Robert Loerzel's blog on music and the arts
Photos from the first day of Riot Fest, Sept. 13, 2013, in Humboldt Park, Chicago.
See: Photos from Day 2 / Photos from Day 3 / Photos of the Replacements / A review of the Replacements
See: Photos from Day 2 / Photos from Day 3 / Photos of the Replacements / A review of the Replacements
For some reason that I cannot recall, I did not see the Replacements when I had a chance to see them play at a small club, Mabel’s in Champaign, circa 1986. I was a student at the University of Illinois, a fan of ’60s music just beginning to discover that there was such a thing as new bands making cool records. The Replacements had just released their terrific album Tim, and I had just discovered the band. I vaguely remember having some lame excuse for not going to that show … not having enough cash for the measly cover charge, or maybe having too much homework. Something like that. Looking back, it’s one of the concerts I most regret missing.
Luckily, I did get to see the Mats a couple of times before they broke up: one show at the Aragon, and then the 1991 concert that turned out to be the final Replacements gig ever — until now, anyway — when they finished unceremoniously, handing their instruments over to their roadies on the Petrillo Bandshell stage in Chicago’s Grant Park. As I recall, both of those shows were pretty good, but I felt like I’d missed the real Replacements — the earlier lineup of the band, which was famous for playing sloppy, drunken, raucous but often brilliant gigs. Maybe I was just feeling envious of the people who could say, “I saw them back then.”
When the Replacements made the surprise announcement that they were reuniting for three Riot Fest concerts in Toronto, Chicago and Denver, it wasn’t the least bit surprising that people immediately started debating whether this was really the Replacements. True, this is not the same band that played those legendary gigs, like the one captured on the “official bootleg,” The Shit Hits the Fans. And no one has a time machine to take us back to one of those gigs. But this was the Replacements’ driving force, singer-songwriter-guitarist Paul Westerberg, reuniting with another original member, bassist Tommy Stinson, and playing Mats songs. So what if the other musicians (drummer Josh Freese and guitarist Dave Minehan) were new guys?
If you had any doubts that this was actually the Replacements, they should’ve been erased by the sight and sound of these guys onstage Sunday night at Riot Fest (Sept. 15) in Chicago’s Humboldt Park. Westerberg’s face frequently broke out into a grin. It was obvious both he and Stinson were having a blast as they tore through some of the hard-edged garage rock songs they played together as teens a few decades ago. In the years since the Replacements broke up, Westerberg has been a mercurial figure, rarely giving interviews, sporadically putting out solo music and giving little hint that he had any interest in ever doing a Replacements reunion. But he did not give off the air of someone who was just going through the motions or reluctantly taking the stage. He looked like he was reveling in the moment.
The Replacements powered through their harder-rocking songs. Videos and recordings of the band’s Aug. 25 show in Toronto showed that this Replacements lineup was already sounding tight, and they clicked once again Sunday during their triumphant return to Chicago, the city where the old Mats broke up onstage. But it wouldn’t be a true Replacements gig without at least a little bit of sloppiness, or some goofy offhanded remarks by Westerberg.
As he flubbed the lyrics to “Androgynous,” Westerberg said, “I forgot the fucking words,” and laughed at himself. During “Swinging Party,” he asked Minehan to change the tone of his guitar. “Could you lose that Cure thing? That vibe,” he said — and then, before getting back into the song, he blurted out, “I don’t know what the second verse is. … I got it, I got it, I got it.” At another point during the show, Westerberg did a bit of Tarzan dialogue.
Aside from those asides, Westerberg reminded me of what a great vocalist he is, delivering his memorable turns of phrase with such natural ease and emotion. At times, he would let himself fall a beat or two behind, slipping back into the melody with timing something like a jazzy lounge singer.
When the Replacements played a frenzied cover of the English punk band Sham 69’s “Borstal Breakout,” some slam dancing broke out in the crowd near where I was standing. Young guys in black punk-rock T-shirts started flinging themselves at one another, and the middle-aged Replacements fans standing nearby moved back to give the crazy kids some space (and to protect themselves from getting slammed).
The high points for me were the Mats classics “Left of the Dial,” “Can’t Hardly Wait” and “Bastards of Young,” which this band — Westerberg, Stinson, Freese and Minehan, or whatever you choose to call them — played with all the youthful spirit of the old Mats. It wasn’t exactly like going back with a time machine, but it was the closest thing available to that.
Set list: Takin’ a Ride / I’m in Trouble / Favorite Thing / Hangin’ Downtown / I Don’t Know / Color Me Impressed / Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out / Achin’ to Be / Androgynous (with a bit of Hank Williams’ Hey Good Lookin’) / I Will Dare / Love You Till Friday/ Maybelline (Chuck Berry cover) / Merry Go Round / Wake Up / Borstal Breakout (Sham 69 cover) / Little Mascara / Left of the Dial / Alex Chilton / Swinging Party / Kiss Me on the Bus / Waitress in the Sky / Can’t Hardly Wait / Bastards of Young / Hold My Life / I.O.U.
See more of my photos of the Replacements at Riot Fest.
(In the next few days, I’ll be posting photos of other bands I saw at Riot Fest, along with a recap of the festival.)
Photos of the Replacements in concert Sept. 15, 2013, at Riot Fest in Chicago’s Humboldt Park. Click here to read my review of the concert. (A recap of Riot Fest and more photos from the festival are coming later…)
A train filled is crossing the country, bringing art installations and live music to stations in eight cities. The project, organized by artist Doug Aitken, is called Station to Station, and it stopped Tuesday night (Sept. 10) at Chicago’s Union Station. This presented a rare opportunity to see a concert and other artistic happenings inside this building’s towering civic space. Art installations were arranged inside yurts. Short experimental films were projected. The rock band No Age set up drums and guitar amps on the train station floor and played a set of ambient drone music.
The sound of drums and horns suddenly came from another direction — up in a balcony overlooking the main hall. That was the Rich South High School marching band, which proceeded down to the main floor. And then, just as the drummers and cheerleaders were exited, the redheaded sibling duo White Mystery began making a noisy garage-rock racket on the main stage. Three screens were arranged behind the stage, allowing for some striking visuals as the musical acts performed in front of sweeping landscapes and other imagery.
Accompanied by drummer John Moloney, Thurston Moore opened his set with an old Sonic Youth song, “Schizophrenia,” which sounded intriguingly skeletal with just the one guitar. The power went out on Moore’s guitar amps a couple of times during the set, but he managed to play some new and old material.
The Chicago multimedia artist Theaster Gates led his “experimental music ensemble,” the Black Monks of Mississippi, which his website describes as “performers who harmonize the Eastern ideals of melodic restraint with the spirit of gospel in the Black Church and soul of the Blues genre deeply rooted in the American musical tradition.” On this night in the train station, they made some beautiful sounds.
Mavis Staples was a late addition to the schedule for Chicago’s Station to Station event, and her performance was a wonderful way to cap off the night. The set was similar to the one she played four nights earlier at the Hideout Block Party, but she changed up a few songs. One nice addition was her lovely version of the Low song “Holy Ghost.” And she extended “Freedom Highway,” letting the band vamp at the end of the classic civil rights song written by her father, Pops Staples. Recalling Martin Luther King and his words, Mavis Staples seemed almost overcome with emotion for a moment as she declared that she is still here.
Almost without fail, the Hideout Block Party is one of the summer’s most entertaining festivals — and that hasn’t changed over the past couple of years, when it combined with the A.V. Club’s A.V. Fest. It feels like a gathering of old friends — in the middle of an concrete-block and corrugated-metal cityscape, with a whiff of trash wafting over from all of the city garbage trucks parked nearby.
The banner on this year’s stage, created by the great Chicago poster artist Jay Ryan, depicted garbage trucks tumbling in midair. And on Friday night, the Streets & Sanitation odors were stronger than usual. As Kelly Hogan wryly noted (during Neko Case’s concert, where she was providing her delightful-as-usual harmony vocals): “That breeze feels great even though it smells like dumpster juice.” The smell was worth putting up with because of all the great music, and thankfully, the wind was blowing in another direction on Saturday.
Unfortunately, the crowd was chatty on Friday night during the sets by Case and Mavis Staples. Wandering around the parking lot, it wasn’t easy to find an area where you could hear the music clearly without being distracted by nearby conversations. As usual, the audience members closest to the stage were the most attentive, and a hush finally fell over most of the crowd when Case daringly performed “Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” an a cappella song from her new album, The Worse Things Get, the Harder IFight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You. The song delivers a fairly stunning emotional impact in the studio version, and it was only heightened in the live performance. That was the highlight of the night, but the rest of Case’s set was lovely, too — such a subtle mix of tough and tender. The final song of the night was her 2002 classic “I Wish I Was the Moon,” and she performed the opening verse a cappella (or nearly so) — the same way she did the song during the Solid Sound Fest this summer. And once again, Case’s voice rang out with clarity. See more of my photos from Neko Case’s performance.
Earlier in the evening, Mavis Staples ably demonstrated the power of her own voice. The matriarch of Chicago gospel recently had knee surgery, and she told the crowd, “This is my very first concert with the new knee. So I’m going to call this knee ‘the Hideout.'” Staples, who recorded a live album inside the Hideout, does genuinely seem to love the place, and the reception that she gets whenever she plays there.
Staples’ voice sounded tentative during the first song, her cover of Funkadelic’s “Can You Get to That” (from her excellent new album One True Vine), but there was nothing uncertain about her vocals in the rest of the set, as she gave full-throated glory to songs new and old. Closing with the Staple Singers’ classic “I’ll Take You There,” she exhorted the audience to sing along, taunting that the crowd’s first attempt at joining in was “weak.” See more of my photos from Mavis Staples’ performance.
Friday also featured the scrappy garage rock of Nude Beach and the acoustic jamming of Trampled by Turtles.
Saturday was a festive day in the garbage-truck parking lot. I just barely missed the opening set by the Guitarkestra (though I heard the roar of its chord in the distance as I walked up to the Hideout). I arrived in time for a fabulous set by Girl Group Chicago — five singer and 15 musicians, if I counted correctly, playing big renditions of classic girl group songs, joined onstage by the dancing gals known as the Revelettes. See more of my photos from Girl Group Chicago’s performance.
It wouldn’t be a Hideout Block Party without a performance by Jon Langford, and for this one, he played with a new lineup of his Skull Orchard band, playing a new song on the timely topic of “endless war” and closing with a cover of the Faces’ “Debris.” He also played “Haunted,” the song he wrote for Kelly Hogan’s album of last year. “The royalty checks are flooding in,” he joked. “They almost match the parking tickets.”
Next up was the Both, a duo comprising Aimee Mann and Ted Leo. They’ve recorded an album together, and their musical styles blended with surprising ease during this set, despite some technical difficulties with the mix during the first couple of songs.
The Walkmen sounded as intense as ever during their late-afternoon set; lead singer Hamilton Leithauser was unrelenting.
It was bittersweet to see Superchunk for the first time without the band’s longtime bass Laura Ballance, which is still recording with the group but has retired from touring. But Jason Narducy did a fine job of handling duties on bass, even getting into Superchunk’s bouncy, jumpy spirit. It seemed like lead singer Mac McCaughan’s feet were a few inches above the stage at just about any given moment during the show, and Superchunk was as lively and exciting as it ever was. New songs, like set opening “FOH,” sounded terrific alongside oldies like “Slack Motherfucker.” And in some comments to the crowd, McCaughan paid tribute to all of the Chicago people and institutions that helped Superchunk over the years, including the Lounge Ax, Steve Albini and Touch and Go Records. See more of my photos from Superchunk’s performance.
As darkness fell, the Hold Steady launched into a loud and raucous set. The fans along the barricade by the stage clearly loved frontman Craig Finn’s shout-singing and wild gestures. Since keyboardist Franz Nicolay left the band, its sound has been all guitars, all the time. The nonstop riffing in the first half of the set was a bit much, but when the Hold Steady dug into its back catalog for some of its catchiest choruses at the end, all was well in Hideoutville.
Saturday’s headliner was Young the Giant. Who? … OK, I had heard of this group, but I’ve just barely heard its music. And I knew plenty of other people who turned out to see Superchunk or the Hold Steady and who were largely unfamiliar with Young the Giant. Judging from the people who crowded near the stage at the end of the night, most of Young the Giant’s fans are in their late teens or early 20s. And well … to my ears, Young the Giant’s music was rather bland and generic pop rock. It paled in comparison to the other music I’d been hearing all day. But I can’t complain too much, given how much fun the whole weekend was.
Photos of Superchunk performing Sept. 7, 2013, at the Hideout Block Party/A.V. Fest.
Related: Recap of the festival and photos of more bands / Photos of Neko Case / Photos of Mavis Staples / Photos of Girl Group Chicago
Photos of and the Revelettes performing Sept. 7, 2013, at the Hideout Block Party/A.V. Fest. (with an appearance by Gina Bloom of the Congregation).
Related: Recap of the festival and photos of more bands / Photos of Neko Case / Photos of Mavis Staples / Photos of Superchunk
Photos of Neko Case and her band, playing Sept. 6, 2013, at the Hideout Block Party/A.V. Fest.
Related: Recap of the festival and photos of more bands / Photos of Mavis Staples / Photos of Girl Group Chicago / Photos of Superchunk
Photos of Mavis Staples Sept. 6, 2013, at the Hideout Block Party/A.V. Fest.
Related: Recap of the festival and photos of more bands / Photos of Neko Case / Photos of Girl Group Chicago / Photos of Superchunk
After decades of using Grant Park’s Petrillo Bandshell as its main stage, the Chicago Jazz Festival has finally moved to a classier, better-sounding and more welcoming venue: Millennium Park. The festival, which continues throughout this weekend, officially opened yesterday (Aug. 29) with events including a concert by Jack DeJohnette in the Jay Pritzker Pavilion.
Calling it a Jack DeJohnette concert doesn’t seem adequate, however. For this occasion, the legendary jazz drummer assembled a stellar group of well-known Chicago jazz men — pianist Muhal Richard Abrams, bassist Larry Gray and reedists Roscoe Mitchell and Henry Threadgill — billing it as “Special Legends Edition Chicago.” It was indeed special, a set of music filled with intelligent and probing solos by all five of these players, but more than just solos. This may have been an one-off performance, but this quintet thrived on interplay and collaboration.
It seems like most of my friends who are regular Chicago concertgoers have seen the local band Heavy Times a bunch of times. Somehow, I’d missed every opportunity to see Heavy Times — until Tuesday night (Aug. 20) at the Empty Bottle.
