!

Fucked Up is just not my kind of music. I read about them, downloaded the record from e-music and promptly decided I didn’t want to hear it again. I do like some punk, but this seemed to me more like the dumb variety of punk. That being said, they put on a crazy live show, with singer “Pink Eye” tearing into beach balls with his teeth and baring his rather massive, hairy stomach for everyone to see. I know a lot of punk fans at Pitchfork loved this set, and I won’t begrudge them their enjoyment of it too much. But I still don’t want to listen to that Fucked Up record.

The Antlers were playing over at the B stage while Fucked Up continued, so I caught the latter part of their set. Good stuff, from what I heard. Still trying to get a handle on what exactly it was. Art rock? Seemed sophisticated and smart in any case.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart played their melodic songs with crunching guitar chords. As with the SXSW set I saw by this band, I enjoyed it — and then reminded myself that I really should listen to their record more often. Some people say they’re not original? OK, whatever, I still like the songs.

Bowerbirds were playing over on the B stage, and by the time I arrived over there, they were halfway through the set. As I feared, the sounds of this quiet, subtle folk-rock band were not carrying very far beyond the stage. Standing at the back of the crowd, I could barely hear Bowerbirds’ music over all the chatter. This is a band I’d much rather see at a place like Schubas (which I did recently).

Final Fantasy does looping violin parts, similar to another artist I love, Andrew Bird. I haven’t quite caught on to Final Fantasy’s music yet, however. It seems pleasant enough, but a little too baroque. Maybe I just need to absorb it more. I stayed for the first few songs and took some pictures, then headed across the park for…

Ponytail — What an insane band this was! Especially lead singer Molly Siegel, who looks like a pixie and seemed to be speaking in tongues as she yelped incoherently and made the most bizarre facial expressions, grinning one second then rolling her eyes back into her head. Her singing reminded me of Björk at times, and the band’s spiky sound had some of the jagged edges of the B-52s or Deerhoof. I’ll have to hear Ponytail’s record before I decide whether this band has staying power, but as a live act, it was flat-out amazing.

Yeasayer is one band I haven’t really warmed up to; their music is OK, but it doesn’t really stick with me. I watched Yeasayer for a few songs, then headed over to see Wavves on the other stage. I might as well have stayed, since the Wavves set was delayed for 20 or 25 minutes. It seemed that the fence between the audience and the photo pit was having some problems after the raucous show by Ponytail, so the crew was working on fixing that. I managed to see a song or two by Wavves (taking pictures from outside the photo pit, since photographers weren’t allowed in for this set)… not enough to get much of an impression.

Doom also got started a bit late. According to the rumors floating around the photo pit — and subsequently reported by Greg Kot in the Chicago Tribune — Doom wouldn’t take the stage until he’d been paid. And Kot also reported that Doom was lip-synching during his set. I couldn’t tell if he was really rapping or not. He was wearing his trademark mask and a camouflage outfit that looked like it was made of leaves. I’ve enjoyed a couple of Doom’s past projects (the Danger Doom album, among them), but what I heard tonight did not thrill me too much. I spent most of this set waiting in line for fish and chips while Doom played behind me like distant background music.

Beirut played an enjoyable set, with some lovely songs and solid horn arrangements. I haven’t become a big fan of this band yet, though I think they have a lot of potential and I hold out the hope that they might accomplish better things in the future. By “they,” I basically mean the lead singer-songwriter, Zach Condon. He has a pleasant enough voice, but he isn’t the most charismatic singer. Still, I thought it was cool to see the crowd waving arms in the air to a Beirut song that was essentially a Balkan brass tune. I did enjoy a couple of Beirut’s remarks on the stage: “This might be the biggest crowd this ukulele has ever played for.” And: “I think we just set a record for the slowest song with crowd surfing.”

The National finished the night with a great set, playing many of the songs from the band’s 2007 album Boxer. (Hey, isn’t it time for another National record, guys? Oh, I guess one is supposed to be coming in 2010…) The National set at Lollapalooza last year was one of my favorites at that festival, and if anything, the band topped themselves this time, supplementing their lineup with horns. Singer Matt Berninger seemed to be intoning his words in a narrow tone, while the band keep the arrangements tense until a few carefully placed moments of catharsis. Berninger and his band have a knack for coming up with lines that seem so simple but somehow stick in your head, and it was wonderful to hear the crowd singing along at these key moments: “I’m so sorry for everything…” or “Squalor Victoria…” Berninger even got into the antic spirit of the weekend and went out into the crowd, walking quite a distance from the stage. He briefly considered getting into a garbage can before thinking better of it.

What I missed: Disappears, Lindstrøm, Matt and Kim, The Black Lips. Hey, I really like the Black Lips and I would gladly have seen them if they hadn’t been playing at the same time as the National.

Photos from Day Two of the Pitchfork Music Festival.