Month: October 2009

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A scary song: ‘The Exiled Men’

Listening this morning to Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis playing scary songs on Sound Opinions inspired me to offer my own choice for a Halloween tune. The song is “The Exiled Men” or “Dei Frealause Mein,” from the CD The Sweet Sunny North: Henry Kaiser & David Lindley in Norway. The only thing that might keep this song from scaring you is the fact that the lyrics are sung in Norwegian. But the liner notes in the CD illuminate the story being told. (Does anyone out there have the actual lyrics in Norwegian and/or English? I’d love to get the actual text.) Here’s how the liner notes tell the tale:

“The words tell the grim story of some exiled outlaws who set sail on Christmas eve — a time when nobody went out on the ocean due to the many strange spirits out and about at such times. They were shipwrecked near the Shetland Islands. Their boat froze in the ice and they stayed there for nine years. Finally they decided to resort to cannibalism in order to survive. They drew lots to decide who would be eaten first. Unfortunately the sailor among them lost and after the others ate him they realized that now there was no one to captain the boat. So they prayed to God and suddenly a big bird came from heaven and stood on top of the boat’s mast and a wind came and took the boat and the men away.”

This is a West Nordic ballad that may come from the Faroe Islands or Iceland, and on the CD, it is performed with chilling beauty by the Norwegian singer Kirsten Bråten Berg, accompanied by David Lindley on the Turkish saz.

Download “The Exiled Men” (mp3)

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Herman Dune, Julie Doiron and Wye Oak

The new Lincoln Hall music venue has sold out some shows in its first couple of weeks, but on Thursday (Oct. 29) it was one of those rather chilled-out evenings with a small crowd of music fans standing around the main floor while three performers delivered their songs unadorned and intimate.

First up was the Baltimore duo Wye Oak, who have released two records on the Merge label, including this year’s The Knot. Jenn Wasner sang and played guitar, belting out some strong notes and shaking her hair with abandon whenever it was time for a solo. Andy Stack isn’t singing as much as he did on the first Wye Oak record, but he pulled off the impressive feat of playing the drums and keyboards at the same time. As much as I liked the Wye Oak performance, I wonder if they could accomplish more with a couple of other musicians to provide more variety and color to their arrangements. Still, it was fairly catchy rock music.

The middle act in the lineup was Julie Doiron, who was in an extremely chatty mood as she played her music solo, taking lots of requests from the audience, basically playing whatever her fans wanted to hear. Doiron’s stage banter was pretty funny, and she seemed to be in a “don’t know when to stop talking” mood. Her songs sounded more fragile than they did when she played with a full band at the Empty Bottle earlier this year, but Doiron still knew how to rock even when she was just playing by herself. What a charming, honest performer.

The headliners were Herman Dune (or Düne), a duo from France whose music is sometimes labeled “anti-folk” … another one of those genre labels I can’t really figure out. The members of this duo call themselves David-Ivar Herman Düne (guitars and vocals) and Néman Herman Düne (drums). I had not heard much of Herman Dune’s music before seeing this show, and I was initially a bit put off by David-Ivar’s vocals, especially at the moments when he does funny, falsetto things with it. But over the course of this concert, I warmed up to their music. There was a plainspoken quality to the music, and at times, the chords had that classic Velvet Underground sound. Reminded me a bit of Smog (Bill Callahan).

Photos of Herman Dune, Julie Doiron and Wye Oak.

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Invasion From Iceland

It’s a rare pleasure to hear Icelandic musicians performing in Chicago. On Wednesday (Oct. 28), the Logan Square Auditorium hosted not just one, not just two, but three Icelandic acts. The headliners were one of the island nation’s better-known bands, Múm (pronounced “moom”), who are touring in support of their new album, the delightfully titled Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know. Actually, most of the songs they played were ones that I did know — including a lot from that new CD, which is one of the best that Mum has ever made.

When Múm began in 1997, the group was known for making electronic music with subtle textures. I enjoyed that music, and I’m sure there are fans out there who prefer it to Múm’s more recent recordings, but some of that early stuff was so chilled-out and low-key that it barely ever stuck in my mind afterward. Seeing Múm in concert, however, was a revelation, with more emphasis on the singing. Everything felt more organic and natural. There’s more of that feeling on recent records, including Sing Along…. There are some precious moments when Múm gets a little too cute for its own good, but then there are sublime hymn-like harmonies, when it sounds like this is a bunch of Icelanders getting together in a little room somewhere and singing to their heart’s content. Actually, that is exactly what it is.

And that’s what we were treated to on Wednesday, too. The mix of instruments included Melodica, cello, violin plus the usual keyboards, guitar, bass and drums. There wasn’t too much of the tinkly techno textures from the early Múm records, but there was a lot of joyous singing. In the final song of the main set, one of the band’s friends (a roadie? I’m not sure) came onstage and held up signs with the lyrics to the title song about singing along. It was a perfect way of summing up Múm’s communal spirit. http://mum.is

Singer, cellist and violinist Hildur Guðnadóttir was perhaps the liveliest presence on the stage during the Múm set, making sweeping gestures and opening her mouth as wide as she could to deliver the choruses. Guðnadóttir was also the first act of the night, playing an impressive set of her compositions on cello. She asked for quiet from the audience, and got it. Check out her music at www.hildurness.com. A free mp3 of her song “Erupting Light” is here.

The middle act on the bill was another noteworthy Icelandic group. It was the first Chicago appearance by Sin Fang Bous, the stage name for Sindri Mar Sigfusson, who’s also lead singer of the Icelandic band Seabear. Both of these bands play tuneful folk-pop, though the new album by Sin Fang Bous, Clamour, gives the songs more of a psychedelic or experimental sheen, with an eclectic variety of twinkly sounds livening up the songs. The live show featured less of that nuanced sound, with more emphasis on Sigfusson’s voice and acoustic guitar chords. Although the concert lacked all the glittering surfaces you hear on the record, it was still a good, heartfelt performance, and I look forward to seeing Sigfusson with Seabear if they show up in Chicago someday. (Maybe after they released their next planned album in 2010?) www.myspace.com/sinfangbous

Photos of Múm, Hildur Guðnadóttir and Sin Fang Bous.

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Claire Chase at Velvet Lounge

Fred Anderson’s Velvet Lounge on Cermak is a jazz club, but on Tuesday (Oct. 27), it hosted a contemporary classical music performance. Claire Chase, one of the founders of the International Contemporary Ensemble, stood alone on the stage with her flutes and made some otherworldly noises with those innocent-looking pipes. This was not your grandmother’s flute music. Chase was playing some of the pieces she performs on her new record, Aliento, as well as a few others. Although she was solo for most of the show, she was almost always accompanied by electronic sounds and textures. In some of the pieces, her notes and even the sounds of the keys clicking on her flutes echoed and reverbed back at her, creating alien soundscapes. Fellow ICE member Eric Lamb joined her onstage for Brazilian composer Marcos Balter’s piece “Edgewater,” and the two of them slowly moved in tandem from one side of the stage to the other as their notes danced around one another. Chase closed the show with Paganini’s Caprice No. 24 for violin, using effects to transform it into a duet between “flute and gear.”

www.newfocusrecordings.com/Aliento.html
International Contemporary Ensemble and composer Kaija Saariaho will perform at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 19 at the Museum of
Contemporary Art. www.mcachicago.org

Photos of Claire Chase.

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Choir of Young Believers

A band from Denmark called Choir of Young Believers made one of my favorite records this year, This Is for the White in Your Eyes, and the group’s music sounded just as sublime in concert the other night (Oct. 26) at Schubas. The leader of this Choir, Jannis Noya Makrigiannis, sang beautiful melodies that put most rock tunesmiths to shame. Markigiannis knows how to write (and sing) a melody that makes dramatic leaps rather than sticking with less imaginative notes.

For all intents and purposes, Markigiannis is Choir of Young Believers, but he had a solid backup group (bass, drums and cello) that did an excellent job of playing live arrangements similar to the studio recordings. I’ve had trouble putting my finger on exactly what Choir reminds me of. The Ghostly International label’s Web site compares Choir’s music with classic pop music such as Roy Orbison. I can see that — the music Markigiannis is making with Choir feels like a Scandinavian take on the epic, quasi-orchestral pop music of Phil Spector — but there’s also something about it that reminds me of indie artists from the 1980s, and I hear similarities to other Scandinavian artists such as Loney Dear.

Performing the final show of Choir’s U.S. tour Monday night at Schubas, Markigiannis hit all the high notes. At the end of the main set, he even let loose on guitar, flailing around with charged energy. He returned without his backup band for one solo song during the encore — a cover of the Swedish band First Floor Power’s song “Goddamn Your Finger.” (Choir’s cover of the song appears on the various artists collection Saluting the Crunchy-Frog-a-logue.

Alas, Schubas was not nearly as crowded as it should have been for this show, although the folks who did show up clearly liked what they heard. Monday nights are always a tough night to draw a crowd, and on this Monday, these Danes were competing with a few other high-profile indie-rock shows in Chicago. The Schubas show also featured opening acts Chris Bathgate (doing some nice roots-rock with trumpet and trombone accents) and Brazil’s MoMo (whom I recently saw at the Chicago World Music Festival). It was a motley but interesting mix of musical styles.

http://ghostly.com/artists/choir-of-young-believers
www.myspace.com/choirofyoungbelievers

Photos of Choir of Young Believers.

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Frankenstein by the Hypocrites

When I heard that the audience would be onstage during Hypocrites theater company’s new staging of Frankenstein at the Museum of Contemporary Art, I wondered if we would be given pitchforks and torches. That didn’t happen. I suppose it would violate the fire code to allow a mob of theatergoers to chase after the monster.

However, the audience does chase around the actors, in a manner of speaking. This play, directed by Sean Graney, is being performed “in promenade,” which means that the audience is on the stage at the same time as the actors, who move in and around the spectators. Interesting concept, but difficult to pull off. I haven’t seen the earlier Hypocrites shows that were performed in promenade, though I have seen a couple of other plays using this device. With Frankenstein, the seating area of the MCA’s auditorium has been closed off with a curtain. Audience members sit or stand wherever they can, including benches scattered around the stage. When the actors need to move to a spot occupied by an audience member, they point in that direction as a signal to make way. The problem is that audience members frequently find themselves unable to see what’s going on. You have to keep moving around to get good vantage points, which didn’t bother me too much, but after a while, it got to be too much work just to get a clear view of the action.

More to the point: Does the fact that the audience is surrounding and mingling with the performers have anything to do with the theme of the play? There is one point when the Frankenstein monster is talking about mankind and he seems to be taking in the people surrounding him. At this moment, I got some sense of how the audience functioned as a sort of silent character in the drama. But it was just a passing moment. Perhaps the promenade concept would have worked better if the MCA stage had elevated areas for the actors or more than one overhead mirror to reflect the action.

The famous movie of Frankenstein starring Boris Karloff and its sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein, were not all that faithful to the original novel by Mary Shelley. This stage version isn’t either, although it seems to draw more from the book (which features an articulate monster) than the films. The original film plays on a screen above the play, with the actors occasionally using a remote control to fast-forward the flow of black-and-white images. Graney’s take on Frankenstein vacillates between contemporary and historic settings, or so it seems. Most effectively, it feels like a bad dream. The story jumps ahead at a few points, skipping over months of events. The result is the alarming sensation that Victor Frankenstein (John Byrnes) has conducted his dangerous experiments in a sort of nightmarish haze, waking up one day to realize what he’s done. Whenever Elizabeth (Stacy Stoltz) or “Strange Girl” (Jessie Fisher) show up, it feels like they’re dropping into Frankenstein’s lair from another dimension.

Matt Kahler delivers a strong, visceral performance as the monster, billed here as The Daemon. As in the book, the monster eloquently questions who he is and why Dr. Frankenstein has built him. The play’s final confrontation between monster and maker is moving and dramatic.

Frankenstein continues through Sunday (Nov. 1) at the MCA. www.mcachicago.org

Photo by Paul Metreyeon

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CSO’s new maestro comes to town

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has a new music director — or rather, to be precise, a music director designate. The renowned Italian maestro Riccardo Muti will take up the CSO’s baton in the fall of 2010. Muti is in Chicago now, however, conducting a few concerts this season as a sort of warm-up to his full-time duties next year.