I thought I might have blown my last chance to see this group, which has put out some excellent records on the local Hozac label. Back in May, the Chicago Reader’s Gossip Wolf column reported that Heavy Times “broke up onstage after more or less playing at Quarters Rock ‘n’ Roll Palace in Milwaukee on April 27” — and this was just a few weeks before the band was set to release its third album, Fix It Alone. But as Gossip Wolf subsequently reported, Heavy Times ended up losing two of its members and recruiting some new players to fill out the lineup. That’s a strange situation for a band to go through just as it’s releasing a new album, but Heavy Times seems to have made it through the turmoil.
As a group on the Hozac label, it’s natural for Heavy Times to get lumped in with other “garage rock” bands. It’s a genre label I use often myself, and Heavy Times seems to fit somewhere within the loose boundaries of garage. Like a lot of garage rock, this music is essentially punk, and Heavy Times plays it with serrated edges and a sharp focus. The songs are quite tuneful, with riffs and vocal melodies that stick in your mind, but there’s nothing ingratiating about the way frontman Bo Hansen sings those hooks. Each song is a short, tense burst. Tuesday’s set was a rapid-fire series of these blasts.
My photos of Heavy Times:
Heavy Times was the middle band in a lineup of three groups playing Tuesday at the Empty Bottle. I confess that I did not stick around for the headliner, Survival. (I would’ve stayed, except for wanting to get some sleep.) The first band of the night was another local band, Vamos — who put on a fun, energetic set of punk rock.
My photos of Vamos:
I took photos last weekend at Lollapalooza for The A.V. Club. Over on The A.V. Club’s Flickr page, you can see my pictures from Days 1, 2 and 3.
My personal favorites were Charles Bradley, The National, The Cure and Palma Violets.
I took photos for The A.V. Club on July 27 and 28 at Wicker Park Fest.
You can see the photos from Day 1 on Flickr here.
And you can see the photos from Day 2 here.
Among other things, I loved having the opportunity to photograph Roky Erickson again.
And it was great to see the Treasure Fleet out in the sunlight, quite a change from the dimly lit venues where I’ve seen them before.
For a Chicagoan, it’s always sad to see a good musician moving away from the city. Saturday night at the Double Door was one of these bittersweet occasions. Emily Cross, a talented singer-songwriter who makes beautiful and ethereal music under the name Cross Record, played at the Double Door, just before heading to her new home in Austin, Texas, along with her fiancé and bandmate, Dan Duszynski. On Saturday, Duszynski played a separate with his own band, Any Kind, and then it was Cross’ turn to rule the stage. Her music is gaining strength in concert, and she seems bound to continue making great music. Let’s hope she visits Chicago often. Listen to Cross Record’s music at bandcamp.
It’s always a joy when the Handsome Family, who once called Chicago their home, return to this city for a concert. “We did live in Chicago back in the 1800s. The place was all gas lamps,” the Handsome Family’s Rennie Sparks remarked Monday night at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium. “We like what you’ve done with the place.”
Well, it hasn’t been quite that long since Rennie and her husband/bandmate, Brett Sparks, lived along Milwaukee Avenue, an experience that inspired grimly humorous and evocative songs such as “The Woman Downstairs.” Rennie writes the lyrics, but it’s Brett who sings them, and on Monday night, standing on the stage in that glorious venue, he sang of those old days in Wicker Park in the 1980s and ’90s: “Chicago is where the woman downstairs/Starved herself to death last summer/Her boyfriend Ted ate hot dogs/And wept with the gray rats out on the fire escape…” And oh, that chorus about the wind screaming up Ashland Avenue.
It’s one of the great songs about Chicago — and a fine example of the Handsome Family’s unusual artistry. This alt-country duo often plunges into the darkness with its macabre lyrics, and yet, it delivers them with an almost jaunty spirit and a wicked sense of humor. The Handsome Family’s latest album, Wilderness, is a concept record, with each song telling the story of a different animal. The deluxe edition comes with a beautiful illustrated book of Rennie Sparks stories to go with each song.
For Monday’s concert, the Sparkses were supplemented by a couple of backing musicians, drummer Jason Toth and guitarist David Gutierrez, which fleshed out and stretched out the songs nicely. Along with a few of the new songs, the Handsome Family played old classics, including “The Sad Milkman,” “So Much Wine,” “In the Air,” “My Sister’s Tiny Hands” and “Weightless Again.”
Rennie was as whimsical as ever with her stage banter, telling the people sitting back on the lawn that all of the musicians onstage had donkey hooves for feet. At one point, when Brett thanked the audience for its kindness, Rennie interjected, “They could still turn on us.” “You always say that,” Brett drawled.
As a matter of fact, there was one particularly loud and boisterous audience member whose shouting proved to be a distraction — by the end, he was yelling out non sequitors such as “Cocaine Blues”! — but not enough to detract from a splendid concert.
The opening act Monday was Chicago singer-songwriter Azita, who sounded lovely as she played Millennium Park’s Steinway piano. Her backup musicians gave her songs a more rocking sound than usual, evoking 1970s guitar-and-piano pop. They played a cool cover of Joe Jackson’s “Breaking Us in Two,” but the highlight was hearing Azita play a quiet song with minimal accompaniment, her voice hitting high notes that echoed the jazzy piano chords.
See my photos of the 2013 Pitchfork Music Festival for The A.V. Club: Days 1, 2 and 3. I’ve included photos in this blog post.
For a long while now, Pitchfork has been about a lot more than indie rock. The Pitchfork website and the Pitchfork Music Festival both have a history of mixing obscure, strange and intellectual music with unabashedly mainstream pop. This past weekend, the festival put an exclamation point on that attitude by booking controversial R&B superstar R. Kelly as one of three headliners. The other two were more typical examples of the sort of music originally associated years ago with Pitchfork: Björk and Belle & Sebastian.
In theory, I like this idea of mashing Top 40 artists and DIY bands together into one musical amusement park. It pushes fans out of their comfort zones, helping them to discover artists they’ve previously ignored because of a bias toward particular genres. I’m one of those music fans who needs some pushing. Call me an indie snob … a guitar-centric elitist … a rockist. I’ve been ignoring the vast majority of mainstream music for the past few decades. The reason is simple. To my ears, most of it sounds overproduced, unimaginative and uninteresting. I realize that the sonic style of this stuff — the way this music tends to be performed and packaged — probably leads me to overlook some creative and well-crafted songs. But it feels like a chore to sift through it all to find whatever gems might be hidden in there.
So … R. Kelly? Sorry. I’ve barely even listened to the guy. What I have heard didn’t make me want to continue listening. The controversy over the disturbing criminal charges he once faced — and was acquitted of — doesn’t make me especially eager to dig any deeper into his music, either. This weekend, I was taking photos for The A.V. Club. After being allowed to take pictures from the photographers pit during R. Kelly’s first song on Sunday night, I had fulfilled my duty. And I needed to get home to edit a day’s worth of photos. So I left Union Park at that point, missing most of R. Kelly’s set. I’ll leave it up to other writers to say whether his performance was what R. Kelly fans wanted to get out of the experience. Judging from most of the comments I’ve seen, his fans rated the concert as a smashing success. From what I did hear, I doubt that R. Kelly would have made a new fan out of me.
I did stay for Björk on Friday night. There was never any doubt about that. And I stayed for every minute of Belle & Sebastian. Both of these iconic artists delivered terrific performances — the only problem being the weather alert about an approaching storm that forced Björk to end her concert prematurely, cutting a few songs off her set list. Certainly, Björk’s more recent compositions aren’t as catchy as the earlier songs, but even the less memorable tunes came off as intriguing, complex creations as she performed Friday, wearing a sparkly set of spikes on her head. The set’s emotional climax was the moment when Björk sang “I love him, I love him, I love him, I love him…” in “Pagan Poetry,” tilting her head skyward, while her choir of female harmony singers responded, “She loves him, she loves him…” And then, shortly after Björk conjured some bottled lightning with a Tesla coil, actual lightning sparked in the dark clouds overhead.
Nothing so dramatic occurred during Belle & Sebastian’s set the following night. It was, quite simply, a fun time — a lively concert packed with so many fabulous songs that it was hard to imagine how anyone could come away from it without being a Belle & Sebastian fan.
The three-day festival had plenty of other highlights for me. Woods jammed with a more Byrdsy vibe than ever. Swans droned and declaimed with frightening intensity. Savages made good on their hype. Wire started off a bit slow but finished with a strong buzz. Yo La Tengo played loud, and then quiet — so damn quiet that you had to listen — and then loud again.
…And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead dug into its songs with fierce power. Foxygen’s flailing lead singer, Sam France, climbed halfway up the red stage’s metal support column and jumped down, as the band fell into a delightfully shambolic groove. Phosphorescent leader Matthew Houck’s voice keened with longing. Julia Holter’s music floated as she stood as still as a statue. And Waxahatchee’s songs blossomed from bedroom folk into slacker rock.
Alas, I wasn’t able to stay for whole sets by Mikal Cronin, Angel Olsen, Low and Metz, but they all sounded great for the few songs of each that I did catch. (I wasn’t there when Low closed its set with a cover of Rihanna’s “Stay,” transforming a mainstream pop song into, well, a Low song.) And I wish I’d seen more of Parquet Courts to figure out what all the fuss is about.
What else happened over the weekend? Pissed Jeans cavorted with glee. Daughn Gibson intoned with brash confidence. Trash Talk praised old people for “having us all and shit.” The Breeders fumbled. Mac DeMarco stuck out his tongue. Joanna Newsom plucked her harp and warbled, the subtleties of her songs getting a bit lost in the park.
I went into this Pitchfork fest with a bias toward old-fashioned, guitar-based indie rock, and I came out of the weekend with my bias intact. Still a rockist, but trying to be open-minded. Toro Y Moi’s frothy pop did nothing for me. M.I.A. put on an impressive and energetic show, but her music quickly wore me down, as it has in the past. I still have no idea what Lil B is all about, other than the fact that he has some really enthusiastic fans. Solange, Beyonce’s sweetly smiling sister, seemed to charm much of the audience. Hearing her music for the first time, it struck me as unremarkable. Maybe just not my cup of tea.
And so, when New York Times critic Jon Caramanica writes that the Pitchfork fest’s second half “served as a reminder of how dance music has become the most exciting emergent narrative in pop,” I have to wonder: What was I missing? I much preferred the weekend’s indie rock, which included, according to Caramanica, “bands in various stages of delusion and defensiveness.”
Killer Mike won me over, though. Of all the hip-hop artists I watched at Pitchfork, he was the one who had the most to say, even if his rap denouncing Ronald Reagan’s lies in the Iran-contra affair seemed oddly dated. “I want to encourage Chicago to take care of each other,” he said in one of his mini-sermons in between his raps, apparently alluding to the city’s violence. “I’d like to encourage the people of Chicago to look out for one another.” Later in his set, looking out on a Pitchfork audience that was more racially diverse than it had been on previous days, Killer Mike declared, “This is what church is supposed to look like.”
See my photos of the 2013 Pitchfork Music Festival for The A.V. Club: Days 1, 2 and 3.
Malian singer Fatoumata Diawara put on a fantastic show Saturday (July 13) at the Square Roots street festival in Lincoln Square. She plays again on Monday evening, in a free concert at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park. She began Saturday’s concert with a fairly demure presence on the stage, in spite of her colorful attire. But by the end, she was dancing with wild abandon, stirring up an almost frenzied response for the audience. She pulled a girl out of the crowd to dance with her during the encore, and the girl mimicked Diawara’s move, much to everyone’s delight. The band was terrific, too, locking into energetic grooves and letting loose with searing guitar solos. Amid the party atmosphere, Diawara paused a couple of times to explain some of her lyrics, including a plea for peace in Africa and a demand for the end to the practice of female genital mutilation. These were serious, sobering messages, contrasting with the joyful sound of Diawara’s music.
Millennium Park’s Pritzker Pavilion hosts a series of free concerts on Thursday evenings called “Loops and Variations,” which brings together electronic experimental music with modern classical music. (“New music,” if you will.) This past Thursday (June 27), the series presented a concert by the Baltimore duo Matmos, with Chicago’s Fonema Consort as the opening act. The Fonema portion of the evening was a good deal more serious. Matmos was downright silly. Still, somehow the two halves of the concert seemed to fit together in a strange way.
Matmos has collaborated in the past with artists such as Björk and So Percussion. They’re one of those electronic acts featuring guys hunched over their laptops, but they’re much livelier and more playful than the typical artist matching that description. On Thursday, they strolled out onto the Pritzker Pavilion stage clapping their hands and making goofy vocal noises, wandering around the stage as if they didn’t know where to sit down. After settling down with their gear and making an evocative soundscape, they explained that they’d been playing music that used recordings Matmos member Drew Daniel had made on recent trips to Istanbul and Beijing.
Joined midconcert by a guitarist and drummer, the Matmos duo transformed into something slightly more like a traditional rock band. OK, hardly traditional — Matmos member M.C. Schmidt blew bubbles in a bowl of water during one performance that was described as a aural simulation of liposuction. And near the end of its set, Daniel expressed his desire for NSA leaker Edward Snowden and led the group in a version of “I Want Candy,” with the words changed to “I Want Snowden.”
Fonema Consort focuses on 20th and 21st century vocal and instrumental music. According to the group’s website, it’s all centered around “our fascination with the exploration of vocal possibilities in music, including the traditional presentation of a text, the breaking down of words into phonemes, or the total absence of words, and the ramifications thereof.”
Those concepts were on vivid display during the consort’s performance on Thursday, including passage of spoken word whispered like auditory hallucinations. (Matmos member M.C. Schmidt later remarked that he’d been in the backstage bathroom listening to this music through the speakers there. “It was terrifying,” he said.) There were also some bravura passages of ear-shattering singing, and wind and string instruments dancing around the voices. The concert included works by Pablo Chin, Daniel Dehaan, Edward Hamel, Jonathon Kirk and Joan Arnau Pàmies.
My recap of Solid Sound 2013, continued from blog posts 1, 2 and 3…
The Solid Sound festival also featured rousing soul music by the Relatives; rootsy jamming by White Denim; harmonic pop by Lucius (who were most impressive when they guested with Wilco); Miracle Legion founder Mark Mulcahy doing solo music, with J. Mascis playing guitar in the back part of the stage; a nice set of solo singer-songwriter music by Sean Rowe; and singer-songwriter Sam Amidon playing quiet songs in the vein of Nick Drake as well as more traditional Appalachian folk, with Beth Orton (his wife) joining in for one song. Marc Ribot and Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo played a terrific set of their “Border Music,” and Brazil’s Os Mutantes playing songs from its new album Foot Metal Jack (which I’m not so keen on) but also some of its classic psychedelic tunes. And as mentioned in Part 2, the fest closed with a strong set by Medeski Martin & Wood, supplemented by various guests.
