Chicago singer-songwriter Jess Shoman started her folk-leaning project Tenci in her bedroom a little more than a year ago. Spencer Radcliffe & Everyone Else, who opened Tenci’s first show last December at the Hungry Brain, had helped her get the project out of the house. Before that gig, Everyone Else vocalist Tina Scarpello had joined […]
Tag: Vol. 48 No. 47
Issue of Aug. 29 – Sep. 4, 2019
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Polo G brings the north-side projects of his youth vividly to life on Die a Legend
Rapper Taurus Bartlett, aka Polo G, grew up in Old Town’s Marshall Field Garden Apartments, and he’s channeled the resilience he learned as kid into one of the most durable hip-hop tracks of the year. On “Pop Out” he delivers a vivid hook that indicts the poverty and mayhem in Black communities, but his plaintive, […]
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Jay2 strengthens the Zero Fatigue collective’s grip on Chicago hip-hop with 4 Tha Wait
Saint Louis-born rapper-singer Smino taps two MCs from his Chicago-based Zero Fatigue collective, Bari and Jay2, for “Z4L,” the best song on his 2018 album, Noir. Jay2 appears at the end, caressing the track’s minimal, sexually suggestive instrumental with his firm flow and supple voice. He needs all of his well-earned self-assurance to handle the […]
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Bay Faction blend emo and synth pop on Florida Guilt
Bay Faction are a band with roots in cyberspace. In 2013, lead singer James McDermott was studying at Berklee College of Music in Boston when he posted a call for bandmates on a Facebook page for local musicians. The only replies came from two fellow Berklee students, bassist Kris Roman and drummer Connor Godfrey (later […]
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On the spaced-out new In the Spirit World Now, Ceremony distance themselves still further from hardcore
Northern California punk outfit Ceremony have been a vital part of the modern-day hardcore scene since their 2005 inception, but they’ve spent much of their career pushing as hard as possible to sound like anything but a hardcore band. Their earliest stuff was super aggressive, powerviolence-inspired hardcore, but by the early 2010s they’d begun making […]
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UK singer-songwriter Barns Courtney explores existential themes on 404
After Dave Grohl broke his leg early in the Foo Fighters’ 2015 tour, he performed the rest of the dates with his leg in a cast, sitting on a throne of his own design. Singer-songwriter Barns Courtney took Grohl’s shtick up a notch after breaking his foot jumping from the stage at Milwaukee’s Summerfest in […]
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Jessica Hernandez & the Deltas mix grooves from Detroit, Havana, and Mexico City
Blessed with a dusky wail and a gift for raw, soulful phrasing, Jessica Hernandez has been serving up Motown-infused, retro-tropical sass with her band the Deltas since 2008. The group’s grooves create an unlikely hybrid of flavors from Detroit, Havana, and Mexico City, but Hernandez comes by that mix naturally: her dad is from Havana, […]
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Country rockers Pure Prairie League play picks from their long, shape-shifting career
As I get older, I warm up more and more to laid-back Americana, delving far beyond the tunes of Gram Parsons, Gene Clark, and Townes Van Zandt that I revered as a wee lad. I’ve sought out vintage practitioners of acoustic twang such as Country Funk, Uncle Jim’s Music, and Hearts & Flowers, who are […]
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Infinity Crush’s Caroline White sings pretty odes to desire on Virtual Heaven
North Carolina singer-songwriter Caroline White records gentle guitar folk under the name Infinity Crush. She’s cited poets Li-Young Lee and Dorianne Laux as inspirations, and given those cues, you could be forgiven for thinking that she’d be singing nothing but elevated songs about nature and love. To be fair, she does do plenty of that; […]