Results tagged “subterranean”

The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir are on the road to recovery after their horrific van crash last month, but they still have mountains of hospital bill to tackle, and much of their gear needs to be replaced. So a number of the band's friends are getting together tomorrow night at Subterranean to play, celebrate life, and raise money for The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir.

Grand Duchy is Frank Black's electro-pop rock side project he's got going with his wife, Violet Clark. Actually, maybe it's not a side project. Black seems to like to keep incredibly so maybe all his bands are main projects? Semantics. What is clear is that Grand Duchy is a delightful listen, and Clark and Black act as excellent foils to each other, teasing out gentle melodies and crafting delicate and ingratiating tunes that linger on long after the stylus has hit the label.

Cage The Elephant may be from Kentucky but their sound is the stuff that British music mags drool over. If you slow down the Arctic Monkeys to a pleasurable speed that'd give you a good idea of what Cage The Elephant sounds like. Their single "Ain't No Rest For The Wicked" is a midtempo rumination on what appears to be a pretty bummer of a day in the narrator's life with a musical backing off an early Beck album. The band mishes and mashes its influences into engaging nuggets of noise.

The Format's Nate Ruess, Anathallo's Andrew Dost, and Steel Train's Jack Antonoff make up the core of new "super"-group fun., but we're told the auxiliary line-up fluctuates from show to show. We were just sent an MP3 of a jaunty tune off their forthcoming full length and just had to share it with you.

Manchester Orchestra creates music that's is plaintive yet rejoicing, and we find the mixture alluring. The band borrows the nasal whine of glam rock and injects it into a bed firmly rooted in the indie rock that rules the CMJ college set. This creates songs that often feel like they're tripping over themselves with a sense of urgency as they try to convey their own inner truths and emotions through nothing more than a couple musical instruments. This is music that is earnest but never cloying.

Low Vs Diamond make us wanna wave lighters in the air, drink pints of lager, and make out with Brits in the discotheque, so imagine our surprise when we learned they were based in California. They mine Muse and The Killers for their sound, which ain't all that surprising considering they were discovered by the same dude who signed The Killers. Low Vs Diamond is in town tonight to play Subterranean, so check out the video below and see if they might be to your liking.

Matt and Kim play Subterranean tomorrow, and we have a pair of tickets for a lucky Chicagoist reader for the show. When we walked past the club yesterday one of our friends saw the marquee and asked if Matt and Kim were from Chicago, since they always seemed to be playing here. They're not, but Chicago does seem to have become the ridiculously energetic duo's second home, and they attract massive crowd of dance-happy listeners to all their area appearances. The band's super simple mixture of singer Matt Johnson's adenoidal vocals and pumping organ chords and drummer Kim Schifino's wide eyed smiling drum thumps ensnares any within earshot. We would say their enthusiasm in infectious, but that would be understating the vibe they throw off from onstage. No one leaves a Matt & Kim show in a dry t-shirt or without a smile.

Chicago ex-pats Walter Meego are making a stop in their hometown tonight at Subterranean with Ra Ra Riot. Their album, Voyager, played a large part in the soundtrack of our summer this year, so as the temperatures start to dip, we can't think of a better band to go see as we mark the unofficial end of summer.

Quirky indie quartet Percolator hasn't been around for long but we've heard 'em make a whole bunch of progress in a short period of time. The group specializes in jerky little guitar jams that would bring a smile to the face of any fan of the "college rock." Tipping their hat towards Pavement, They Might Be Giants, and any number of Northwestern rockers (both math- and groove-), Percolator creates a bunch of winning little numbers on their debut, Man Is Not A Bird.

It's bad enough Canadian's have been biting a bunch of our indie cred, now they're going after our insurgent country sound too?! Seriously, it's time we start throwing some more grant money our musicians' way so we don't lose the sonic arms race!

Sure, there are the fireworks on the lakefront and the Taste of Chicago is still going strong, but if you're like us, you want to seek out something to do with your Fourth that's a little less crowded. So if milling around shoulder-to-shoulder with tens of thousands of strangers isn't your bag, here's a quick list of other things that might prove to be some good post-grilling entertainment for your America Day.

It's really hard to encapsulate what England's These New Puritans are all about. Stylistically they don't really adhere to one recognizable genre or another, and to be honest the first time we listened to their album, Beat Pyramid, it gave us a bit of aural vertigo. All of this intrigued us further and tempted us to go back again and again to unpack the album's contents and make sense of it.

Friday, April 25: