Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Photo © MCA Chicago, 2009. Photo by Dan Baldwin. The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago is once again highlighting some of the windy city's most exciting music with another round of performances for "Face the Strange: New Music Chicago and Beyond." The concert series kicks off on October 25, and runs every fourth Tuesday of the month until April 24 and features the acts performing, "one-hour sets of new music you may not have heard but should." "Face The Strange" kicks off [...]
Spires That In The Sunset Rise From: Chicago/Madison, United States Spires That in the Sunset Rise is an experimental American Psych folk band from Decatur, Illinois who have been ploughing a furrow far from the madding crowd for over 10 years. They are a mystical band of poets who create an organic panorama of left field, dissonant and percussive noises that are shot through with enough beauty to make a songbird weep. It's [...]
Nervous Cop - "Setting the Bushes on Fire" MP3 Whirlwind Heat - "No Gums" MP3/download This is a Nervous Cop review originally created for my magazine-that-never-was, The Gumshoe Revue (notice that John Dieterich and a pre-fame Joanna Newsom boasted membership in N. Cop; who would of thought after an abstract project like this she would [...]
T.I.T.S. - "Throughout the Ages" MP3/download Leopard Leg - "The Seven Sistered Sea-Secret of Shh Shh Shh" download The fabled Leopard Leg / T.I.T.S. split is something of a legend in the Gumshoe home. (Listen to the TWO FREE DOWNLOADS and you'll hear why!) I was record shopping in California on a job-interview trip - [...]
![The Lava Children - s/t mini-album - Graveface [release date: 2009]](http://cdn.elbo.ws/posts/1907524_lg.jpg)
I don't make any sense. I was all set to review Thee Ohsees' Hounds of Foggy Notion LP/DVD combo (on cream-colored or split pea-green vinyl!) when I sort of balked at the idea of reviewing aNOTHER Oh Sees record. I mean I think they're great and all but I'm starting to get a bit gay on them. With that in mind I'm going to get all Gay on another band: The Lava Children . Like so many bands I've discovered in the past and freakin' loved ( Panoply Academy , Ty Segall [...]
+ ATLAS SOUND , LET THE BLIND LEAD THOSE WHO CAN SEE BUT CANNOT FEEL [Kranky/4AD] "I heard a voice through a great cloud of agony and sickness. The voice was asking questions. It seemed to be opening and closing like a concertina. The words were loud, as the swelling notes of an organ, then they melted to the tiniest wiry tinkle of water in a glass." —Denton Welch, A Voice Through a Cloud Atlas Sound, "Ativan" + BEACH [...]
Spires That in the Sunset Rise is the musical collaboration of Kathleen Baird, Taralie Peterson, Tracy Peterson, and Georgia Vallas. Based out of Chicago, IL, they perform a type of free form avant-folk that is absolutely mind blowing. They have just released their third full length, This Is Fire, and it's really hard to put into words exactly what this primal experiment sounds like. Words like summons, outsider folk, texture, incarnation, and intense all come to mind when addressing this coven. A wide array of instrumentation (harps, guitars, cello, drums, [...]
After garnering mucho critical success from their previous release, Four Winds The Walker Chicago's fearsome female foursome, Spires That In The Sunset Rise , are back with the highly anticipated This Is Fire . A brilliant melange of middle eastern and kraut influences, their unique take on things is a breath of fresh air to the psych folk community. This is the type of album I imagine would be the result of Nico and Popol Vuh (fresh from recording their soundtrack to Werner Herzog's Nosferatu ) collaborating [...]
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