Watching all of the music, I missed most of the comedy cabaret hosted by Hodgman, though the portion I caught — featuring Hodgman and Jen Kirkman — was hilarious and eccentric.
In between the concerts, I stopped into MASS MoCA’s galleries and saw a few of the most striking and memorable artworks I’ve experienced in a while. The Chinese artist Xu Bing’s Phoenix, a pair of hundred-foot-long mythical birds constructed out of debris, is hanging from the ceiling in a room the size of an airport hangar. (And Xu Bing’s remarkable super-wide-screen animated film The Character of Characters was screening in another room.) Another gallery displayed a thousand or so miniature paintings that Tom Phillips created on the pages of an obscure Victorian-era novel, W.H. Mallock’s A Human Document. I could have spent many more hours examining these fascinating pictures. And then there was an entire building devoted to the paintings of minimalist Sol LeWitt. Now, I must confess here that I am unenthusiastic and generally bored by most minimalist art. When I see a big canvas covered in one color of paint, my typical response is, “Big deal.” So I wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of seeing all those LeWitt paintings. But there was something damn impressive about seeing all of them assembled in the three floors of this building. Taken as a whole, they became more like a weird piece of architecture.
All in all, Solid Sound lived up to its name. It’s an inspiring model for how to run an arts festival — although it’ll be hard to emulate elsewhere, because how many other places are there like MASS MoCA?
Read more about Solid Sound and see more photos in Parts 1, 2 and 3
Read more about Solid Sound and see more photos in Parts 1, 2 and 4
My last two blog posts about Solid Sound were about what the members of Wilco were up to during this festival. But like any decent fest, this one wasn’t entirely about one band. In brief, the other highlights included a high-energy show on Saturday afternoon by The Dream Syndicate, who were cult favorites in the 1980s California indie-rock scene. This was their first North American gig in more than two decades, but as it felt like they’d never stopped playing.
Yo La Tengo played not one, but two shows during Solid Sound. Alas, I arrived too late on Friday night to get a set at the screening of the film The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, featuring a live score performed by Yo La Tengo. On Saturday afternoon, the group played a typically excellent set of its songs, both old and new, with the most drastic shift in dynamics I heard all weekend. After blasting a couple of noisy songs to open their concert, Yo La Tengo took the volume way, way down for a couple of its hushed, whispery ballads, “The Point of It” and “Decora” — and it seemed like everyone in the crowd stopped making any sound so they could listen in. (At least, that’s what it was like by the stage, where I was standing.) By the end of the set, the band back at full volume.
Out of all the artists playing at Solid Sound, the one that seemed to represent younger, hyped bands was Foxygen. Just as they acted goofy during their recent in-store at Chicago’s Saki, Foxygen’s members seemed loopy at Solid Sound as they cavorted on the stage, playing their quirky, catchy songs. Perhaps they cavorted a bit too much. I heard most of Foxygen’s set, but I was away from the stage when lead singer Sam France reportedly tried to climb the scaffolding and got pulled down by security. Later in the day, I noticed three security guards surrounding Foxygen’s tambourine player, who looked intoxicated, and escorting him away from a tree. During Wilco’s show that night, Jeff Tweedy told the audience that the members of Foxygen had been “kicked out” of the festival. “They’re awesome. A little too awesome, I think,” he said. Later, he apologized, saying he hadn’t meant to disparage the band. But he dedicated the song “Passenger Side,” a song about drunk driving, to Foxygen. And then Tweedy brought up Foxygen one more time, suggesting that they might want to try drinking water onstage. The Reverse Direction blog has more about the Foxygen story. Whatever happened, I was charmed by what I saw of Foxygen’s set.
Although Low got some flack for playing one long droning song at the recent Rock the Garden festival in Minneapolis, the band played a standard set of its songs at Solid Sound on Saturday. And with Low, standard means beautiful.
Neko Case is another artist who nearly always delivers a good to great performance, and her show on Saturday night included a few songs from her forthcoming album The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You, which comes out Sept. 3 on Anti. On first impression, the new songs sounded like a strong continuation of the singular style of music Case has been shaping over her last few records. For me, the highlight of the set was a heart-stopping performance of her 2002 song “I Wish I Was the Moon,” with Case’s voice plaintively calling out across the park in the opening verse. “We’re kind of a weird band for a festival because all of songs are bummers,” Case remarked at one point. Her stalwart harmony singer, Kelly Hogan, pointed out: “Low played earlier.” At the end of her set, Case said, “Every single song in our set is dedicated to that girl playing drums on her dad’s head.”
Read more about Solid Sound and see more photos in Parts 1, 2 and 4
Read more about Solid Sound and see more photos in Parts 1, 3 and 4
Given the fact that Solid Sound was a festival organized by Wilco, it’s not surprising that it also featured side projects by the band’s various members on Sunday (June 23). The most impressive of these may have been Wilco member Nels Cline’s eloquent, virtuosic guitar duets with Julian Lage. Cline later showed up as one of the guests during the festival-closing set on Sunday night by the jazz trio Medeski Martin & Wood, and he ended up playing for about half of their set, bending and twisting the notes on his guitar in a frenetic style reminiscent of John McLaughlin’s legendary work with the Mahavishnu Orchestra. (Tweedy, Hidalgo and Ribot also sat in on that set at various points.)
Mikael Jorgensen — the keyboardist and electronics whiz who generally sits at the back of the stage during Wilco shows, making himself the least showy member of the band — had a couple of chances at Solid Sound to show off what he does. On Saturday, he generated live electronic analog synth music in a dark museum room, accompanied by longtime Wilco techs Nathaniel Murphy, Travis Thatcher and Josh Goldsmith. I dipped into the performance for a short sample, and it felt like I’d stepped out of the summer festival and into a … well, not a rave, exactly, since no one was dancing. A laboratory?
And then, the following afternoon, Jorgensen took his pulsing electronic music out into the broad daylight, playing a set with Greg O’Keeffe and Oliver Chapoy. I’m not sure if Wilco’s more traditional-music-loving fans knew what to make of it, but the droning noise settled over the museum courtyard like an invasion of cicadas — but with a danceable rhythm.
Another member of Wilco with avant-garde tendencies outside of the band, drummer Glenn Kotche, played as part of the duo On Fillmore, which also includes bassist Darin Gray. But it wasn’t a straightforward concert of their music. Rather, they provided accompaniment for an entertaining live version of the public radio show “Radio Lab,” which featured Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich reading from scripts and playing short clips from interviews as Kotche and Gray made sounds to evoke the story of the dinosaurs’ extinction.
While some members of Wilco contribute elements of jazz, electronic and avant-garde music to the mix, John Stirratt and Pat Sansone bring a power pop, classic rock and soft rock sensibility, and that was on full display when they performed as the Autumn Defense. After playing pretty pop songs from their own albums, they closed with a perfect cover of Bob Welch’s 1977 radio hit “Sentimental Lady.”
Meanwhile, the Blisters — a band featuring Jeff Tweedy’s son, Spencer, on drums — also played at Solid Sound. The youngsters got plenty of adults dancing as they rocked out near the end of their noontime Sunday set.
Read more about Solid Sound and see more photos in Parts 1, 3 and 4
Read more about Solid Sound and see more photos in the rest of my report: Parts 2, 3 and 4
Wilco’s home base is Chicago, but the band’s vacation home seems to be MASS MoCA — the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Mass. Wilco held its Solid Sound festival of music and arts June 21-23 on the museum’s sprawling grounds, the third time in four years that it has brought this event to this spot in the Berkshires. (The previous two Solid Sound fests were in 2010 and 2011, and then the event took the year off in 2012.) This past weekend was my first visit to Solid Sound and MASS MoCA.
What a cool place to hold a festival. The maze-like museum has been open only since 1999, but most of the 26 brick buildings on the 13-acre site have been standing there since the 19th century, when 3,200 people worked there, making printed textiles for Arnold Print Works. During World War II, the industrial complex was transformed into the Sprague Electric Co.’s factory.
Now, it’s a place for putting up works of modern and contemporary art, with enough space to hang up some truly massive sculptures and paintings. And for three days in June, it was also a place to make music — and to explore. During his performance on Sunday with David Hidalgo, guitarist Marc Ribot marveled at the sight of music fans gathered in one of the old factory courtyards. “If they took all of the factories and turned them into art museums, everyone would have fun,” he remarked. (Not exactly a sound idea in economic terms, but let’s not quibble too much.)
Like many other music festivals, this one had a bunch of bands playing on a few stages, with their performances taking place over a few days. That’s one of the main reasons people attend festivals: to see a whole lot of bands in one fell swoop. The pace was more leisurely at Solid Sound than it is at, say, Lollapalooza or Pitchfork, with only a little bit of overlap in the performances. There was plenty of room for people to move around, anywhere other than the clusters right in front of the stages for the most popular musical artists.
There was a lot more than live music at Solid Sound. John Hodgman, who emceed the comedy portion of the festival, called it “a nexus of fantastic things coming together in an amazing space.” Of course, Hodgman was emceeing, so you’d expect him to hype up the festival a bit, but his description wasn’t far off from the truth.
Naturally, art was on display in and around the art museum — as well as displays created specifically for Solid Sound. “Jeff Tweedy’s Loft” exhibited pieces of Wilco memorabilia.
One of the museum’s galleries filled with Sol LeWitt paintings featured Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche’s sonic soundscapes playing over the speakers. Kotche also created some “earth drums,” which were embedded in the ground, with signs encouraging festival attendees to tap out messages in Morse code to one another. (I got the impression that most people were just playing random rhythms.) Wilco bassist John Stirratt and Chicago artist Chad Gerth created the “Rickshaw of Forward Motion,” a mobile sound installation. (I failed to catch a ride on it.)
And of course, Wilco performed on the concert stage — an all-request show on Friday night, followed by a more standard Wilco show on Saturday night. Saturday’s concert was fine, as far as Wilco concerts go. Just another night starring an outstanding band playing a wide range of songs from throughout its career. If you’ve seen a Wilco concert in the last few years, you’ve seen a show like this one. But the one on Friday was something else entirely.
The band asked for fans to request songs, and boy did they ever — apparently dozens of pages listing songs. Pulling from that list, the songs that Wilco chose to play were almost entirely covers. Hodgman came out onto the stage several times to “randomize” the concert, pulling out ping-pong balls with numbers assigned to songs on the huge master list and challenging the band to play them. This resulted in a few of the less-rehearsed and sloppier tunes of the night (Grateful Dead’s “Ripple” and Yo La Tengo’s “Tom Courtenay,” which was rescued by the participation of Yo La Tengo itself). Just to prove that all of his choices weren’t rigged, Hodgman also brought up three audience members to play “stump the band.” It turned out that Wilco couldn’t really play two of these audience requests (Lucinda Williams’ “Atonement” and the Cranberries’ “Dream”) without learning and rehearsing them, but the band delighted much of the crowd when it succeeded at playing the third audience member’s unlikely request: Daft Punk’s current hit, “Get Lucky.”
The members of Wilco were clearly having a blast as they played covers of some terrific tunes, ranging from the delicate, wistful beauty of the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset” to a goose-bump-raising guitar solo by Nels Cline during Television’s epic “Marquee Moon.” And Replacements guitarist Tommy Stinson made a surprise appearance when Wilco played the Mats classic “Color Me Impressed.” Stinson (who will play with the reunited Replacements — er, Westerberg and Stinson — at Riot Fest in September) had a big grin on his face the entire time, and Tweedy seemed to relish sharing the stage with him.
At a couple of points during the night, a fan or two shouted, “Play some Wilco songs!” If you had never seen Wilco before, this concert would’ve served as a rather unusual introduction to the band’s live act. But for longtime fans, this was a night to treasure, filled with delightful musical nuggets. (NYC Taper captured the whole thing on audio.)
The set list almost speaks for itself:
The Boys Are Back in Town (Thin Lizzy) / Cut Your Hair (Pavement) / In the Street (Big Star) / New Madrid (Uncle Tupelo) / Dead Flowers (Rolling Stones) / Simple Twist of Fate (Bob Dylan) / Ripple (Grateful Dead) / Who Loves the Sun (Velvet Underground) / And Your Bird Can Sing (The Beatles) / And Your Bird Can Sing (repeat) / Psychotic Reaction (Count Five) / Tom Courtenay (Yo La Tengo) with Yo La Tengo / James Alley Blues (Richard Rabbit Brown) / Waterloo Sunset (Kinks) with Lucius / Waterloo (ABBA) with Lucius / Peace Love and Understanding (Nick Lowe) / Marquee Moon (Television) / Happy Birthday (to Pat Sansone) / Don’t Fear The Reaper (Blue Oyster Cult) / Cinnamon Girl (Neil Young) / (Stump the Band) / Get Lucky (Daft Punk) / Surrender (Cheap Trick) / Color Me Impressed (Replacements) with Tommy Stinson / Kingpin / Thank You Friends (Big Star) / ENCORE: The Weight (The Band) with Lucius / Roadrunner (The Modern Lovers) with Yo La Tengo
Read more about Solid Sound and see more photos in the rest of my report: Parts 2, 3 and 4
Dr. John (aka Mac Rebennack, aka “The Night Tripper”) won some well-deserved attention last year, thanks to a terrific album called Locked Down. Producer Dan Auerbach (the Black Keys’ singer-guitarist) inspired Dr. John to make some of the spookiest, quirkiest music he’s made since his early recordings such as the classic 1968 album Gris-Gris.
Dr. John headlined Friday night’s show in a festival called Blues on the Fox, which is out in the far western suburb of Aurora. It was worth the trip. Dr. John played several songs from Locked Down, and even though he didn’t have the same lineup of musicians that Auerbach assembled in the studio, the songs retained their weird edges. His touring band, ably led by singer-trombonist Sarah Morrow, jammed out on the funky grooves.
Decked out in his standard sunglasses, hat and beads, the bearded, ponytailed Dr. John growled in a voice that didn’t sound all that different from the younger Dr. John of 1968. He’s one of those performers who seemed old before his time.
“I can get away with anything I say tonight because I’m on psychotic medication,” he said — probably a joke, alluding to the psychedelic flavor of his New Orleans blues-jazz-rock. Probably. When he dug into the keyboard notes of his biggest hit, 1973’s “In the Right Place,” it was impossible to resist the impulse to dance — or just move.