I recently heard Muti give a talk at Orchestra Hall. At one point, he gently mocked young conductors who make faces and gesture wildly when they’re in front of an orchestra. Apparently in a jesting mood, Muti talked about how simple it is to conduct, using Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony as an example in his one-minute lesson on how to move your arms to the tempo.

On Saturday night, I got my first look at how Muti conducts, when he led the CSO and the Chicago Symphony Chorus in a performance of Brahms’ A German Requiem. As much as Muti talked about conducting with the simplest of arm movements, he performed with flowing gestures, sometimes looking as if he were shaping the music in the space in front of him, sculpting sounds out of thin air.

And what beautiful music it was. It was especially impressive to hear a couple of hundred voices from the chorus blending together in an almost seamless whole, sounding just as lovely whether they were singing softly or raising the volume to match the epic quality of the German Biblical lyrics.

On the first night that Muti and the CSO performed A German Requiem, a few overly enthusiastic folks in the audience apparently applauded too early. At least, that’s what Chicago Tribune critic John Von Rhein reported in his review. Brahms’ composition ends with a few moments of silence, and Muti still had his arms up when some people began applauding. Muti kept his arms up, as if to say: “Not yet.” On Saturday night, the audience held its applause until the right moment, when Muti had lowered his arms. And then the applause went on and on. It was a well deserved ovation for Chicago’s new maestro — and the terrific musicians and singers he’ll be conducting next year.

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Dead Man’s Bones at Schubas

As I said in my recent review of the CD by Dead Man’s Bones, this is one peculiar project. And so it was in concert, too. Dead Man’s Bones came to Schubas Wednesday night (Oct. 21) for two sold-out shows. I think it’s a fair assumption that a high percentage of the crowd turned out because the band includes film actor Ryan Gosling. And need I say that a high percentage of the crowd was female? Gosling could have doing just about anything on the stage, and a good number of these fans probably would have shown up anyway. But, given the way the crowd responded to the songs, it was also clear that these fans have been listened to the Dead Man’s Bones album, which sounds a bit like Daniel Johnston teaming up with a school choir to do a musical about haunted houses. (The vocals are on key more often than Johnston’s, however.)

The songs sounded much the same in the concert, with a chorus of children in white sheets and pale ghost makeup crowding onto the stage and singing many of the choruses, to the delight of the audience. One of the girls in the chorus took part into a miniature drama, involving her falling dead and then singing from behind a backlit sheet. The whole spectacle was campy and quirky to the extreme. Even the opening act, if you can call it that, was an exercise in ironic amateurism: a talent show that included an artist drawing a picture then singing, a belly dancer, and a magician.

I expect some people would find the whole Dead Man’s Bones show a bit precious, but I enjoyed it from beginning to end, and unlike many of the folks in attendance, I wasn’t even there to moon over Mr. Gosling. (Don’t forget that he has other collaborators in this band, including another singer-songwriter, Zach Shields.) The celebratory show had some of the zany sense of humor and the “let’s try something weird” attitude that animated the Flaming Lips at their best. It was certainly a very memorable night.

Photos of Dead Man’s Bones.

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Elliott Brood at Schubas

The Canadian trio Elliott Brood calls its music “goth country,” which is a fairly apt description. The group played Tuesday night at Schubas, combining banjo, guitar, ukulele and drums with gritty and sometimes growled singing. Despite the dark side of Elliott Brood’s music, the music came across as upbeat in the live performance. The band played with its own lights, including strings of twinkly little bulbs and some spinning red ambulance lights. A big banner with the band’s name hung from a frame in front of the drum kit, making the stage look like an old-fashioned carnival show. The highlight of the set came at the end, when drummer Stephen Pitkin passed out pie tins and wooden spoons to the crowd for some audience participation. And then, during the encore, opening act the Wooden Sky (who had put on a pretty good set of alt-country) joined Elliott Brood onstage for some dancing and singing along. Suddenly, the goth country tunes seemed like party music.

www.myspace.com/elliottbrood

The evening got off to a nice start with the moody songs of Chicago’s Speck Mountain — another band that might qualify as goth country, but with a slower, more drawn-out beat.

Photos of Elliott Brood, the Wooden Sky and Speck Mountain.

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Wilco does the arena-rock thing

After years and years of seeing concerts in Chicago, I had never actually gone to a show at UIC Pavilion until Sunday night, when Wilco played the first of two nights at the arena. I would so much rather see concerts at a small venue than some big concrete dome designed for sports events. But, alas, there are times when the bands you like become popular — wait, that’s a good thing, right? And then it no longer becomes possible to see the bands inside little rooms the size of Schubas. So you end up in a crowd of thousands of people inside a big concrete dome where the music echoes off the walls like the noise of passing airplanes. But then there can be moments when you feel a sense of awe that all these people around you like that music that you like, too. Maybe you even get a feeling of community.

This week, Wilco moved up to its biggest venue yet in Chicago (unless you count their two Lollapalooza performances). I’d prefer seeing Wilco in one of the big downtown theaters like the Chicago or Auditorium, but this time, they were in the less cozy confines of UIC. And, well, they put on a pretty great show Sunday night, despite the lackluster surroundings. Of course, I never doubted that Wilco was capable of putting on a great arena show, since this versatile, virtuoso band seems to be capable of doing just about anything leader Jeff Tweedy asks of it, from straight-ahead roots rock to stranger and more experimental art rock.

This lineup of Wilco, which has been steady for a few years now, sounded as good as I’ve ever heard them Sunday night. As these six musicians played songs from throughout the Wilco catalogue — including many songs originally played by different Wilco lineups — they made it all sound like one coherent body of work. The clattering curiosities in “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” were still there, but the noise that guitarist Nels Cline was making during that song made it sound more like something that today’s Wilco would record rather than a remnant from a previous Wilco era.

Cline was on fire Sunday night. Within seconds after the band came onstage and began playing the first song of the night, “Wilco (The Song),” Cline was flailing around wildly with his guitar like a maniac. And he kept it up during the second song, “A Shot in the Arm.” It seemed more like the frenzied climax of a concert than the opening. What got into this guy? It’s been clear that Cline is a very talented guitarist, who can run rings around most people, since he joined Wilco, but on Sunday night, he combined that virtuosity with a high level of passion and energy.

