If you’ve got a low tolerance for whimsy, this Australian psych-prog band are probably not for you (the name really should have tipped you off to begin with). But if you like your trippy art-rock with lots of impish smiles implied, welcome to the weird world of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. The group […]
Category: Concert Preview
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Brooklyn duo 75 Dollar Bill shake up their hypnotic sound with a churning second album
Last year scrappy, minimalist New York duo 75 Dollar Bill dropped their second proper album, Wood/Metal/Plastic/Pattern/Rhythm/Rock (Thin Wrist), whose awkward title serves as a list of the basic ingredients that guitarist Che Chen and percussionist Rick Brown draw on. (“Second” doesn’t count their three cassette-only titles.) Though still rooted in the visceral, cyclical grooves of […]
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Contempo presents a valuable look at the work of five cutting-edge female composers
Contempo, the long-running new-music organization at the University of Chicago, casts a welcome light on five important female composers from Europe with this rigorous program performed by locals Ensemble dal Niente and the Kontras Quartet along with Polish pianist Pawel Checinski, expat Moldovan bayan virtuoso Stas Venglevski, and mezzo-soprano Kayleigh Butcher, a founding member of […]
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Danish sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard creates from within the scorched Chernobyl environment
For his long-overdue Chicago debut, Berlin-based Danish sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard presents Aion, a multimedia work built around a recording project he conducted in October 2005 within the radioactive zone that surrounds the decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Released in 2006 as 4 Rooms (Touch), it consists of four pieces recorded in an abandoned gymnasium, […]
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LA rapper Lil Peep surfs a new wave of hip-hop tinged with alt-rock
LA rapper Gustav Åhr, better known as Lil Peep, was a child when emo’s third wave crashed onto the Billboard charts. For Peep and a smattering of other underground MCs, emo in its most popular form—notoriously defined by the masses in terms of its quasi-gothic fashions rather than, well, its music—has been part of the […]
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Ben Chasny emerges with his most bucolic and pretty Six Organs of Admittance album to date
In 2015 Ben Chasny, sole constant member of the long-running Six Organs of Admittance, created what he calls the hexadic system in an attempt to break familiar patterns and habits in his playing and writing. The rules, which revolve around the dealing of a deck of cards in relation to notes on the guitar, injected […]
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Show Me the Body recruits friends from the underground to make some noise
The members of New York punk group Show Me the Body write barbed, sludgy songs that make it sound like they all woke up on the wrong side of the Dumpster. The band’s work draws on the distorted alt-rock and nasty pigfuck of 20-plus years ago as well as contemporary artists across a broad spectrum: […]
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Veteran Tuareg band Tinariwen create a lattice of bluesy guitar licks on the new Elwan
Over their previous few albums, veteran Tuareg band Tinariwen have included contributions from a revolving cast of rock musicians, and their strong new Elwan (Anti) follows suit. Guitarists Kurt Vile and Matt Sweeney (Chavez), who jam on a handful of tracks, deserve praise mainly for not getting in the way, which is more than I […]
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BJ the Chicago Kid’s emotional restlessness keeps him grounded
BJ the Chicago Kid is ostensibly an R&B traditionalist: he’s reimagined Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” as a posthumous duet with the singer, he repeatedly alludes to the importance of the church in his lyrics, and he even sang the national anthem at President Obama’s farewell address here in Chicago. But it’d probably be more […]
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Singer-songwriter Tift Merritt brings poetic beauty and calm to life’s uncertainties on Stitch of the World
Tift Merritt wrote the songs on her new album, Stitch of the World (Yep Roc), as she attempted to wind down after a divorce, several years of touring both on her own and as a member of Andrew Bird’s band, and the clustered releases of several records, mostly under her name but sometimes with collaborators […]
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Bustling country-rock band Sweet Spirit throw one hell of a party onstage
Nine performers is a lot of band, and on their recordings Austin country-rock outfit Sweet Spirit can sound a bit clotted and ragged, like nobody’s quite clear where all the members go. Live, though, they throw one hell of a party. Lead singer Sabrina Ellis in particular has a riveting, no-fucks-given charisma that comes across […]
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Minimalist composer Arnold Dreyblatt is as adaptable as he is innovative
Maybe the collaboration between minimalist composer Arnold Dreyblatt and trio Megafaun on 2013’s Appalachian Excitation (Northern Spy) seemed odd at first: the former came up in the fertile underground experimental NYC scene of the 1970s, while the latter keep to the hills of Durham, North Carolina, propagating an off-kilter brand of psych-touched folk. But Dreyblatt, […]
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The CSO’s MusicNow series salutes the late Pierre Boulez
Masterful composer, conductor, and thinker Pierre Boulez died in January 2016 at the age of 91 after decades of revolutionizing classical music and propelling it to radical new extremes. As a conductor he had a long, fruitful relationship with Chicago, beginning with a two-week subscription series leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1969, during which […]
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Bizarre minimalist duo Sleaford Mods add some melody to their verbal assault
If Nottingham’s Sleaford Mods have anything that might be considered a breakout single it’s “Jobseeker,” a track that landed them on the BBC’s Later . . . With Jools Holland in 2015. The hyperaggressive and starkly minimal duo were a sight never before seen on the late-night circuit, right away making them something of a black sheep for the […]
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On Rheia the flexible Oathbreaker blend shoegaze, black metal, and postpunk
Belgian quartet Oathbreaker have dribbled all over the metallic map in their three full-length albums, the most recent of which, Rheia, came out last fall on Deathwish. There’s something for everyone in their rapid-shifting mixture of shoegaze dreaminess, black-metal vitriol, and postpunk abstraction—which means that there’s sure to be something for everyone to dislike. But […]