Jason Isbell, who sang and played guitar in the Drive-By Truckers back when the band had three great singer-songwriters in its lineup, has a strong new record out today called Southeastern. Dwight Garner wrote a great profile of Isbell for The New York Times Magazine, which is well worth reading. Isbell recently went through rehab, and he has emerged from that experience with a terrific set of new songs. Isbell and his band, the 400 Unit, came to Chicago on Saturday (June 8), playing at the North Center street festival called Ribfest. The set included several of the new songs, both the softer, acoustic ballads and the rockers like “Super 8.” And of course, Ibsell and the 400 Unit played some of his best-known songs from previous records, including “Codeine” and the touching tribute to a friend killed in war, “Dress Blues.” And of course of course he delivered the signature tunes he first played with the DBT’s: “Decoration Day,” “Never Gonna Change” and “Outfit.” Isbell’s fans sang along enthusiastically.
The last time I saw a headline set by singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten was Feb. 17, 2012, at Lincoln Hall. As I noted back then, she was in a silly, giggly mood, fumbling around a bit too much in between her lovely songs. She was more focused when she played this Monday (June 3) at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park. Her goofy charm was still evident, as she made a few jokes, but this concert was all about her music. She doesn’t have a new record, so her set list drew from last year’s Tramp as well as her earlier albums. Even in a venue with thousands of concertgoers and a sweeping, panoramic view of Chicago’s skyline, Van Etten’s songs felt like intimate revelations.
For photos of the opening act, Speck Mountain, see my last blog post.
One of the delightful things about seeing a concert at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park is watching the performers themselves marveling at the beauty of the venue. And for some of the lesser-known musicians who get the chance to grace this stage — thanks to the inventive, often bold programming choices of the folks who book summer concerts — you can sense a certain amount of awe. I sensed that on Monday night (June 3), when the Chicago band Speck Mountain landed a primo spot as Sharon Van Etten’s opening act. It’s a very good bet that a sizable portion of the audience that turned out for the evening didn’t know who Speck Mountain was, but they probably made a lot of new fans.
Did they have any jitters about playing on a big stage in front of thousands of people? Not that I noticed. In fact, the band sounded more confident than I’ve ever seen them, especially when they jammed out with dual guitar solos on songs from their strong recent album Badwater. Marie-Claire Balabanian’s singing and guitar playing both sounded beautiful. They were a perfect choice to set the stage for Van Etten’s headlining performance. (More on her in my next post…)
Despite unseasonably chilly temperatures, the summer concert season got off to a stellar start May 27, with the year’s first show in the Monday night series called “Downtown Sound” at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park.
The evening started with Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog, a trio led by the highly esteemed guitarist. I’ve admired Ribot’s distinctive playing ever since I heard him on the 1985 Tom Waits masterpiece Rain Dogs. He went on to play on several more Waits albums as well as records by Elvis Costello, John Zorn and others. This was the first time I’d ever seen him perform in concert. Ribot really let his fingers fly at many points during Monday’s set, but he also led his group through the droning textures of a piece aptly called “Prayer.” Ribot was less successful as a singer, whenever he occasionally barked out some words. But it was marvelous to see him twisting notes on his guitar into gnarly, spiky solos.
The headliner had been billed ahead of time as the Lee Ranaldo Band, but by the time they were introduced, they were calling themselves Lee Ranado and the Dust. It’s half of Sonic Youth — Ranaldo on guitar and vocals and Steve Shelley on drums — along with guitarist Alan Licht and bassist Tim Luntzel. Of all the music released by Sonic Youth’s members since the band went on hiatus, Ranaldo’s 2012 album Between the Times and Tides is the strongest and most accessible work. And that came through during this concert performance, with a slew of catchy choruses and smartly constructed riffs.
Ranaldo and the Dust also played a few songs that the band is working on for its next record, as well as a somewhat surprising choice for a cover: the Byrds song “Everybody’s Been Burned,” written by David Crosby. Jamming out with Shelley and their new bandmates, Ranaldo seemed completely confident in his new role as a frontman.
Check out the rest of the schedule for this summer’s Downtown Sound concerts.
Laura Marling was alone on the Athenaeum’s stage Thursday night (May 23), standing in a white spotlight with a dark expanse of floor all around her. She has played with a backup group on some previous tours, but this time, it was just her voice and her guitar. That was all she needed.
Marling’s records, including the superb new Once I Was an Eagle, show that she’s a marvelous singer and songwriter. Her concert performance demonstrated another great talent: her guitar playing, which was highly expressive, using many alternate tunings and inventive compositions that allowed her to play melodies up and down a few strings while the chords formed by the open strings continued to ring out.
She joked and apologized about all of the time she spent tuning her guitar between songs. “They should advertise now that my concerts are 15 percent tuning,” she said at one point. And later: “My next album is going to be called ‘Tuning.'” Marling’s good-natured stage banter made up for the long tuning pauses.
She started the concert with an uninterrupted suite of songs off the new album, which stretched out to epic length, somewhere around 12 minutes. That one suite covered so much musical, lyrical and emotional ground that it felt like a miniature concert unto itself.
Marling played one brand-new song, newer than the new album. It opened with the lyrics: “I look west and I believe. He looks east and thinks of me.” Marling noted that she debuted another song during a previous Chicago concert. “I’m going to … make Chicago my debuting city,” she remarked.
On a couple of the songs from previous albums, audience members shouted “woo!” when she sang the opening lines, which made her laugh midsong. “I forget that people come to gigs to hear me,” she said.
After warning the audience that she wasn’t sure she would be able to remember how to play her song, “Hope in the Air,” Marling did indeed find herself blanking out on the lyrics. She stopped, and audience members shouted out the words, helping her back into the song. Afterward, she said, “I was just bragging this afternoon how I never write down the words to any of my songs.”
She may not write them down, but they’re clearly etched in the memory of her fans.
Hozac Records’ Blackout Fest was back this past weekend for another round of garage rock, power pop and other mostly raw and raucous music. It stretched out across four days at the Empty Bottle; I was there for the last two nights: Saturday, May 18, when Chrome headlined; and Sunday, May 19, when Dwight Twilley had top billing.
For my money, Sunday was the much better of these two nights — partly because Sunday’s lineup leaned more heavily to the power-pop end of the spectrum, which was to my liking. As for Saturday … Well, Saturday had its moments, too, especially the powerful music of Chicago’s Verma, with wordless singing (or is it merely incomprehensible?). Wizzard Sleeve, with Quintron on percussion, were another highlight, with a number of catchy choruses.
But when Chrome took the stage for the headline act of the night, everything ground to a halt. Original Chrome member Helios Creed encountered one technical difficulty after another, struggling to tune his guitar or to get his pedals working, even as he kept making boasts such as, “We’re going to blow you away.” It seemed like a rehearsal with a newly assembled band more than an actual concert. The band sounded all right once it got started playing songs, but there was an uncomfortable vibe among the players. At several points, Creed abruptly halted songs by waving his arms at everyone else in the band, giving them a not-so-subtle signal to stop playing. Maybe this is just the way Creed functions on stage, but it seemed more like malfunctioning.
Sunday got off to a damn good start with The Sueves, a Chicago band with jagged guitar riffs and vocals — the best discovery of Blackout Fest for me. The second band of the night was one that I was already familiar with, Games, who put out a strong album of ’60-influenced garage rock/power pop on Hozac late last year. The songs sounded even more bracing in concert than they do in the studio versions.
Then came what amounted to a double dose of power-pop headliners: Oak Park’s Pezband — a trio that originally formed around 1971 and still knows how to rock, demonstrating that they should play far more often than they do — followed by Dwight Twilley. The Tulsa, Okla., singer is most famous for his two hits, “Girls” and “I’m on Fire,” but he has a cult following of fans who clearly loved hearing Twilley play other songs from his old records — as well as the news that Hozac is releasing the first official record of Twilley’s 1975 song “Shark (in the Dark).” Twilley closed out the Blackout Fest in style.
By the end of a long night, more than a dozen musicians had filled the stage at the Bluebird Nightclub in Bloomington, Ind., joining their voices and instruments together into majestic rock songs. But as crowded as the stage was, what was more striking was the absence of one man.
The songs cried out for the voice of Jason Molina, the singer-songwriter who had played with many of these musicians in his bands Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co.
Molina died in March, and the tribute concert on Saturday (May 11) was a celebration of all the great music he left us with. It also served as a sorrowful reminder of what we’ve lost. (Read and hear my 2006 interview with Molina.)
Held in the college town where his record label, Secretly Canadian, is based, the bittersweet concert brought together Molina’s former bandmates from the various phases of his career, as well as musicians from other bands whom he’d befriended. The show stretched on for more than five hours — a testament to just how prolific Molina was, and just how well his music holds up.
Proceeding in a roughly chronological order, the concert began with some of Molina’s earliest musical collaborators reuniting. Admitting they’d had little chance to rehearse, these players still managed to deliver moving renditions of Molina’s early songs.
“This is going to be an epic night of music, 20-plus years of music and people who played with him,” singer-guitarist Bruce Comings remarked. “It feels weird to be play this music without him, but it feels good.” Later, touching his hand to his chest, Comings added, “We all miss him and this is helping a little bit.”
Singer Jennie Benford (who also performed in Jim and Jennie and the Pinetops) made the first of several appearances throughout the night during this set. It was great to hear her lovely vocals again.
Oneida, who toured with Molina and recorded a split single with Songs: Ohia, played a three-song set, returning to the scrappier, more song-oriented sound of its early days to capture the spirit of the times Oneida spent with Molina. For this performance, Oneida was supplemented by Erica Fletcher on bass and vocals. (She later came back to the stage with Oneida’s Fat Bobby to sing another tune.)
The next band to take the stage was essentially the group that Molina brought together in Steve Albini’s studio to make the 2003 album Magnolia Electric Co. — although it wasn’t the same band that played on later Magnolia Electric Co. albums and tours. This was a rare opportunity to hear these musicians (including some members of the Chicago heavy metal band Arriver) playing the songs live. Back when Molina made the record, he turned out the lead vocals on his song “The Old Black Hen” to Chicago alt-country singer Lawrence Peters, and now it was Peters who took a turn at the microphone to sing it in a rendition faithful to the beautiful original. Most of the songs from that masterpiece of an album were saved for the end of the night, however.
The core of the band that became Magnolia Electric Co.’s long-running lineup is the Coke Dares — a Bloomington trio that plays loud, fast, short and humorous hard-rock songs. The Coke Dares delivered 10 songs in rapid succession, adding a bit of comic relief to the evening. “We felt like we won the lottery when Jason asked us to play with him,” Coke Dares/Magnolia guitarist Jason Groth reminisced.
The final set of the night was essentially a concert by Magnolia Electric Co., and it was practically a concert unto itself. “We don’t have a lead singer, so we’ve asked out friends and ourselves to fill in,” Groth said. Not everyone could sing the songs in a style similar to Molina’s, but a few of them pulled off a tone reminiscent of Molina’s conversational, melancholy vocals.
Capping off the last set, players from the various eras of Molina’s career piled onto the stage, playing four songs from the 2003 Magnolia Electric Co. album: “Farewell Transmission,” “I’ve Been Riding With the Ghost,” “John Henry Split My Heart” and “Hold On Magnolia.” At their most dramatic moments, these final songs swelled and pounded with an almost startling force. In their quietest and most lyrical passages, the songs felt like prayers the musicians were saying for their lost friend.
This was not only a stirring tribute to Molina. It was also probably the last time the musicians who played on these songs will ever do them live in a concert anything like this. It was the final Magnolia Electric Co. concert and the final Songs: Ohia concert — albeit without the man who defined those bands. As the final notes sounded, singer Jennie Benford said, “I don’t want it to end.”
Molina’s handwritten liner notes for Magnolia Electric Co. included this comment: “Someone used to say to me: ‘If the only two words you ever say are THANK YOU then that will be enough.’ Thank You.”
Thank you.
Video of “Farewell Transmission”:
After getting their concert last night at Lincoln Hall off to a strong start, The Men came to a screeching halt because of technical difficulties. One of the Brooklyn group’s members, Mark Perro, was playing a vintage keyboard — an instrument the band has apparently been using a lot lately — when it suddenly conked out on him. Or maybe it was the amp. In any case, the thing stopped making any sounds recognizable as music. Perro left the stage for a bit, while the rest of the band played a couple of songs. Then he returned, abandoning his malfunctioning keyboard and picking up an acoustic guitar.
The Men scrambled their planned set list, playing songs that they could do without the keyboard. They ended up playing several brand-new songs — songs even newer than The Men’s latest record, New Moon, which just came out last month. In spite of everything, The Men put on a thrilling performance of rock music reminiscent of the Replacements, with touches of roots rock and older classic rock. (The Faces, another appropriate reference point, were playing on Lincoln Hall’s speakers before The Men took the stage.) At one point, when I was standing in front of center stage, I heard what sounded like perfect stereo: two simultaneous and fantastic guitar solos, one on either end of the stage. This was clearly a band that knows how to play and has a good time doing it.
The only reason I thought about this anniversary is that I happened to pull out my CD of South San Gabriel’s album Welcome, Convalescence last week. And I just happen to have a copy that was sent out to the press before the album’s official release date. So there’s a sticker on the jewel case that says: “National Release APRIL 11, 2003.” Ten years ago today.
I doubt if anyone else is making note of this anniversary. It’s probably the most obscure record I included in my top 12 list of the best albums from the last decade. But it’s the most magnificent recording that Denton, Texas, singer-songwriter Will Johnson has made in his prolific career fronting Centro-matic, making solo records, collaborating with many other artists and occasionally making music with a side-project sort of group called South San Gabriel.
While Centro-matic plays a style of rock somewhere between power pop, roots rock and lo-fi post-punk, South San Gabriel’s Welcome, Convalescence layers orchestral touches and menacing abstract noise on top of Johnson’s collection of melancholy songs. Death and violence are always lurking nearby in this set of lyrics. The record opens with the line, “Make no mistake, we’ll be the ones to happily set you on fire,” and goes on to mention gunshots, dagger, slings, hammers, poisonous arrows, axes and arson. (“At your feet was a mouthpiece and nozzle/Fit for the gas spreading all through the house.”)
There’s a way out of the darkness. In the final track, nearly buried by a dense, beautiful cacophony, Johnson (or the character in his lyrics, anyway) travels “quietly out from the passage/if only to see the Splinter Angelic.” I’m still not sure exactly what the Splinter Angelic is, but it’s a fitting description of the evocative music South San Gabriel made on this record, released a decade ago today.