The rest of the band sounded great, too, of course. Wilco is, if nothing else, a true ensemble of six musicians who know how to blend their sounds together into a brilliant whole. As usual, Wilco played a sample of songs from throughout its albums. It was nice to see John Stirratt taking over lead vocals for the rarely played A.M. song “It’s Just That Simple,” and I was glad to hear a few songs from the album I love that a lot of other people dismiss, A Ghost Is Born. Wilco even dug out one obscurity, the bouncy ditty “Just a Kid,” from the soundtrack to The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie.

Tweedy asked the crowd to sing the lyrics to “Jesus etc.” and stepped away from the mike for virutally the entire song, and the crowd happily complied. The encore included a surprisingly long string of songs from Being There: “Kingpin,” “Monday,” “Outtasite (Outta Mind),” “Hoodoo Voodoo.” And then, just when it seemed like the show had ended after some 2 hours and 15 minutes, the band launched into one more song, the lively, absurd “I’m a Wheel.”

At one point during the show, Tweedy asked, “Having a good time? Enjoying the arena rock?” The answer was: Yes. But I’d still rather see Wilco somewhere other than an arena.

Set list:
Wilco (the Song) / A Shot in the Arm / Bull Black Nova / You Are My Face / I Am Trying to Break Your Heart / One Wing / Misunderstood / At Least That’s What You Said / Deeper Down / Impossible Germany / It’s Just That Simple / I’ll Fight / Handshake Drugs / Sunny Feeling / Jesus etc. / Theologians / I’m Always in Love / Hate It Here / Walken / I’m the Man Who Loves You / ENCORE: You Never Know / Heavy Metal Drummer / Just a Kid / Kingpin / Monday / Outtasite (Outta Mind) / Hoodoo Voodoo / I’m a Wheel

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Lincoln Hall opens

Lincoln Hall opened Friday in the same space where the 3 Penny Cinema used to show movies, on Lincoln Avenue just north of Fullerton. This is the same neighborhood where the Lounge Ax used to be one of the Chicago rock scene’s beacons. And with Wax Trax Records located just a short distance away, this stretch of Lincoln was a major destination for music fans. Not much has been happening in this part of Lincoln Park lately, as far as music goes, but that’s changing now with the opening of this new venue.

Run by the same fine folks who book so many great concerts over at Schubas, Lincoln Hall is three times bigger than its sister venue, holding about 500 people. I paid the place a visit for the first time on Saturday (Oct. 17) when Liam Finn was the headline act. To be honest, Lincoln Hall didn’t look all that big when I was standing on the main floor. It still has the cozy feel of a small venue, and that might be because the main floor’s capacity is only 169, almost exactly the size of Schubas. The difference is that there’s a large balcony with lots of prime viewing space along the railing. And boy does this room have a high ceiling. The long black drapes hanging behind the stage seem like they go up and up and up. The inside of Lincoln Hall looks a bit like a small music club where the ceiling has been lifted up. The place doesn’t have as much character as Schubas — at least, not yet. The place is brand spanking new after all. I appreciated the lack of posters, advertisements and decorations on the walls of the music room. With lots of stained wood and wrought-iron railings (at least, that’s what they looked like), Lincoln Hall is a classy-looking place. The decor is restrained — not all that exciting, maybe, but hey, the music’s what makes the excitement, right?

The sound at Saturday’s show was excellent. From what I read in the Chicago Tribune, it seemed as if the owners held off for a week on their official grand opening while they work out bugs like sound quality, but I didn’t see any bugs that needed to be worked out on Saturday. The sound was crystal clear. Even when I was standing near the stage, I didn’t really feel much need to use earplugs. I think that’s because the loudest speakers in the place were the ones hanging up on the ceiling way above my head. I did notice at one point that I was picking up too much sound from the bass amp on the stage, throwing off the balance of the mix I was hearing, but that’s probably an unavoidable thing for people who stand right next to the band.

I was up in the balcony for just a few minutes at the beginning of the night, and I thought the view of the stage from up there was excellent. The views were good on the main floor, too, of course. Nice sight lines all around. I’m told that about 300 people were there for Saturday’s concert, and with that many people, it was comfortable moving around. We’ll see what it’s like when it sells out.

At Saturday’s concert, a team of employees helped the bands set up and remove their equipment in between sets. There’s a sound board on the side of the stage as well as a large control station at the back of the main room. It all looks highly professional.

But… Memo to the guys running the lights: Would you mind laying off a bit on all those red lights? This is a problem that’s not unique to Lincoln Hall. Lots of music venues seem to think that concerts look cool when the musicians are bathed in a red or pink haze. And I doubt if most fans think there’s anything wrong with that. As a photographer, however, I hate red light. It really makes for lousy pictures. Those red lights knock out just about every other color in the spectrum, and all you’re left with is an image that might as well be black and white. There were a lot of red and pink lights Saturday night, especially when Liam Finn was playing. Once in a while, there was a burst of white light, and to me it felt like: Hallelujah! At last I can take a decent picture. So, if it’s not too much to ask, a little bit more of that white light would be fabulous, guys. I’m just saying…

Saturday’s show started off with Greycoats, who sounded a bit like Coldplay, playing polished pop-rock. Next up was the Chicago band Unicycle Loves You, which played some pretty good power pop. Nice melodic hooks and a tight sound, though I’d like to see Unicycle scruff things up a bit more.

Headliner Liam Finn usually puts on an entertaining show, and he was in good spirits Saturday night, especially when he used his looping pedals to go a little bit nuts with guitar solos and drum solos on top of the chords he’d just been playing. His mellower ballads sounded lovely, too. Finn treated the crowd to a couple of loud and lively cover songs. Noting that his sound guy was celebrating his birthday, and that it was also the birthday of someone in the audience, Finn played a rocking version of the Beatles’ “Birthday.” And during the encore, he cranked out some great Neil Young riffing on “Cinnamon Girl,” noting: “I wanna play in a Neil Young cover band!”

For more details on Lincoln Hall, see www.lincolnhallchicago.com

Photos of Liam Finn, Unicycle Loves You and Greycoats.

