alt-country Archives - Chicago Reader

Members of Freakons gathered outside a red barn

Freakwater and the Mekons unite to sing about coal’s dark, transatlantic legacy

by Bill Meyer March 23, 2022March 16, 2022

In the early days of the COVID pandemic, retail clerks, day-care staff, public-transportation employees, and many other workers learned what coal miners have known for a very long time: that the authorities who deem their labor essential don’t necessarily feel the same way about their lives. Freakwater and the Mekons have each sung folk ballads […]

The five piece band the Royal Arctic Institute

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All-star indie quintet the Royal Arctic Institute make twangy space jazz on From Catnap to Coma

by Brad Cohan February 2, 2022January 31, 2022

The Royal Arctic Institute is a group of New York- and New Jersey-based musicians who made indelible marks on the east coast’s underground rock heyday of the 80s and 90s as members of Das Damen, Two Dollar Guitar, and Cell. This instrumental band operates with a core trio: guitarist John Leon (who’s played with Roky […]

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Half Gringa’s empathetic alt-country harnesses the power of understatement

by Leor Galil September 1, 2020August 18, 2021

In 2016, Chicago alt-country singer-songwriter Isabel Olive began performing and recording as Half Gringa, a name that refers to her Venezuelan ancestry. As she told music writer Britt Julious in the Trib that year, she wants to use Half Gringa to explore complicated questions about ethnicity and identity. Olive knows she’s unlikely to find easy […]

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Paisley Fields makes out and open country music

by Salem Collo-Julin July 15, 2020August 18, 2021

The country-music world has been slow to embrace its queer community, so it’s been refreshing to see a new generation of queer country artists and songwriters—among them Brandi Carlile, Ty Herndon, and Shane McAnally, who frequently writes for Kacey Musgraves—live out and open lives in the spotlight over the past decade or so without their […]

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