The CD of Welcome, Convalescence is out of stock at the Undertow record label’s online store, but MP3s can be purchased here.
Admission was free Monday night at the Empty Bottle — as it often is on Mondays — for a triple bill of intriguing local bands. With DJ Scary Lady Sarah playing music in between the bands, the live music got started with the first-ever concert by Acteurs, a duo comprising Jeremy Lemos of White/Light and Brian Case of Disappears. Song shapes occasionally emerged out of the amorphous synth squiggles and reverb-drenched vocals, but Acteurs was more about the atmosphere than anything else. It may turn out to be just a side project for these two busy musicians, but they make for an interesting combination of talents. (Their six-song EP is out on the British label Public Information, and you can listen to it on bandcamp.)
The second band of the night, Population, played goth post-punk with vocals strongly reminiscent of Joy Division and guitar lines that evoked the Cure. The band’s latest songs are streaming on bandcamp.
The headliner was Implodes (like Disappears, a Chicago band with a present-tense verb for a name). The group’s second album, Recurring Dream, recently came out on Chicago’s Kranky label, and the gauzy shoegaze guitar music sounded great in concert.
The real Stagger Lee, an African-American pimp named “Stag” Lee Shelton, killed a man in St. Louis on Christmas day, 1895, during an argument over a Stetson hat. The slaying became legendary thanks to a folk song called “Stack-a-Lee,” “Stacker Lee,” “Stagolee” or “Stagger Lee,” depending on who was spelling it out at any given time. Early versions of the song end with “poor, poor” Stagger Lee hanged and then hauled off to the cemetery via a “rubber-tired hearse” and “a lot of rubber-tired hacks.”
That’s not how the song ends when Nick Cave sings it. The 1996 version by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds — actually, a loose interpretation of the old folk story, with new music written by Cave and six of his bandmates at the time — turns Stagger Lee into even more of a bad ass. Or to quote Cave’s twisted rendition of the words, “that bad motherfucker.”
By the time Cave & the Bad Seeds performed Monday night (April 1) at the Chicago Theatre, they had transformed Stagger Lee into an even more powerful, frightening demon of a man. In Cave’s live version of the song, the devil comes for Stagger Lee, and Stagger kills him, too. Cave was swaggering and writhing on the lip of the stage, lowering himself toward the outreached hands of the fans in front. The vulgar threats in the song’s lyrics (“suck my dick, because if you don’t, you’re sure to be dead”) became a leering come-on to the audience. Seeing someone in the crowd holding up a smartphone, Cave ad-libbed a new lyric: “In come the Devil with an iPhone in his hand.”
Nick Cave concerts are rarely, if ever, anything less than stellar. Monday’s show reaffirmed Cave’s breathtaking power as a live performer — and all the strengths of the versatile Bad Seeds ensemble. The new record by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Push the Sky Away, is a brooding, moody set of songs. Much of it is quiet, but a tension rattles underneath the songs, as if they might burst into noise and apocalypse at any time. That expected catharsis never comes, but that doesn’t diminish the listening experience. If anything, it heightens the foreboding sense that something sinister is at play.
One of the new songs, “Higgs Boson Blues,” returns to the Satanic sort of blues Cave evokes in “Stagger Lee.” This time, Cave sings about the old legend about bluesman Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil, but the lyrics take a strange and unexpected journey into the world of pop celebrities including Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus. The song shows Cave at his most uninhibited as a songwriter. Like much of the album, “Higgs Boson Blues” feels like a phantasmagoria. (Dictionary definition: “a rapidly changing series of things seen or imagined, as the figures or events of a dream.”)
Cave and his band began the concert with four of the new songs, including a version of “Jubilee Street” that climaxed with a more rocking jam than the studio version, and a sprawling, dynamic “Higgs Boson Blues.” Then came a series of the Bad Seeds’ golden oldies, a smattering of piano ballads, and a staggering “Stagger Lee” to end the main set. (The Chicago Tribune’s Greg Kot has the full set list at the end of his review.) The encore was a pounding “Tupelo” followed by one more song from the new record, the title track, an album closer that channels all of those disturbances and hallucinations into a shimmering meditation. And then the phantasmagoria shimmied out of view.
On Friday night at the Empty Bottle, Thurston Moore introduced his new group, Chelsea Light Moving, as if both he and his bandmates were completely unknown newcomers to the music scene. Just some new band called Chelsea Light Moving. From Chicago. Or so he said. Of course, the New York-based Chelsea Light Moving is actually a new vehicle for Moore, who’s already famous as a member — apparently, a former member — of Sonic Youth.
The surprising news in 2011 that Sonic Youth was breaking up, or at least taking an extended hiatus, left us fans wondering what the group’s individual members would do on their own. Drummer Steve Shelley spent some time playing with Chicago’s Disappears. Lee Ranaldo released a quite tuneful and enjoyable solo record last year, emphasizing the pop side of Sonic Youth. Kim Gordon made an appearance at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago last week (which I missed), reportedly getting rather avant-garde with noisy jams based on Nina Simone songs. On Friday, it was Moore’s turn, and he played songs from his new album with Chelsea Light Moving — which is named for an actual moving company that composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich once operated, back when they need to move furniture to pay the bills.
Moore’s solo records have shown that he’s just as responsible for Sonic Youth’s melodic side as anyone else in the band was, but with Chelsea Light Moving, he’s gravitating more toward the noisier, scrappier end of the spectrum. Moore’s new songs are sometimes bring back memories of what it was like to hear Sonic Youth for the first time, when the chord progressions — or whatever those weird sequences of notes might be properly called — seemed to operate on a logical system distinctly different from most rock music. It was fascinating to watch Moore returning to those roots, even as he tries to reinvent himself. On Friday night, Chelsea Light Moving’s other members (Samara Lubelski, John Moloney and Keith Wood) felt like a backup band for Moore rather than a group where he’s an equal partner in a musical mind-meld. So, yeah, it wasn’t Sonic Youth. But then again, what is?
The show also featured an opening set by Jeremy Lemos, who plays in the Chicago drone band White/Light. This was billed as a solo set, but he was joined onstage by the other half of White/Light, Matt Clark, as well as Mark Solotroff (of the bands Bloodyminded and Anatomy of Habit), for a set of abstract hums and bleeps.
The second band of the evening was Cave, the Chicago krautrockers, who dug into their repetitive riffs with intensity.
As I wrote last week in Time Out Chicago, one of the Chicago record label Trouble in Mind’s latest finds is a psychedelic singer-songwriter from the Netherlands named Jacco Gardner. His debut album, Cabinet of Curiosities, is a delightful throwback to Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd and the chamber pop of the Left Banke; a more contemporary reference point is the music of newer psychedelic groups such as Caribou.
Gardner and his band played last night (March 19) at the Empty Bottle, visiting Chicago for the first time (and remarking on how cold our city is). The studio versions of Gardner’s songs are tuneful, pretty and generally on the mellow side, occasionally veering into strange and spooky sounds. The live versions Gardner played with his touring band didn’t radically change those arrangements, but the Zombies-esque drumming, acoustic guitar chords and melodic bass lines had a bit more zip — making the songs all the better. Gardner’s definitely a talent to watch.
I arrived at the Empty Bottle just in time to hear the last few minutes of the opening set by MMOSS, another Trouble in Mind band — who were jamming out on a different, spacier variety of psychedelic music.
Below: Pictures of Jacco Gardner and his band.
Rest in peace, Jason Molina. The news that this great songwriter has passed away is devastatingly sad for those of us who knew and loved the music he made with Magnolia Electric Co., as well as the many recordings he made under other guises, including Songs: Ohia and his own name.
The Chunklet website broke the news today about Molina’s death, and tributes soon followed from the Chicago Reader, NPR, Drowned in Sound and Molina’s longtime label, Secretly Canadian. Free mp3s of Molina’s songs are posted here.
I had the privilege of interviewing Molina, for an article that appeared in Pioneer Press. It was Sept. 8, 2006, and he asked me to meet him that Friday afternoon at Simon’s Tavern in Andersonville, which was close to where he lived at the time. Magnolia Electric Co. had just released its album Fading Trails, and Molina also had a new solo record, Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go.
Until now, I’d never transcribed the entire interview. Here is the audio for anyone who would like to hear Molina discuss his approach to songwriting. (My apologies for the background noise in the bar and my own sometimes awkwardly worded questions.)
And here is Jason Molina, in his own words:
Q: Was it relatively recently, in the last couple of years, that you moved to Chicago, and kind of made this your home base?
A: No, well, I’ve lived here off and on for, I guess, it’s been about six years or something like that. Between here and southern Indiana. The band is in southern Indiana. And as long as I can afford Chicago, I stay here.
Q: Just because it’s a nice place?
A: Well, I mean, I love it. I have access to so many fantastic musicians, people to bounce ideas off of. It’s a wonderful place for live music, and also our favorite studio in the world is here, Electrical Audio.
Q: Now, is Indiana where you’re from originally?
A: No, I was born in Ohio. And I grew up in northern Ohio and in southern West Virginia.
Q: It’s kind of a standard question to ask musicians such as yourself, but I’m always curious about your childhood exposure to music, either playing it or hearing it, and what kind of things influenced you?
A: It wasn’t music at the — Nobody in my family played music. We had an old guitar. You know, I taught myself how to play on this garage-sale guitar my parents had bought, in the ’60s, probably. But they had a fantastic record collection. So my earliest exposure to music was — you know, I could probably operate a turntable before I could walk — is my memory of my early, early life. I would listen to a record all the way through — Patsy Cline, Roxy Music, David Bowie, Eno, Neil Young.
Q: Your parents were into this kind of stuff?
A: They had everything.
Q: Were there certain records that stood out to you early on as a kid, as your favorite?
A: Not really, no. If the artwork was intriguing, really that’s what I — because I sort of had free rein. I didn’t live in a — I lived in a trailer park. So we didn’t live around any other kids, really. So, before I started reading a lot, I think listening to records was my — I probably taught myself to play music by listening to a whole record. That’s how I started to write songs, and the idea of putting together a whole record’s worth of material.
Q: And this garage-sale guitar, was it just something that was lying around?
A: Yep. Yeah, it was broken. You had to tune it with pliers.
Q: You still have it?
A: I still have it.
Q: What company was it?
A: It’s actually a fairly decent guitar. Fender made it, but it’s clearly like a Harmony Silvertone kind of guitar. Maybe a Stella body. I don’t know. For a while, Fender put their name on it. But yeah, I’ve always kept that guitar, because it was important. Because I taught myself how to play music on it.
Q: So with this thing not being in great shape, I imagine your early efforts must have been a little daunting, just figuring out how to get it in tune or whatever.
A: Yeah, when you live in a small town — I didn’t even know how to buy strings. I didn’t know the difference between a bass guitar and a guitar. So I taught myself. And I was learning how to play, and playing along with songs on records or on the radio. I was playing part of the bass line and part of the guitar line. It was real trial by fire.
Q: And that was just hearing the note on the record —
A: Sure.
Q: — and finding where on the string it makes that sound.
A: Right.
Q: So you didn’t necessarily know how to make a G chord or anything?
A: No. So that idiosyncratic kind of approach to guitar music has really colored my songwriting, I think.
Q: And at what point did you meet someone else who knew how to play guitar or tell you, “You’re not supposed to do that,” or “Hey, you’ve learned a lot by yourself”?
A: I was — where I was I? I found this, not in my really — just on the edge of my town, I had found a little guitar shop. And I had never seen a guitar shop before. It just blew my mind, after I’d been playing, you know, alone and writing songs, that there’s a store you can go to and actually buy musical instruments. So I went in there and said, “I have to buy a guitar” — like a good, like a new one. And an electric guitar — sounded like it would open a lot of doors to me. So I—
Q: How old were you at this time?
A: I was probably about 12.
Q: And what towns are we talking about?
A: This — I bought this guitar in Lorain, Ohio. Real small guitar shop.
Q: That’s the town you lived in, or —
A: It’s on the edge of the town I lived in. I did live in Lorain. It’s between Cleveland and Toledo, right along the lake. And yeah, I didn’t know anything about how to play or whatever and I plugged this bass in and just started playing, and I’m just as loud as hell. I don’t have any concept of how to keep it quiet. I was playing Black Sabbath. And I was literally shaking the — the walls were shaking, and I interrupted some drum lessons in one of the lesson rooms.
So the teacher comes out and everybody’s yelling at me, like, ‘Keep it down.’ And the guy he’s giving the lesson to is someone I knew from, like, grade school, and he was a drummer, so we started a band right there. It was that easy. And when got a guitar player who was a friend of his. And that was it. That was how I started to be in bands.
Q: Now, as you came to know more musicians and play with people, did that — I imagine some of those idiosyncrasies of your early guitar playing have stuck with you, but did you pick up the more traditional “Here’s how to play chords,” or —
A: No, that only happened at the time of recording Didn’t It Rain, was the first time. So I’d probably already been playing music for ages, and I’d already put out a lot of records. But as I was settling into wanting to collaborate with a lot of different kinds of musicians, I needed to have a musical vocabulary, at least in a simple kind of way. Because Here I am, writing all of these songs with abstract tunings, absolutely no reason for it. It’s really hard to get in a room with a musician with one mind-set, and then have me teach them a song, and I don’t really have a way to communicate it.
Now, at least, I mean, I can still write the songs as crazy as I want and use whatever tunings I want, but I have a sort of — I have a language connection to the music where I can explain it in words. And so, since, time is a sacred thing now. It’s so impossible to rehearse. Everybody in Magnolia is in several other bands, and when we’re together, we’re on the road, so tomorrow, we’re going to be watching some of the Touch & Go bands and rehearsing tomorrow night and all day Sunday, and then we’re going to be on tour until Thanksgiving. So —
Q: Right. One reason I contacted the label to set up the interview now is, I looked at your website and thought, “Wow, he’s not going to be around for a while. If I’m going to get him in person, I’d better do it this week.”
A: Right.
Q: And you’re going — this is pretty wide-ranging.
A: The first part is North America, and we’re touring with Bottomless Pit. That’s two of the members of Silkworm and some other guys. Fantastic band. From Chicago. And we will be, after we’re done there, we’re going to be doing Australia and New Zealand, and be in Europe for a while, too. It’s a heavy tour.
Q: So, getting back to starting bands as a teenager, what happened between —
A: Before a teenager, though. You have to understand —
Q: Preteen.