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Dead Man’s Bones: CD Review

When film and TV actors make records, the results can be pretty embarrassing. Just listen to the Golden Throats collection to hear some of the most misguided music ever recorded. It’s hilarious, but I doubt if any of the people involved intended it to be hilarious. In all fairness, though, some actors do have musical talent. It’s almost natural that people in the performing arts would cross over from one field of entertainment to another. Last year, Zooey Deschanel proved that she’s more than just a pretty face (and talented actress) when she teamed up with M. Ward as the musical duo She & Him, recording some delightful old-fashioned pop songs. I’m not yet convinced I should spend much time listening to music by Keanu Reeves, Russell Crowe, Billy Bob Thornton or Scarlett Johannson, but I’ll try not to be too dismissive about them just because they’re movie stars.

The latest film star to cross over into music is Ryan Gosling. OK, so he’s not really a huge star, but he is a fairly popular film actor who made his name with starring roles in indie films Half Nelson and Lars and the Real Girl and more mainstream movies including The Notebook. And now, he’s recording music with a group called Dead Man’s Bones, with another actor, Zach Shields, as his main collaborator. Their self-titled debut album is out now on the prestigious Anti label.

This is not your typical movie-star vanity recording project. This is one strange record. It sounds like something you might discover in a Salvation Army bin of used records, like some old recording project from a grade school that went awry when a couple of slightly demented musicians were put in charge of the choir. Is the lo-fi oddness of this whole thing a calculated move by Shield and Gosling? Sure, I suppose it might be, but so what? I don’t doubt that some people are going to hear this and say it’s yet another movie-star musical endeavor gone bad. But Shields and Gosling have come up with an oddball artifact that’s entertaining and frequently haunting.

Their signing sometimes resembles the howling of ghosts in a haunted house, while the guest vocalists from the Silverlake Conservatory of Music Children’s Choir make it all seem very naive and innocent. It helps that most of the songs are fairly catchy, like primitive rock, gospel and folk tunes being played late night in a basement with little more than acoustic guitar, piano and tambourine. The record meanders off a few too many times, but so do most dreams — and more than anything else, this record feels like a dream. At the end of it, you wake up, trying to remember what just happened. Did you really hear what you think you just heard?

www.myspace.com/deadmansbones
www.deadmansbones.net

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Scot-U.K. invasion

Does everything sound better in a Scottish accent? Sometimes I think so, but that’s probably just a personal quirk of mine. I do love the sound of Scottish singers, the way that burr bends the words. If you’re like me and you like Scottish music, the Empty Bottle was the place to be on Monday night. Two of the three bands were from Scotland: headliners the Twilight Sad and the cheekily named We Were Promised Jetpacks. Earlier on their tour, these bands were playing together with another Scottish outfit, Frightened Rabbit, but on this leg of the tour, they teamed up with a great band from Brighton, England, BrakesBrakesBrakes.

It seemed like the band playing second, We Were Promised Jetpacks, drew the most fans in Chicago, judging from the way the crowd responded, singing along to many of the lyrics. But all three bands received strong applause and deserved it. BrakesBrakesBrakes is known as Brakes in England, but the band calls itself BrakesBrakesBrakes in the U.S. to avoid a legal conflict with an American band called Brakes. As far as I’m concerned, these blokes are THE Brakes, so I’d rather just call them Brakes.

I’ve been a fan of Brakes since the band released Give Blood in 2005, and the group’s latest CD, Touchdown, is another strong recording. Opening Monday night’s show, Brakes slammed through a series of quick songs, tossing off these punk, post-punk, country and rock gems like musical haikus. Several of the songs end abruptly, as soon as Brakes have said everything they want to say. The shortest song of the night was so short that Brakes played it twice: the 2005 political commentary “Cheney,” which consists of about 30 seconds of the name “Cheney!” being chanted over and over followed by the eloquent plea: “Stop being such a dick!” The band also threw in a cover of Camper Van Beethoven’s “Shut Us Down,” but the highlights were some of the now-classic songs from Brakes’ 2005 debut and new tracks like the catchy “Don’t Take Me to Space (Man)” and the wistful “Leaving England.” And in case anyone was thinking that Brakes are a bit like Art Brut, guitarist Tom White kicked off one song by asking the rest of the band, “Ready, Art Brut?”

We Were Promised Jetpacks played most of the songs from their recent debut record, These Four Walls, stretching some of that out. Not that this was anything like jam music. It was just that these lads seemed to love feeling the pulse of their riffs and rhythms, so they luxuriated in that sound. And so did the crowd. Singer Adam Thompson knows how to belt. I was amazed at how far back he got from the microphone at some points, signing at maximum volume, his voice rising above all that other noise. Noting that this was the last night of their U.S. tour, Thompson said he was looking forward to going home to Scotland. “I need my mom and my mashed potatoes,” he said.

Fellow Glaswegians the Twilight Sad raised the intensity level even higher for a riveting, cathartic set at the end of the night. Playing songs from the band’s excellent 2007 CD Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters as well as the new Forget the Night Ahead, the Twilight Sad played loud, passionate post-punk. Lead singer James Graham holds the mike in his hand and roams the stage, raising his eyes to the ceiling or dropping down to his knees like a man who’s nearly overcome with the music and words passing through his mouth. When the band finished its set with guitars pressed into amplifiers for squalls of feedback, it was clear that there would be no encore. That ending was too climatic to follow up with another song.

Photos of the Twilight Sad, We Were Promised Jetpacks and BrakesBrakesBrakes.

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Loney Dear returns

On Saturday night (Oct.10), as I was coming out of the play Fedra at Lookingglass, I decided on the spur of the moment to head over to the Bottom Lounge for a concert by Sweden’s Loney Dear. I showed up in time to see most of the set by Asobi Seksu, which was properly loud and shoe-gazy… But then I was disappointed to see that a number of Asobi Seksu fans left before the set by headliner Loney Dear. This terrific Swedish band ended up playing to a fairly small crowd. Maybe the crowd wouldn’t have looked so small if this show had been at a smaller venue like Schubas, where Loney Dear has played in the past, but the Bottom Lounge room tends to dwarf the audience. The Bottom Lounge vibe is OK for a rock show, but when the music’s mellower or folkier (as it is with Loney Dear) the old-fashioned concert-hall vibe at a place like Schubas somehow seems more fitting.

