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Album Review: Young the Giant – Mind Over Matter
The curse of the second album. Some careers are built slowly, album after album showing a band growing into their own, finding a sound, perfecting that sound (see: The National). A very, very rare few...
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Album Review: Lost in the Trees – Past Life
On the new album Past Life, North Carolina-based orchestral folkers Lost in the Trees have found complexity via simplicity. Previous output from the band, including All Alone in an Empty House...
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Album Review: Phantogram – Voices
When Phantogram released their first LP, Eyelid Movies, in 2009, they were the little electropop duo that could. Earlier that year, Sleigh Bells erupted on the scene, defining a new electropop sound...
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Album Review: SKATERS – Manhattan
Before any music: a field recording of a distant, rumbling subway car set against a canned Casio-SK1 beat. This is the first of many conversation snippets and other “day-in-the-life” fragments that...
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Album Review: The Notwist – Close to the Glass
Released in 2002 and now remembered by a dwindling subset of graybeards as a classic, The Notwist’s Neon Golden served as an urtext for the kind of emotional, pensive electronica-with-an-indie-heart...
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Album Review: Tycho – Awake
Listening to Tycho is the aural equivalent of exploring a new art museum. The overall effect is one of remarkable beauty and you still have the option of how you’ll take it in. Rush through the halls...
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13 Rock Bands That Have Destroyed Their Legacies
Loathe a good band lately? You probably have your reasons. We’ve all been there; it’s a universal feeling. The way we dust off our record collection, thinking back to a place in history when “things...
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Live Review: The Knife at Chicago’s Aragon Ballroom (4/23)
When the Jesus-figure — long hair and beard, garbed in a blend of flowing robe and neon spandex — came onstage to lead us through uplifting calisthenics, I knew I was in for a concert unlike any other....
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Album Review: Rodrigo y Gabriela – 9 Dead Alive
On 9 Dead Alive, Rodrigo y Gabriela waste precious little time before letting the listener know they’ve returned to the formula that made them stars. The first physics-defying guitar flourish bursts...
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Album Review: The Horrors – Luminous
All praise to the artist who can’t sit still. The best writers, painters, and musicians, the ones that define an age, are those whose work falls at crossroads: in conversation with the past, fully in...
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CIMMfest 2014: Six Films for the Musically Obsessed
Last week, the sixth edition of the Chicago International Movies & Music Festival, aka CIMMfest, took over parts of the Second City for four days straight. Founded by musician Josh Chicoine...
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Live Review: Wye Oak at Chicago’s Metro (5/13)
Countless love affairs have been born in the low, smoky light of a Wye Oak concert. First off, Jenn Wasner (guitar, bass, keyboard, vocals) and Andy Stack (drums, keyboard) are certainly easy on the...
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Live Review: HAIM, Tennis at Chicago’s Riviera Theatre (5/17)
Photography by Kris Lenz “It’s Saturday night. I know we all wanna get lit,” Danielle Haim exclaimed to a frantic, devoted, and borderline catatonic sold-out crowd at Chicago’s Riviera Theatre. With...
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Album Review: Kishi Bashi – Lighght
Over the course of two albums, songwriter/violinist/composer Kaoru Ishibashi has proven he isn’t afraid of big ideas. For his sophomore effort, the man behind the Kishi Bashi name could have remained...
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Album Review: 1,2,3 – Big Weather
The fickle, destructive nature of … well, nature … haunts Big Weather, the sophomore effort from Pittsburgh band 1,2,3. Across 20 sprawling tracks and almost an hour and a half, Big Weather’s vignettes...
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Dissected: Led Zeppelin
Welcome to Dissected, where we disassemble a band’s catalog in the abstract. It’s exact science by way of a few beers. Rock ‘n’ Roll 101: The Beatles are for elementary school. The Rolling Stones for...
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Led Zeppelin’s Top 10 Songs Not Named “Stairway to Heaven”
“No ‘Stairway’? Denied?” The classic line from Wayne’s World applies unanimously here, namely because you won’t find it up ahead. Why? Well, for starters, the song never appeared once on any of our top...
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Album Review: Led Zeppelin – Led Zeppelin III [Reissue]
In under 20 seconds, rock ‘n’ roll, heavy metal, and barbaric “yawps” were forever changed by Robert Plant’s carnal battle cry in “Immigrant Song” — so opens Led Zeppelin’s third album, suitably titled...
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Live Review: The Antlers at Chicago’s Lincoln Hall (6/29)
“When angels trumpet the onset of the Apocalypse, it won’t be the high-tone notes of a triumphant cavalry charge nor a precious baroque flourish. It will be a slow, mournful dirge, a sort of ‘brown...
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Album Review: French Style Furs – Is Exotic Bait
With a name like French Style Furs, you might be expecting something decadent, but also something once organic now without its bodily core. The name has its origins in a (gag-worthy, depending on your...
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