A: Like, when I was 13, we already had a record. So, I mean, when I was really about 11 or 12, I already had a lot of songs. We learned right away from a generation before us. You know, the older guy in high school or whatever who had an eight-track, or he’d ring the tape machine in the garage to document us this band that was playing.
Q: What was the first band called?
A: Well, for probably a year, we didn’t even have a name, but we settled on the Spine Riders. … It’s got this ghosty connotation, and it’s like a skateboard reference. But it was the ’80s.
Q: And did many people hear you? Were you playing in front of friends at school?
A: Yeah, we absolutely played. We were our version of what a hardworking touring band would be. We were definitely doing — we played parties for high school kids, when I was just in junior high. I think I was probably in fifth or sixth grade when we were already playing these parties, 300 people crammed into a garage driveway. And we played in the projects. We played in heavily depressed areas. … Anywhere between Cleveland and Lorain, because Lorain’s about an hour away from Cleveland.
Q: Were the high school kids impressed by the fact that you could play, or were they like, “Who’s this rugrat that’s coming to our party?”
A: I was a songwriter, so they didn’t — I mean, I wrote the music. So, even though I was playing with older dudes, in a lot of ways, it was — it just so happened that I was younger. It didn’t become a problem until everybody moved away. I can remember those guys being able to drive, when I wouldn’t be able to drive for another five years. Going to my own show would be impossible, because I’d have to have my parents drive me to the show. (Laughs.) I didn’t even have a license. But then, eventually that band disintegrated because everybody was so much older than me. Everybody moved away and got jobs, so, you know, I still already had a working method, which was writing songs pretty much every day. So, I found myself without a band and wanting to still do this.
That’s what turned into all of the Songs: Ohia years, the Magnolia stuff, was the transition from having a steady band and then having it sort of taken out from under me. But the Mangolia, it’s not a traditional band. We don’t live in the same town. We don’t rehearse often. But we love to tour together. And I have 100 percent confidence in the way that they arrange my songs. And so, it’s a really fantastic working relationship, because these are really creative people, extremely talented. And it think it gives us a special footprint in the music world because we don’t — we’re not worried about the business side of this. How it will, you know, turn out — what is the arc of the career? We’ve been doing this for 10 years on one, single independent label. And we’re proud of that kind of working and that relationship with the independent music world.
Q: What was the origin of the name, and I was never even sure I was pronouncing it right — Songs: Ohia (O-hi-yuh)?
A: O-hee-yuh.
Q: O-hee-yuh?
A: It doesn’t matter. That’s part of the fun of it. Before I was even in the mind-set to make records, I was recording records, which were — I would get 10 songs and conceive of them as, like, a piece. I would record them on a four-track, and I would do a cassette release that I would just sell at my live shows or give to friends.
Q: How many copies?
A: Probably up to 50, was like the most that I could do before my tape machines would self-destruct. And so, it would just be a reference point of, like, where I recorded them. A lot of the times, it would be like, you know, “Songs: Tennessee,” if I happened to be in Tennessee then. Because I was living in West Virginia, there was a lot of West Virginia references. Cities that I was in or places that I had traveled to or whatever. So that’s how the name, the sort of weird kind of construction of the name. It was just “Songs:” and then insert something to remind me of what is on that tape. And so, Ohia is a Hawaiian flower. It’s a tree, a flowering tree. All those songs were done on ukulele. It was to remind it was all these songs I did on ukulele and singing — that stuck for almost a decade.
Q: There was some debate among fans about the album that was titled Magnolia Electric Co., and whether that was a Songs: Ohia album called Magnolia Electric Co. or if that was the name of the band. And now, obviously, that has become the name of the band. But was that your original intention when you did that first one?
A: The last Songs: Ohia record is Didn’t It Rain. And then the next record is the self-titled Magnolia record. That is the first Magnolia record. Because in my mind — I was living in Chicago, and I had scheduled to do this record with Steve Albini over here at the studio. There was a scheduling conflict came up, and we wouldn’t be able to do the record in the time that I had available here in Chicago and that he was available. And that was bookended between touring, so it’s not like I could cancel 20 shows in order to fit recording into a new time. The tour was already booked. So a studio offered itself to us in Philadelphia, and the whole band couldn’t come.
So suddenly I was stuck. I thought I had a record with this band that we were going do here at home in Chicago and then suddenly we couldn’t all do it. And I forced to sort of write on the fly. I just had to come up with a record, basically And we got actually sessions for that musician, Mike Brenner and Jennie Benford. Mike Brenner, that was the first time I met him but he’s played on most of the records since then, a steel guitar player. And Jennie is an old friend from over 10 years ago, and she sings on a lot of the records. But basically, that kind of working on the fly, literally cobbling together a record in a studio that I’m not familiar with, with musicians I’ve never met, and material that I was literally writing while I was in the studio — that, to me, was the most successful version of that I’d ever pulled off.
I felt like, since it was coming up on 10 years of doing it under that name, just changing the name — it really wasn’t arbitrary, but it was a marker for myself. I want to put 10 more good years in with Magnolia, and who knows? There might be a day when we walk out of that studio here on West Belmont and know that we’re going to be doing something else. (Laughs.) You know?
Q: Over the course of the records since then — I have to confess I haven’t paid that much attention to the liner notes as far as who was playing what. Has the lineup of musicians you’re playing with—
A: It’s always the core group of the Indiana guys. That’s Pete Schreiner, Jason Groth, Mark Rice and Mike Kapinis. And then with rotating guests. So it’s a core band of keys, bass, drums, guitar.
Q: And these are musicians, had you just met them, like you said, around the time of that first album, or how did you hook up with them?
A: Well, these are people that I — you know, I was a fan of their bands, their other projects. These are touring musicians. Fantastic bands on their own.
Q: I saw that show Magnolia Electric Co. did maybe about a year ago at Schubas where the Coke Dares [a band including members of Magnolia] played. They were great.
A: Right. It’s three of the guys. That’s the Magnolia rhythm section, the Coke Dares. And then Mike Kapinisis the keys-and-trumpet guy. But yeah, I was already a fan of that music and we lived in the same town at the time, and I just remember that Pete the bassist had really wanted to somehow work with me. He was in other bands that I was a fan of. Panoply Academy, Glee Club. Some other bands that Jason was in. And Mikey was also in other bands. So these guys were doing, like, triple duty in other bands. I wasn’t so concerned with: Did I get along with these guys. I was just, I felt like they could add something fantastic to my kind of songwriting. I would still be working with these guys even if I hated them, because they’re such sympathetic musicians. I think that they’re — and they also really take risks when they’re playing. I don’t feel like they’re being self-conscious playing with me.
Q: Could you describe — you said that they add some fantastic to the music. Could you describe what it is that they add, that would set apart a Magnolia Electric Co. from a Molina solo recording?
A: I guess what you’re going to look at is — everybody is really given a sort of free rein for contributing arrangement ideas, you know? I come in with just the skeleton of the song, just the basic chord progression, melody, kind of. Um, and the lyrics, and you know, it can go in any direction. Just by when the first person speaks up. You know, the bass line goes in this one direction and everybody can follow that way. Maybe the drums do something and everybody follows that way. And that’s what I think that they add — a real kind of a human life to this song. These aren’t little art projects to me. I think songs are living animals. And I think that working with these guys for so long, touring so much, it’s made me a much better musician.
Q: So you’re not the kind of songwriter who goes into the studio with a preconceived notion of: “I need a bass line that does this, I need a drum part that does this”?
A: The songs are basically finished when we’re in the studio. I do write when we’re in the studio. And those songs will, a lot of the time, make it onto the record. But like I said, I have 100 percent confidence in what each of those musicians from Magnolia will bring to the songs. I’m thinking more in a very, very, very big way. I’m thinking about the overall scope of the record, from the first song to the last song. I’m thinking about the general tone of the record, the basic speed and feel, I’m thinking of all of eight, 10, 12 songs at a time. I’m not thinking of one little song, and I don’t fixate on one little aspect of the song. I think that all of that’s really important, and all of that adds to the texture and vitality of the records. It’s not like I gloss over that. I think that stuff’s all really important. But what these musicians are doing is adding that detail.
And although I said that I have a musical vocabulary now, which is very rudimentary, the idea of the record in my head is really hard to — you can’t put it into words. When it’s finished, I can say it achieved what I wanted or it didn’t. But along the way, it’s a harrowing kind of — it’s a harrowing experience, from the writing of the songs to the touring of the songs to the final arrangements in the studio, to the final count four and do a take, of the songs.
Q: You have a couple of records out. There’s the solo one, and Fading Trails is the new Magnolia record. How would you describe that one? You said it’s hard to put in words while you’re doing it. Now that you’re done with it, can you describe what the concept or idea behind this album was?
A: Well, we wanted to finish — we had an entire session that we wanted to have finished here in Chicago with [Steve] Albini at Electrical. We had a session that we had done in Memphis at Sun Studios with a fantastic engineer, James Lott. He’s worked with all of the great Sun musicians over the years. And we also had this record that was a collaboration between me and David Lowry from Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker, which was a session that we did in Richmond, Va. And then we had music from a session that was to be a full Magnolia record but due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control, the original tapes for the session were lost. So I had only sort of demo quality versions of them. I had professional-quality versions of the songs that could have either been a solo record or the start of a Magnolia record.
So we had all these sessions, and they were all done in a relatively short amount of time, and the label thought it would be a really good idea to take a representative sampling from each of the sessions, make them into a complete record. Because lyrically, thematically, all of the songs are really related. And the wild sonic world that we cover from just these four-track recordings at my house to Sun Studios to Electrical Audio, Albini’s take on recording us live in the room, and then the David Lowery collaboration — I would never have dreamed that somehow this makes a cohesive record, other than lyrically being tied together. But to the fans’ ears, it’s one of the most successful records we’ve done.
So, there’s where chance really took over. I didn’t have a heavy-handed approach to how this record would work out. The label actually just made a suggestion, which they never do — I was floored by them saying, “Why don’t we do this — instead of putting out five records, all in a row, why don’t we put these all together and see if we can make a good record out of it?” For the rest of the material from all of those sessions, none of it’s throwaway material, and the label has something special planned for early next year — a secret. It’s a secret.
[The following year, Secretly Canadian released a box set of the recordings from these various sessions called Sojourner.]
Q: Now, what’s the solo record called?
A: The solo record is called “Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go.”
Q: Right. Now is that apart from all of the stuff you’re talking about?
A: It’s an entirely separate thing. That came out a couple of weeks ago.
Q: Is that more, just Jason Molina playing by himself?
A: They didn’t seem to be songs that needed to have full band arrangements. Because I was taking a lot of arrangement chances. I was playing a lot of piano and organs. I don’t ever attempt that out of the songwriting moment. If I write a song and it seems to be appropriate to be doing an arrangement where it’s just voice and one instrument, doing it on piano, when I present that to the band, I’m just going to be playing guitar and have someone else — Mikey will actually play, he’ll write a proper line for the piano.
But there’s a kind of simplicity I really appreciate and a real exploration that I hear when I listen back to those tapes of someone literally trying to make this somewhere. Given the situation where I have the instrument in front of me, and I have an idea to write a song, and I’m going to try to make two or three chords, make some kind of progression, and make a melody and make it into a song. And I’m confident as I do that, but to duplicate it in a different environment with me playing piano or playing the Rhodes or the Wurlitzer or whatever, I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in capturing that moment where the song is being written as the tape is rolling.
Q: So, you mentioned a similarity of theme in the lyrics. What you care to talk about that? I always hate to put songwriters and artists on the spot and say, “What does your song mean?” But I’m wondering what themes have interested you.
A: It’s going to be a lot of themes of dislocation. It’s going to be themes of, you know, trying to find out where a person really is at home. Someone like a touring musician, who’s gone most of the year — you know, I move and I don’t even know where our next apartment is, you know. I’ve just come home from tour and we have a new place. I think a lot of that is in there.
Also, an appreciation for what I think some people would take for granted — really small episodes in a day that involve, you know, birds and the weather, the nighttime — you know, a moment with quiet in the middle of the city. To put that in a song is something I really try to get across. Because it really does happen. You know, there’s a magic to that. The pounding, and the screaming and yelling, and the screeching tires, and the street noise, and the airplanes and the train rumble, and then you turn a corner and suddenly it’s just silence. It’s that kind of moment that I always try to put into the songs.
Q: So, how much of the year do you get to spend at home in Andersonville?
A: It’s gonna be, I’d say, it’s gonna be, something like maybe a third of the year that I’m gonna be in Chicago. The rest of the time, I’m on the road.
Q: Is there anything else I should mention in terms of things you do for fun?
A: No.
Q: Do don’t have a day job, right — you’re a full-time musician?
A: Right, right. I mean, this is anecdotal, but — so I’m doing this interview for a paper in Indiana. The interviewer says: “I really feel like I know you because you’ve been back and forth a lot and some of the band still lives here in Indiana. And you got five records done this year, so you must have a lot of free time.” And I was just blown away, that there is someone that thinks that this is a product of free time. Because this is really the product hard day-to-day work, but it comes from all of those years when I was sweating in some shitty job. Some shitty full-time job. And I was writing songs. I got up two hours, three hours early.
Q: What kind of jobs did you have?
A: Everything. At last count, I had over just 30 menial, stupid jobs. But you know, when I would have to go to work, I would get up two or three hours early, and I would write songs in the morning, even if that means being up at 4 and writing for a few hours and then go to work. And then come home and write more songs. So, now, just because I’m not working a physical 9-to-5 job, songwriting, it’s definitely a full-time thing. So, it was just funny to be interviewed by someone who thought, like, this is just the result of having a hell of a lot of —
Q: You’re kicking back and taking it easy and writing five records?
A: Right.
Q: So, when you write songs every day, does it just — do you ever get writer’s block—
A: No.
Q: Or does it come out pretty easily?
A: Here’s the thing. You want a well-oiled machine. Maybe the machine sucks. The design of the machine might suck. But I’ve had a really, really good stretch the last couple of years where, you know, I’m just not afraid to throw stuff away. When it’s a bad song, I kind of know it. While I’m writing it.
Q: Do you ever change your mind, go back and listen to a tape from a few years ago and you think—
A: Well, that’s the thing: I physically throw things away. I actually, when it’s a demo, and I feel like it’s not going anywhere, I have to get it out of my life. And I physically throw it in the trash. There’s no going back. Secretly Canadian has, like, a vault filled with outtakes and demos and all these things from before — Sometimes I feel like I’m going to give them one-sixteenth of what I have, just so I can put it away. Someday, they might want to listen to that stuff. I might want to listen to that stuff. But most of the time, I’m, once a week, throwing out stuff.