Since the last time I saw Loney Dear, I’ve been listening more to the band’s most recent CD, Dear John, which has a number of wonderfully subtle songs. I especially like the hushed, heartfelt track “Harm/Slow,” and I was glad to hear the Bottom Lounge quiet down as Loney Dear main man Emil Svanängen sang “Harm” (I believe he sang only the first song in this two-song medley).

I didn’t have my camera, so I can’t offer any of my own photos from the Loney Dear show, but check out this cool set of images from Kirstie Shanley

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Califone goes to the movies

The Chicago band Califone’s music has always been cinematic, with lots of atmospheric touches, so it was not all that surprising to learn that Califone leader Tim Rutili was making a movie. On Saturday and Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Rutili’s film, All My Friends Are Funeral Singers, screened while the band played along to the soundtrack. Or something like that. You see, Califone has a new album, which is also called All My Friends Are Funeral Singers, but it’s not really a soundtrack. It includes some music that appears in the film, but it also has other songs.

And when Califone played in front of the movie screen this weekend at the MCA, the band was also appearing in the film up on the screen. The film is about a haunted house in Indiana, and the members of Califone play a ghostly house band. The way the film was shown, you could hear some music from from the film, while Califone supplemented that soundtrack with even more music — rattling, jangling percussion and droning guitar, keyboards, violin and banjo. Rutili sang a bit, when the film left space for a couple of actual songs, but most of the time, it was more like Califone was adding emotional accents to the film as it unfolded. The music and images meshed together artfully.

Rutili’s film was pretty impressive in its own right. This is the sort of independent film that probably wouldn’t make it much further than the film-festival circuit, short on plot, heavy on mood, but it’s imaginative and well crafted, with decent acting. Like Califone’s music, the film is spooky and a little rough around the edges. Seeing it with a live supplemental score was a memorable experience.

After the movie and an intermission, Califone came back and played about 40 minutes of music without visual accompaniment, including several of the songs from the new album that don’t actually appear in the film. The band ambled through these songs, taking a couple of long pauses due to a broken string… which led to some humorous stage banter. Rutili remarked that it was an unprofessional set, which Califone can get away in its hometown but perhaps not in other cities. Maybe so, but it made the performance seem all the more intimate.

www.myspace.com/califonemusic

(Photo from All My Friends Are Funeral Singers by John Adams.)

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Faust at the Empty Bottle

Along with bands like Can and Neu, the originators of the early ’70s German art rock known as krautrock included Faust. On Wednesday (Oct. 7), Faust played in the Chicago for the first time in more than decade. If Faust’s guitarist-bassist-singer-general-all-around-mischief-maker Jean-Hervé Peron had his facts right, Faust hasn’t played here since a gig at the Lounge Ax in 1994. At the Lounge Ax show, Faust was down to two musicians: Peron and drummer Werner “Zappi” Diermaier. For this return concert, Faust had expanded, with guitarist-keyboardist James Johnston and guitarist-singer Geraldine Swayne. “This time, we are a bit more numerous,” Peron said.

Faust is known for its unusual stage antics, breaking the boundaries of what bands are expected to do in concert, and Faust did not disappoint at the Empty Bottle. A cement mixer was sitting on the floor in front of the stage, and I began to get worried that I was standing too close to this machine. Some Bottle employees got things ready by breaking beer bottles inside the mixer. During the first song, Peron signaled to Faust’s roady that they machine should be turned on. It started spinning around, making a churning rhythm that served as the beat for Faust’s first song of the night. Peron dropped some rocks from plastic cups into the cement mixer, then he got down onto the main floor and threw more beer bottles into the cement mixer with a whipping motion of his arm. (At this point, I was backing away from the machine as much as I could, since bits of rock and dust were flying.)

Later in the show, Diermaier took out some sort of power sander, threw off a bunch of sparks, and applied the power tool to his cymbals. (I’m pretty sure at least one provision of the fire code was violated at this show.) During one improvised number, Swayne left the stage and painted an abstract picture on the wall next to the stage. Some of the audience sat down so more people could see what she was painting, but the Bottle’s layout didn’t make it easy to experience what was going on. And then, during the encore, Peron and Swayne led as much of the crowd as they could over to the other side of the Empty Bottle’s bar, where Swayne played piano. Peron got on top of the piano and sang unamplified. Then he gestured to the audience with a bottle of bleach.

Throughout all of this activity, Faust played classic songs and some new ones. The music was dominated by strong bass grooves. Faust pulled together its clattering, thumping sounds with an offbeat sense of how different musical voices can mesh. As Diermaier recalled, somewhat touchingly: “People said this is bullshit, but we kept on playing it. I’m talking about krautrock.”

Opening act Bobby Conn played with Monica Boubou on violin and electronic drum beats, slamming through a series of hard-edged disco-glam-prog tunes. And then Boubou joined in with Faust for a couple of songs. It was a strange night. I survived, but I don’t recommend standing next to the cement mixer.

Photos of Faust and Bobby Conn.

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Youth Group at Schubas

After seeing the story of London’s Black Plague and listening to some delightful classical music during Black Violet (see my previous post), I stopped at Schubas last night (Oct. 6) for a show by Australia’s Youth Group.

I’ve enjoyed Youth Group’s 2005 album Skeleton Jar and the group’s 2006 album Casino Twilight Dogs. Both are filled with smart, melodic tunes that stick in your head. At times, Youth Group verges on the sort of mellow indie pop played by groups like Death Cab For Cutie, but there’s also a quality to the guitar lines that reminds me more of ’60s psychedelic rock channeled through contemporary indie rock. I’m less familiar with Youth Group’s latest CD, The Night Is Ours, but those new songs sounded pretty good alongside the old ones on Tuesday night.

The heart of this band is the hirsute singer-guitarist Toby Martin, who has the sort of fine mellow voice that’s perfect for carrying an anthem like “Forever Young.” That voice also meshes well with the louder guitars on Youth Group songs. The band doesn’t reinvent its songs in concert, but it does play them with a sort of insistent intensity. Schubas was not sold out for these musicians who’d made the trip from Sydney, but the room filled up somewhat by the time Youth Group played, and the audience showed its appreciation for what it was hearing. (I just wish the band had played one of my favorite songs off their last album, “Sorry.”)

www.myspace.com/youthgroupmusic
www.youthgroup.com.au

The first act of the show was the Wiitala Brothers, who were celebrating the release of a new CD. They sounded like a pretty solid rock duo, closing their set with a couple of nice, melodic ballads. Next up was Other Girls. Not surprisingly, Other Girls was actually four guys (following the trend of all-male bands like Girls and Women). They sounded an awful lot like other recent bands such as the Walkmen, with that style of strained singing, so I can’t say they were all that distinctive, but they won me over with their energy.

