If there’s a music critic equivalent of finding five bucks in a pair of jeans you haven’t worn in a minute, it would be finding an unopened, weeks-old promo mailer in your desk mess that just happens to have some great music in it. That’s what happened to me this week, and the music in question is the debut EP from local dream-surf-goth quartet Tiger Bones, Go Over Here. Formerly known as Gay Baby, the group rebooted itself recently and started making weird, gray-toned pop music that Monica Kendrick describes as “enough to make you picture pale goths with black parasols on the beach, getting high enough to like it without giving up their passion for the sinister undertone.” The show she’s previewing is tonight at the Whistler, and it’s a release party for Go Over Here, which will be available on vinyl and as a free download. You can check out the opening track, “Kill Them,” here. It’s really, really good.
Other shows previewed on the List in this week’s Reader include the Ex, Iron & Wine, Janet Jackson, Nels Cline, and Barrington Levy. Elsewhere in this week’s music section you’ll find a double Q&A on the topic of lo-fi with current and former locals Campfires and Bird Names, photos of Yann Tiersen and Breathe Owl Breathe from their Bottom Lounge show last week, my piece on SoundCloud’s new, DJ-unfriendly approach to copyright enforcement, and an extra-spicy Gossip Wolf with a major Pitchfork Music Festival leak.
And by the way, the Tiger Bones disc is far from the only droolworthy Chicago release to come across my desk in the past couple of weeks. Get psyched for spring, everybody.