Q: You’re not going to do the thing that Guided By Voices did and put out a box set of outtakes from the outtakes, like, 10 years later?
A: Yeah, I don’t think could — I can’t do that because, like I say, physically I throw out everything. I think that that’s good. I think that that’s good. I’ve always — you know, for 10 years I thought, for 10 years I had this rule that I could only have 50 records. Couldn’t have any more than 50 records in my life.
Q: And what number are you are at right, depending on how— [At this point, I thought he was talking about the number of albums he would record in his life, but it became clear he meant the number of records that he owned.]
A: Well, right now, I have, I probably have at least 200 records, because I just buy things and I buy things so much I don’t have time to listen to them? But I’m getting it back down to 50. The 50 rule. And it’s the same thing with songs. When you’re writing a record, you keep — I keep this thing in mind.
The moment you write a song that sounds like it doesn’t fit with the rest of what you’ve been doing for the last month or so, then you set that aside and then you go back and you try to determine if those songs that you’ve done recently are really a cohesive unit. The song that sort of like threw you off and then was like a clue into maybe where the next record’s gonna go is the thing that makes you realize it’s time to book time in the studio and get these songs done with. Because it’s a very, very, very small window, and I will have no interest — because I’ve put so much work into these songs — I don’t have interest in going back to them. If they don’t materialize on tape and come out as a record, I’m not going to reinvest any part of my life to go back and get to know those songs and try to get back into my way of thinking as I had been when I wrote those songs. So, like I said, it’s a really small window.
So I’ve written records that never came out, of course. There’s full records. I had this whole collaboration with Low, we were going to do a few years ago. And I was living in Nebraska, and I wrote this entire record called The Lamb and Flag, and then at the last minute Alan [Sparhawk, of Low] had a scheduling conflict and instead of doing that I ended up going to Australia or something. And not only did I never go back and do those songs and Low and I never collaborated to do this record, but those songs have probably ended up in the Dumpster. Usually on New Year’s Day, I throw out everything. So, all these songs —
Q: Make a fresh start every year?
A: Of course, of course. I think about it then.
Q: And you said no writer’s block. It’s pretty easy for you to just sit down and do the work?
A: Right. Because I realize — it’s not precious to me if I have to throw it out.
Q: And what’s usually — it may be different every time, but is there a standard thing that starts a song going? Is it some notes on the guitar? Is it a lyrical idea? Is it whatever?
A: It’s both. Well, it’s the lyrics first. It’s the music first. It’s different every single time.
The idea is just to be available to the kinds of, you know, little sparks and little quirky things that normally I wouldn’t have come up with. Maybe it’s the juxtaposition of a little melody I had in my head with the guitar. Maybe it’s a lyrical idea. Maybe it’s, you know, very rarely, just sort of a title and then I work towards the title. That’s not really the way I write songs. And when a song is done, I walk away from it saying — you know, I’m usually shocked. Because it’s not what I went in going for. That wasn’t the original idea for the song. There’s not a completed idea.
It’s a process, you know? Yeah, it’s definitely — songwriting is a process, it’s not a — it’s not this big event that materializes on a record when you’re listening to it at home as a, you know, as a fan. To me, it’s: How can I put something together, just like, cobble together something out of just the ether? So I’m — there’s still a magic to it for me.
Q: Um, you don’t strike me as a musician who’s — um, well, I guess everyone is influenced by other musicians. And in your case, sometimes with the whole band arrangements with Magnolia, I hear some Crazy Horse in there. But you yourself don’t particularly strike me as Neil Young fanatic.
A: No. What I definitely know — I can see the — the comparison is pretty easy because there is a kind of a, there’s an absolute search for freedom in the arrangement of the songs. There isn’t a heavy-handed approach to how these — these songs don’t have to be hits, but they have to be a good song. They have be a song that we feel we should be playing. And I think that there’s, like I say, that kind of searching comes in the actual records. Because you’ll hear that, because we’re recording that live. We are real humans really standing around in the room making this music. And people like Steve [Albini] are documenting that. So, I think a lot of what Crazy Horse went through in all of these last years — since before I was born — those guys were doing an exploration onstage, using just this little thread of a song and making it into, you know, a beast.
Q: How old are you right now, anyway?
A: I think I’m thirty— uh, I think I’m 32 right now.
Q: Do you keep up — obviously when you’re out on the road and you have different opening bands, you’re exposed to that music. I’m wondering how much you keep up on — what sort of music do you listen to?
A: Just Bob Seger. ’70s music, mainly. That’s the music I like.
Q: Yeah, I think I saw you do a Seger cover once.
A: “Still the Same.”
Q: He’s got a new album coming out.
A: Finally. I mean, seriously, like, ’91 was the last one.
Q: I read this article where he said he’d recorded an album a few years ago and decided he didn’t like the way it sounded and scrapped the whole thing. But he has a new record coming out in the next month or two.
A: Well, you know, I saw some of our friends are opening for Wilco, you know? It would be killer if we could open for Seger. That would be—
Q: Now, Bob Seger is not considered very cool.
A: That’s what strange, because, to me, it’s like, very razor-sharp music, and it’s got a lot of this bad-butt boogie element that I think was really popular at the time those records were made. But the core of the songs, if you are patient enough, you can find a great song in there, and that’s a great song.
Other than that, for what I keep up with, it’s my friends’ bands, bands that I tour with, bands that I go to see live. I just don’t have time to keep up, and it’s OK. But I do educate myself. I don’t lock myself in a sort of a closet, and say, “New music sucks.” That’s so disheartening to hear. I hear someone like Dylan doing interviews now, saying he doesn’t know anybody who’s made a record that has sounded any good in 20 years.
Well, he’s never been brave enough to make a record at Electrical Audio. Do it all live, and do it the way you did it in ’65. Don’t be self-conscious about it and, you know, scream and rock and, you know, fuck it up. And you will make a great record. I mean, you just have to go into it knowing that when you walk into that studio, it doesn’t matter if anybody buys it. Do you buy it? Does the musician buy it? Do I buy this music that I’m singing? Do I buy this song? Do I believe in it? And that’s all that matters.
It’s a March tradition at the Hideout: On the Saturday before the SXSW festival begins in Austin, the club hosts an all-day benefit concert featuring many of the Chicago bands that are heading down to Texas, raising some money to help them cover their travel costs. (They’re not actually getting paid for playing those gigs at SXSW — imagine that.) The lineup was strong this past Saturday (Feb. 9), and I managed to catch the first seven hours of the shindig before I finally bailed — not because the later bands were any less worthy, but just to get some rest.
The afternoon got started with a terrific set by Twin Peaks, a group of guys barely out of high school. I’d noticed them featured in Loud Loop Press’ recent list of 13 local bands to watch in 2013, and the song “Sunken” on their bandcamp page further piqued my interest. They more than lived up to my expectations, bashing out a bunch of catchy songs with some surprisingly Beach Boys-esque harmonies and Television-esque guitar leads.
Judson Claiborne performed lead singer-songwriter Chris Salveter’s folk rock with a muscular, roots-rock vibe, offering an intriguing preview of the group’s forthcoming record, We Have Not Doors You Need Not Keys.
The Congregation filled the stage with brassy, old-fashioned soul music, with occasional blasts of Who-style guitar and drums as a bonus; the group closed with an unexpected cover of the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog.”
Scott Lucas & the Married Men followed with perhaps the most intense performance of the day, culminating with a searing version of “There Ain’t No Grave (Gonna Hold My Body Down),” filled with some stunning guitar playing by Mr. Lucas.
The Waco Brothers were billed to play next, but it was actually a combination of the Wacos and another group led by Jon Langford, Skull Orchard. As Langford explained, a couple of the usual Waco members were unavailable to play; I presume he was joking when he explained that Tracey Dear was indisposed because of chafing he’d become afflicted with after a nudist adventure in the jungles of Costa Rica. Langford called tonight’s band, which featured Jim Elkington, “Waco Orchard,” and they played a fun set, finishing with Langford throwing his guitar into the arms of drummer Joe Camarillo for the last chord.
For a complete change of pace, Frontier played droning, ominous music in nearly complete darkness, other than a few bright beams of light. It should’ve been louder.
And then the Summer Girlfriends played their sunny girl group tunes, sounding tighter than they did the last time I’d seen them, with at least one brand new song in the set.
There was plenty more ahead — Mahogany, Outer Minds, The Hood Internet — but that was as far as I made it. Good luck to all of these bands at SXSW!
Saki record store in Logan Square was packed Thursday evening (March 7) for a free performance by Low, followed by a Q&A including the band as well as Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, who produced the new Low album, The Invisible Way. And as if all that weren’t enough incentive to bring out a crowd, there was also free beer. This was part of the monthly “Off the Record” series of free listening parties, presented by the city of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events and saki. “Listening parties” tend to involve a new record being played, and that happened, too — The Invisible Way, which comes out March 19, was playing in the store before the live performance.
The performance was billed as a “stripped-down” show by Low. But of course, Low has always played some pretty bare, stripped-down music. So some of trio’s live renditions probably weren’t all that much different from what the band will play when it returns to Chicago for a full concert March 22 at Metro. In any case, it was a beautiful set of serene yet passionate music, with intimate harmonies between guitarist Alan Sparhawk and drummer Mimi Parker. Steve Garrington, who has normally played bass with Low since joining the band in 2008, played on the record store’s piano throughout this set. The new record features a lot of piano, too. As the group explained during the Q&A, that’s because the album has more songs than usual by Parker, who writes her songs on the piano — despite, by her admission, not really knowing how to play the instrument.
WXRT’s Marty Lennartz asked questions during the Q&A, before opening it up to the audience. Tweedy emphasized how he tried to stay out of the band’s way, producing the record with a light touch. “It’s my favorite thing I’ve ever been a part of,” he said. The interview concluded with Tweedy displaying the albums that members of Low were purchasing at Saki, including (pictured below), Pat Travers’ Makin’ Magic.
Watch the trailer for The Invisible Way on YouTube.
Wednesdays are usually a night for jazz and improvisational music at the Hideout. Last Wednesday (Feb. 28), the venue hosted three bands playing instrumental rock music of the sort often called, for lack of a better term, drone. The evening started with Bitchin Bajas, a keyboard/electronics duo comprising Cooper Crane from Cave and Dan Quinlivan from Mahjongg, who got a cool krautrock vibe going by the end of their set. Next up was White/Cream — which is Jeremy Lemos of the band White/Light teaming up with Tim Iseler, joined for this set by the always-inventive Chicago drummer Frank Rosaly. The duo responded to Rosaly’s rhythms as they fashioned subtle electronic patterns.
The headliner was Mountains, the electronics-and-guitars duo of Koen Holtkamp and Brendon Anderegg, who recently released a new album, Centralia, on Thrill Jockey. Live, their music pulsed and washed over the room in waves of chords, a soothing symphony.
(I confess to cheating a bit with some of these photos; the room was dark during the performances, so I captured a few shots of Mountains as they were setting up, before the actual concert began.)
Last Monday (Feb. 25), I caught two concerts — first, the always-entertaining Hideout residency of Robbie Fulks, who featured Brooklyn singer-songwriter Greg Trooper as his guest this time. I wasn’t familiar with Trooper’s music going into this show, but I was quite impressed with what I heard, and Fulks contributed some masterful guitar solos to Trooper’s tunes while, of course, singing a few of his own.
And then I was off to a free concert at the Empty Bottle with Ex Cops, Henry Wagons and Panoramic & True. Wagons, an Australian singer, was the highlight of the night for me, with his confrontational and highly humorous stage banter, culminating with his effort to get a reluctant audience member standing at the bar to emit a blood-curdling scream as the climax to a song about executions.
As you can see from my recent posts, I’ve been seeing a lot of concerts lately at the Logan Square club Township. The venue still feels a bit under the radar, but it has been booking some good shows recently, including local as well as touring bands. On Saturday night (Feb. 16), the Washington, D.C., band Deleted Scenes played — for some reason, as the third of four bands. I caught the last three bands (My Dad, Deleted Scenes and We Love You), and it seemed like each group had its own set of fans, and the people rotated in and out of the room during the evening. My Dad’s two-drummer math rock was ragged but energetic, and We Love You’s pop-punk was pleasant but somewhat generic. Deleted Scenes were the highlight of the evening, playing indie rock with some of the complexities of art rock. It was a strong performance in front of a small crowd in a small bar … by a band that’ll surely be playing bigger Chicago venues in the future.
“Play the Blondie song!” Some guy shouted out that request in the middle of the show by the Paul Collins Beat last Thursday (Feb. 7) at Township. Other people in the crowd groaned. I think most of us wanted to hear that song — “Hanging on the Telephone,” which was originally recorded by Collins’ first band, the Nerves, before Blondie had a hit with a cover version — but this was an unfortunate way to phrase the request. In any case, when Collins and his band got around to playing “the Blondie song” a little while later, it was electrifying.
After the Nerves broke up way back when, Collins formed another band called the Beat — not to be confused with the English Beat. Later on, it became the Paul Collins Beat. In all of these guises, Collins has created some catchy power pop but he’s never gained all that much fame. But the folks who crowded into Township on Thursday clearly knew and loved his music. A fairly young crowd sang along to Collins’ songs, including a few that dated back to the first, self-titled Beat album from 1979, such as “I Don’t Fit In,” “Working Too Hard” and “Rock N Roll Girl.” The audience was on the verge of moshing at times. Now, that’s how you’re supposed to greet power pop royalty, people.
Cross Record — the stage name for Chicago singer and musician Emily Cross — plays an intriguing mix of folk songs with ambient and drone textures on its album Be Good, which you can stream at bandcamp. Songs that might pass for early Cat Power or Sharon Van Etten are embellished with echoes and moody washes of keyboards, or even an epic sense of drama, as on the song “Dirt Nap.” The record sometimes has the sound of a performer who’s playing by herself, with looping pedals as her only accompaniment.
Emily Cross played, with a backing band, on Thursday (Jan. 24) at Township. It was a solid performance, although the music wasn’t quite as spooky or evocative in these live arrangements. Still, Cross’ voice and guitar playing made it clear she’s a talent to watch. For the final song of the night, she switched to clarinet and giggled a bit as she covered the Chris Isaak song “Wicked Game.”
My favorite concerts from the past year. Just 10 very memorable and outstanding performances of a hundred concerts I attended; there were so many other great ones…
1. Iggy Pop and the Stooges, Sept. 16 at Riot Fest (Humboldt Park). Blog post.
2. Glen Campbell, Jan. 26 at Rialto Square Theater. Blog post.
3. Ida, Jan. 29 at Saki. Blog post and photos.
4. Jeff Mangum, Feb. 8 at the Pabst Theatre, Milwaukee. Blog post.
5. Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Oct. 11 at the United Center. Blog post.