Photos of Youth Group, Wiitala Brothers and Other Girls.

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A ‘Graphic’ Concert: ‘Black Violet’


Combining music with pictures and stories is nothing new, but the multimedia project Black Violet does it in a way that’s pretty unusual. It’s both a series of classical music concerts (performed by Chicago’s Fifth House Ensemble) and a serialized graphic novel (by Ezra Clayton Daniels). The project got under way last night (Oct. 6) at the Chicago Cultural Center with the first of three “acts.” 5HE (as the chamber group calls itself for short) played music by Johannes Brahms, Walter Piston, Jonathan Keren, Heitor Villa Lobos and Greg Simon, while a series of comic-book-style drawings about the Black Plague striking London in the 17th century were projected on a screen behind the musicians.

In a way, the experience was similar to watching an animated film with a live soundtrack, except that the pictures were not actually animated. The protagonist of this story is Violet, a black cat who’s trying to survive on the streets of London at a time when people superstitiously believed that black cats were spreading the plague. Violet and the other characters speak in cartoon bubbles, so watching the story unfold on the screen felt like reading a book.

What about the music? As with just about any combination of instrumental music with pictures or stories, it’s hard to say what precisely the music has to do with the images or narrative, other than setting a tempo or creating a mood. The music seemed appropriate for the story, even if it didn’t offer any direct commentary on Violet and her travails. Some of the pieces that 5HE performed were split apart. The various movements of Brahms’ Horn Trio Opus 40 were interspersed among the works by other composers, for example. I especially enjoyed the delicate, playful flute-and-bassoon duets in Villa Lobos’ “Bachianas Brasilerias” No. 6. Piston’s Divertimento for 9 Instruments gave the large ensemble a chance to show what it can do with a full array of players. And Keren’s “Hungary Is Far Away” and Simon’s “Kites at Seal Rock” added a more contemporary inventiveness to the concert.

Black Violet will be performed again at 8 p.m. Thursday (Oct. 8) at SPACE in Evanston. Then comes Act 2 (7 p.m. Feb. 1 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 8 p.m. Feb. 4 at SPACE) and Act 3 (7 p.m. April 5 and 8 p.m. April 8 at SPACE). The shows at the Chicago Cultural Center are free, but tickets at SPACE are $20. I hope to catch the rest of this series — to find out what happens to Violet, and also to hear some wonderful music.

Watch a “trailer” for Black Violet.

And speaking of shows that combination music with pictures and stories, this Saturday and Sunday, Califone is playing a live soundtrack at the Museum of Contemporary Art for a film by band leader Tim Rutili, All My Friends Are Funeral Singers.

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Vertebrats reunion

The Vertebrats, one of the great original rock bands from the University of Illinois campus in Champaign-Urbana back in the early ’80s, reunited this past weekend to celebrate their 30th anniversary. I did a story for the “Eight Forty Eight” show on Chicago Public Radio WBEZ 91.5 FM about one of the more fascinating aspects of the Vertebrats — the fact that the band’s song “Left in the Dark” has been covered by at least nine other musical acts, including the Replacements, Uncle Tupelo and Courtney Love. You can stream or download that radio story on the WBEZ site. (And here is the article I wrote about the same topic for Pioneer Press in 2003.)

But there’s a lot more to the Vertebrats than that one song, as great as it is. The Vertebrats were together at a time (1979 to 1982) when it was much harder for bands to record their music and release it than it is today. As a result, it was quite a while before any of their songs came out on CD. A couple of decades after the Vertebrats were history, Parasol Records put out a collection of their studio tapes called A Thousand Day Dream and a compilation of live recordings, Continuous Shows. You can buy the CDs from Parasol. Listening to those old tapes, some of them recorded as demos, you wonder what the Vertebrats might have been able to accomplish if they’d stayed together and landed a record deal. Then again, maybe it’s better to have the band in a sort of treasured time capsule, specific to those few years.

The Vertebrats have reunited a few times, playing a show or two in Champaign and drawing a crowd of their faithful fans. Three of the original Vertebrats (Kenny Draznik, Matt Brandabur and Jimmy Wald) got together this past weekend, playing Oct. 2 at Cowboy Monkey and Oct. 3 at the High Dive. Bassist Roy Axford was unable to make it to the shows due to a death in his family, but two stalwart members of the Champaign music scene ably filled in: Mark Rubel on Oct. 2 and Paul Chastain on Oct. 3. And with original Vertebrats drummer Wald playing rhythm guitar now, John Richardson took over on drums.

The band sounded great both nights, playing a whole slew of catchy garage-rock anthems with a direct, unassuming attitude. Draznik delivered most of the lead vocals, sounding not all that different from the way he sounded years ago on those tapes, and Brandabur added the spiky guitar licks that gave those songs jolts of strange energy. A sizable group of Vertebrats fans danced almost nonstop near the stage — and at the end of the second show, a fair number of them got onto the stage. Vertebrats songs kept running through my head on Sunday after seeing these two shows. Don’t hold your breath for another chance to see the Vertebrats in concert, but do check out their recordings.

During the Oct. 2 show at Cowboy Monkey, three Champaign groups played short sets of a few songs each before the Vertebrats took the stage: Milktoast, the Outnumbered and the Dream Fakers. I especially would have liked to hear more songs from the Outnumbered, who played a reunion show on Memorial Day weekend, but this wasn’t really their night. As members of the band noted, they were finally getting a chance to play on the same bill with the Vertebrats, a band that broke up just around the time that the Outnumbered formed.

Photos of the Vertebrats, Milktoast, Outnumbered and Dream Fakers.