6. Willis Earl Beal, April 19 at the Hideout. Blog post and photos.
7. Patrick Watson, June 1 at Lincoln Hall. Blog post and photos.
8. Le Butcherettes, June 2 at Do-Division. Blog post and photos.
9. The Cairo Gang, Dec. 9 at the Burlington. Blog post and photos.
10. Eighth Blackbird and other musicians perform John Luther Adams’ “Inuksuit,” Aug. 26 at the Pritzker Pavilion. Blog post and photos.
1. SPIRITUALIZED: SWEET HEART SWEET LIGHT (Fat Possum) — Spiritualized maestro Jason Pierce emerged from a brush with death to make a soul-searching, musically rich masterpiece. Lush orchestrations and choirs of harmony singers shine like beams of light to fend off the existential angst creeping into Pierce’s world-weary rocker narration.
spiritualized.com
2. SHIRLEY ANN LEE: SONGS OF LIGHT (Numerophon) — These songs were recorded between 1996 and 1968, but only a few of them were released at the time — and even those were just 45 rpm singles distributed by bicycle in Toledo, Ohio. In other words, even though this is old music, it didn’t truly see the light of day until 2012, thanks to the invaluable work of the master musical archeologists at Chicago’s Numero Group. These spare, occasionally primitive and off-kilter recordings feature little more than piano or electric guitar and Lee’s remarkable voice, but that’s all they need to showcase the heartfelt songs, mostly written by Lee herself. Each song is built around a gospel message, but they transcend any particular religious denomination’s beliefs, expressing life’s universal struggle. When the Numero Group’s Rob Servier visited Lee at her Toledo home in 2008, she had no copies of her own records. Lacking a CD player, she went out into Servier’s car so she could hear the disc he’d made of her old recordings. Hearing the music for the first time in 40 years, she sang along. And now, the rest of the world can marvel at these lost recordings.
Buy from the Numero Group.
3. RADAR EYES: RADAR EYES (HoZac) — Garage rock of the ’60s and punk rock of the ’70s continue to inspire a lot of new music, including many Chicago bands recording on HoZac and other labels. Chicago’s Radar Eyes are one of the best, packing a punch with fuzz-drenched guitar riffs, stomping drumbeats, walloping bass lines, droning keyboards and catchy singing about, well, prairie puppies, among other things. On the final track, Radar Eyes suddenly sounds almost exactly like Joy Division, making for an odd shift in style but one that gradually starts to make sense after you get used to it. A strong set of tunes from start to finish.
4. THE CAIRO GANG: THE CORNER MAN (Empty Cellar) — The Cairo Gang is Emmett Kelly, a versatile guitarist, singer and songwriter who has shown up a lot on Chicago stages over the past several years, always demonstrating an impressive talent for sensitive playing that feeds off the musicians next to him. On this lovely new LP, Kelly’s songs resemble the music he’s recorded as a collaborator with Bonnie “Prince” Billy, but they’re all his own, with subtle, organic arrangements that shift from hushed falsetto ballads to dramatic bursts of rock. In one song, he aptly asks, “Tell me what’s better … being quiet in the noise?”
Buy the record from Endless Nest.
Buy the record on Bandcamp.
5. JOSHUA ABRAMS: REPRESENCING (Eremite) — Joshua Abrams is another musician who appears with Zelig-like frequency in Chicago nightclubs and concert halls, playing jazz as well as experimental music that overlaps with the rock scene. Abrams often plays bass, but on this record he plucks the guimbri, a three-stringed North African bass lute, also known as the sintir. His choice of instrument gives these improvisational jams a tactile sensation — you can almost feel those strings bending and snapping under his fingers. A variety of other musicians join in, creating exotic and evocative sounds. The textures change from song to song, but they’re consistently engaging, even hypnotic.
Buy the record from Eremite, and hear a sample track.
6. GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR: ALLELUJAH! DON’T BEND ASCEND (Constellation) — Epic visions of decay and destruction, all communicated without a single word being sung. The music by this Montreal collective (back in action after a long absence) could be categorized as instrumental rock music, but that feels like an inadequate label. GY!BE’s compositions owe as much to classical music as they do to rock, and the band erupts into apocalyptic bursts as intense as anything a full orchestra could conjure.
Constellation Records
7. DR. JOHN: LOCKED DOWN (Nonesuch) — The legendary New Orleans singer and keyboard player found an ideal collaborator for this record, working with Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys. The resulting musical stew includes pieces of Afro-beat, Ethiopiques, funk, blues, jazz and rock. It’s colorful, odd and cool.
Nonesuch’s website for Dr. John
Dr. John’s website
8. KELLY HOGAN: I LIKE TO KEEP MYSELF IN PAIN (Anti) — For the past decade, Kelly Hogan has been a singer you had to catch live. Despite having one of the best voices in the business, she shied away from the recording studio. She finally released an album this year, with a top-notch band and a whole slew tunes contributed by noteworthy songwriters. She wrote only one of these songs, but she makes them her own. Hogan’s home territory is a landscape with patches of country music, soul, folk, old standards and rock — classic American scenery.
kellyhogan.com
9. TREASURE FLEET: COCAMOTION (Recess) — This Chicago band features former members of the Arrivals, the Smoking Popes, the Lawrence Arms and Sass Dragons, and the music they make overflows with 1960s influences, including Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, the Who and the Kinks, and there’s a bit of Guided By Voices in the mix, too. The songs are inventive and scrappy, sometimes whimsical, sometimes yearning, always highly melodic. Cocamotion was just one of two records Treasure Fleet released in 2012; the other was Future Ways, which is almost as great as this one.
Buy the album from Recess Records.
10. CATE LE BON: CYRK (The Control Group) — The Welsh singer-songwriter takes Great Britain’s folk-music idioms and channels them into a rock band setting, adding psychedelic flourishes, Nico-style intoning and waltz beats. Le Bon’s dulcet voice glides serenely and seemingly effortlessly through it all.
catelebon.com
Listen to the album on Paste magazine’s website.
RUNNERS-UP (IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER)
Alabama Shakes: Boys & Girls
Amadou & Mariam: Folila
Antibalas: Antibalas
Willis Earl Beal: Acousmatic Sorcery
Andrew Bird: Break It Yourself
Bonnie “Prince” Billy: Hummingbird (EP)
Bonnie “Prince” Billy & Mariee Sioux: Bonnie & Mariee (EP)
Cat Power: Sun
Cinchel: Stereo Stasis
The dB’s: Falling Off the Sky
Dan Deacon: America
Disappears: Pre Language
Divine Fits: A Thing Called Divine Fits
Justin Townes Earle: Nothing’s Gonna Change the Way You Feel About Me Now
The Explorers Club: Grand Hotel
Father John Misty: Fear Fun
Bill Fay: Life Is People
Lee Fields & the Expressions: A Faithful Man
Gap Dream: Gap Dream
Guided By Voices: Let’s Go Eat the Factory
Guided By Voices: Class Clown Spots a UFO
Guided By Voices: The Bears for Lunch
Hanne Hukkelberg: Featherbrain
The Horse Loom: The Horse Loom
Catherine Irwin: Little Heater
Kayhan Kalhor: I Will Not Stand Alone
Brendan Losch: Low
Aimee Mann: Charmer
Mexican Institute of Sound: Politico
Mind Spiders: Meltdown
Mount Eerie: Clear Moon
Georgia Anne Muldrow: Seeds
Salim Nourallah: Hit Parade
Angel Olsen: Half Way Home
Oneida: A List of the Burning Mountains
Outer Minds: Behind the Mirror
Poor Moon: Poor Moon
Redd Kross: Researching the Blues
Megan Reilly: The Well
Lee Renaldo: Between the Times and the Tides
Ty Segall: Twins
Ty Segall Band: Slaughterhouse
Spires That in the Sunset Rise: Ancient Patience Wills It Again
Swans: The Seer
The Tallest Man on Earth: There’s No Leaving Now
Thee Oh Sees: Putrifiers II
Treasure Fleet: Future Ways
Trembling Bells & Bonnie “Prince” Billy: The Marble Downs
Corin Tucker Band: Kill My Blues
Sharon Van Etten: Tramp
Waco Brothers and Paul Burch: The Great Chicago Fire
The Walkmen: Heaven
M. Ward: A Wasteland Companion
Patrick Watson: Adventures in Your Own Backyard
White Hills: Frying on This Rock
Matthew E. White: Big Inner
Bobby Womack: The Bravest Man in the Universe
Woods: Bend Beyond
The World Record: Freeway Special
Neil Young & Crazy Horse: Psychedelic Pill
Time flies. It doesn’t seem like five years have passed since I attended the Thrill Jockey record label’s 15th anniversary celebration. (I posted photos here.) But on Thursday (Dec. 20), somehow it was already time for Thrill Jockey’s 20th anniversary. The Chicago label has maintained a defiantly independent streak over its two decades of existence, an achievement well worth celebrating. Thursday’s concert at the Empty Bottle was free, though not everyone waiting in the long line outside managed to get in.
There weren’t any speeches from the stage — just three bands, playing the sort of out-of-the-mainstream music Thrill Jockey is known for. It would’ve been impossible to represent the full range of Thrill Jockey’s musical spectrum in just a few hours, but this was a good sample. Man Forever, a group led by Oneida drummer John Colpitts aka Kid Millions, started the evening with a single piece of music featuring four percussionists playing polyrhythmic patterns as guitars and bass provided a wall of drone. Then came The Sea and Cake, a long-running Thrill Jockey band, playing its alternative-universe version of what pop music might sound like. And finally, two of the musicians from that outfit (John McEntire and Doug McCombs) stuck around for a performance by one of their other bands, the so-called post-rock (sorry!) instrumentalists Tortoise. One of the band’s members, Dan Bitney, was ill and unable to attend, so the band played as a quartet — which made for a scrappy and rocking, if somewhat abbreviated, set.
Kudos to Thrill Jockey for a terrific 20 years, and here’s to … the next 20?
It’s been seven years since the last album by Freakwater, the alt-country duo of Catherine Irwin and Janet Bean, and a decade since Irwin released her last solo record. Thankfully, there’s some action lately on the Freakwater front. The duo is reuniting (reconvening?) for a tour celebrating the 20th anniversary of its album Feels Like the Third Time, with a show Jan. 21 at the Hideout. And Irwin recently released a great solo record called Little Heater, which brought her to the Hideout on Friday night for a delightful set of her rustic, plaintive country-folk songs.
She mostly played songs from the new record, including “Dusty Groove,” which her friend Kelly Hogan also sang on her 2012 album. And Irwin threw in another one of her songs that has been covered by a friend, “Hex,” which Neko Case sang on her 2004 live album, The Tigers Have Spoken. It was great to hear Irwin sing these songs in her own unmistakable voice.
The night started with a set from Rachel Ries, who said she is recording an album in Chicago with help from Emmett Kelly and David Vandervelde. Following Irwin’s set, Mr. Rudy Day (featuring Andy Hopkins, Mike Bulington and Geoff Greenberg) cranked up the volume considerably above the hushed sounds of the acts that preceded them.
This past weekend was filled with noteworthy live music, as you can see from my previous blog entries about Chris & Heather’s Country Calendar Show, Syl Johnson, Renaldo Domino and Expo 76, and Foxygen and Angel Olsen. And then on Monday came another fabulous evening of Robbie Fulks at the Hideout, this time featuring Kelly Hogan.
But perhaps the best performance of the whole weekend was a set on Sunday night by the Cairo Gang, in front of a small but appreciative audience at the Burlington. The Cairo Gang is the stage name of virtuoso multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter Emmet Kelly, who shows up in Chicago clubs over and over again playing with various bands. Most famously, he’s been a sideman to Bonnie “Prince” Billy in recent years. On the wonderful album Wonder Show of the World, the Cairo Gang (aka Kelly) wrote the music while Bonnie “Prince” Billy (aka Will Oldham) wrote the lyrics. Kelly has also played with Angel Olsen, Joshua Abrams and David Vandervelde, just to name a few.
Under his Cairo Gang moniker, he recently released an exceptional record called The Corner Man, which makes it clear how much he and Oldham have influenced each other. In its quiet, acoustic moments, the album is reminiscent of the work Kelly has done with Bonnie “Prince” Billy, with delicate, subtle vocals carrying artfully constructed melodies. But as Time Out Chicago noted last week in an article about Kelly, the live version of the Cairo Gang is turning into something more like a band than a solo act. The lineup that played Sunday at the Burlington includes Ryan Weinstein (of the band Coffin Pricks) on bass, Sam Wagster (of the Father Costume) on guitar and Ben Babbitt (of This Is Cinema) on drums.
At the Burlington, the Cairo Gang was loud and intense, but no less subtle than the studio recordings. Some of Kelly’s quiet moments on record were transformed into dramatic, even epic rock. In the midst of the set, the band played two terrific back-to-back covers: the Mekons’ “Hello Cruel World” followed by Nick Cave’s “Shivers.” [Correction: Oops, that’s actually a song written by Roland S. Howard and originally recorded by The Boys Next Door before they became The Birthday Party; Cave was a member of the band but not the writer of that song. The song is also covered by The Divine Fits on their 2012 debut.] The gang ended their show after midnight with the most hushed song of the night, but that one, too, built to a thrilling climax. There were 30 or so people in the room, including several faces I recognized from other bands. An enthusiastic couple near the front didn’t even know who they were watching, demanding at the end of the set: “Say your name again!” The Cairo Gang. Remember that name.
On Sunday (Jan. 9.), Logan Square’s Saki record store once again hosted an afternoon of free live music. One of the performers was Chicago singer-songwriter Angel Olsen, whom wrote about recently when she played at the Burlington. So… not to belabor the point, but she once again wowed a crowd into silence with her beautiful voice and songs.
In a much different vein, Sunday’s in-store at Saki also featured Foxygen. The California duo-turned-band’s debut, Take the Kids Off Broadway, was released this year by the Jagjaguwar label. It’s a giddy psychedelic party, and the band lived up to its occasionally goofy studio recordings with a daft live performance that included lots of hair pulling, ironic stage banter and keening vocals that sometimes reminded me of the Oklahoma band Evangelicals. I’m looking forward to the second Foxygen record, We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic, which comes out in January.
Epitonic recorded both performances for its Epitonic Saki Sessions.