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Van Morrison does ‘Astral Weeks’

For a few years now, it’s been trendy for musicians to perform live versions of entire albums from their back catalogues. Bruce Springsteen was in Chicago recently, playing all of “Born to Run.” And last Tuesday night (Sept. 29), it was Van Morrison’s turn. Playing to a sold-out Chicago Theatre, Morrison performed every song from his 1968 album “Astral Weeks.” Although it’s praised by many critics as one of the best records of all time, “Astral Weeks” is not exactly filled with hits. If Morrison had wanted to please audiences with a bunch of radio hits, he probably would have chosen to do his 1970 album “Moondance.” Instead, he played the strange half-jazz, half-orchestral vamps of “Astral Weeks,” the album that established his reputation as a vocalist who can mumble, moan and holler with a sort of mystical intensity.

A lot of the music on the original “Astral Weeks” felt like it was improvised. The musicians sounded as if they were feeling their way into the songs, tiptoeing around Morrison’s dominating voice. So it was no surprise that Tuesday night’s performance was not a note-for-note duplication of the record. In fact, Morrison even juggled the order of songs. Instead of closing the suite with “Slim Slow Slider,” he played that song third and moved “Madame George” into the final slot.

Morrison was in fine voice Tuesday, delivering the songs in his distinctive throaty tones. Morrison’s a highly emotive singer, wringing so much feeling out of every note, and yet he never visibly demonstrates much passion onstage. Hiding his eyes behind dark glasses and wearing a hat, Morrison shows little flair for showmanship, other than occasionally rearing back his head when he’s singing an especially demanding note. He never says a word to the audience. The only time he said anything audible on Tuesday was when he wanted more volume in his monitor and he barked, “Turn it up!” to someone off in the curtains.

Morrison simply isn’t the kind of performer who acts out the drama of his songs onstage, but that doesn’t mean his singing is any less impressive. He sang the tunes from “Astral Weeks” with what seemed like fresh emotion, while his nine-piece band played trembling arrangements similar, but not identical, to those on the record.

“Astral Weeks” (which Morrison also released recently on a live CD) was the second half of Tuesday’s concert. Earlier in the night, he sang a couple of his best-known hits, “Brown-Eyed Girl” and “Have I Told You Lately,” along with several more obscure songs from his later albums. Morrison and his band sounded at time like lounge lizards, but these talented musicians were versatile, easily shifting into blues, folk or garage rock.

When the “Astral Weeks” section of the concert came to an end, Morrison picked up a harmonica and launched into the extended solo that opens “Mystic Eyes,” a song he did in the mid-’60s with his original rock band, Them. A couple of minutes later, “Mystic Eyes” slid right into Them’s biggest hit, “Gloria.” Morrison and his musicians spelled out the song’s title with those famous call-and-response vocals, and the theater came alive.

And then Morrison was gone. Almost as soon as he’d left the stage, the house lights in the Chicago Theatre came on. It was clear that Morrison was going to follow his usual pattern of not doing an encore. It was also clear from the applause that his fans would have liked another song. But that’s the thing about seeing a Van Morrison concert: You know he’s not going to give you everything you want, but what you do get from him is still pretty great.

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New plays in Chicago

Short reviews of a few plays I’ve seen lately.

AN APOLOGY FOR THE COURSE AND OUTCOME OF CERTAIN EVENTS DELIVERED BY DOCTOR JOHN FAUSTUS ON THIS HIS FINAL EVENING by Theater Oobleck — Another masterpiece in miniature by Evanston playwright Mickle Maher, who wrote one of my favorite plays of recent years, The Strangerer. I did not see An Apology… the first time that Theater Oobleck presented it several years ago, with Maher in the title role. This time Colm O’Reilly plays Doctor Faustus, while David Shapiro takes on the unusual role that O’Reilly played in the original production: a silent Mephistopheles, who just sits and listens for the entire play as Faustus delivers his desperate, dying monologue. Even the way that audiences enter the Chopin Theatre basement’s performance space to see An Apology… is dramatic and peculiar. I won’t give away much at all about this show, because as much of it as possible should be a surprise. Maher’s writing is a brilliant, black-humor variation on the Faust legend about a man selling his soul to the devil. This version goes off in some strange directions, including a riff on 7-Eleven stores. O’Reilly delivers every single syllable with sad-eyed intensity. The entire experience is riveting, and not to be missed.
www.theateroobleck.com

ANIMAL CRACKERS at the Goodman Theatre — This re-creation of a 1928 musical-comedy show starring the Marx Brothers is a pretty unusual thing to see on a major stage in 2009. Like the movie based on the play (one of my favorite screen comedies), Animal Crackers is wildly uneven. The scenes featuring Groucho, Chico and Harpo are hilariously madcap, but the romantic subplots featuring everyone else are often clunky. So, no, the play by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind is not a great one, and if the Marx Brothers hadn’t starred in it, it probably would be forgotten. The Goodman production does a decent job of making those non-Marx scenes tolerable, or even enjoyable, especially when the cast is signing and dancing. Joey Slotnick, Jonathan Brody and Molly Breenan bring a lot of fun and panache to the Groucho, Chico and Harpo roles. Seeing them perform is a bit like watching a tribute band re-creating the songs of a more famous artist. The Marx Brothers were so fabulous that you can’t help enjoying this, even though it’s just a good imitation of the real thing. Go into this show with the attitude that you’re about to experience an old-fashioned piece of entertainment, a glimpse of what stage comedy was like more than 80 years ago.
www.goodmantheatre.org

THE MERCY SEAT at Profiles Theatre — Once again, playwright Neil LaBute bluntly probes the darkness of the human mind. Or should I say: the male mind? Like many of LaBute’s films and plays, The Mercy Seat features a man who doesn’t follow the better angels of his nature. This one-act, two-character drama takes place in New York on Sept. 12, 2001. Ben (Darrell W. Cox) and his lover, Abby (Cheryl Graeff), argue about some big life decisions in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Ben is a craven coward, with an appalling plan for dealing with some of the problems in his life. At moments, Abby seems to be enabling Ben’s cowardice, but at other times, she attacks him with acidic fury. Cox and Graeff are both superb in these difficult, complex roles. Like most of LaBute’s work, this play is not exactly what you would call a pleasant experience, but it is ultimately powerful and emotionally wrenching.
www.profilestheatre.org

Theater Oobleck photo: Kristin Basta. Goodman Theatre photo: Eric Y. Exit. Profiles Theatre photo: Wayne Karl