Gazelle is the new super group project between Jeff Dimpsey, a veteran of such legendary Champaign bands as Hum, Honcho Overload and Poster Children (just to name a few) and Adam Fein of Absinthe Blind, the dreamy neo-psychedelic precursor to Headlights. These 10 tracks find the duo ditching the volume of their electric guitars and experimenting with more electro-pop influences. I even dare to call this music post-electro-pop or tranquilized club because of the focus on beautifully textured atmospheres, scattered electronics, light acoustic guitar, keyboard, and vocals from both musicians like a gentle wind.

I always like going to shows at the IMC. The space is inside the old historic Urbana post office building, which is a neat old structure, and the couches and paintings are very nice and welcomed choices for alternative furnishings. The place really has a good atmosphere for all ages shows, and the "secret" BYOB policy for those above the legal age. Above all else though, the bands and sound system work really well in the room.

With all the scenesters I see walking around campus, I was very surprised when I walked into the Canopy to find this show in the Void Room, or, their front bar area. An indie-rock veteran like John Vanderslice who has released a string of excellent and critically adored solo albums since the start of the new millennium should have packed the place, but since finger wagging won’t get people out to shows, I’ll just move on.

There was a strong but small crowd though, last night. At first it seemed that most people were there to support opening act, an artist with ties to the C-U community, Jared Bartman. He is a young looking fella that wears the underage “U” on his right hand like all the rest of us not old enough to drink, but he and his band played his songs like they have been doing it for years.

Stopping by the Canopy Club on a short spring jaunt through the northern Midwest and out to New York is Saddle Creek’s indie-rock veterans, Cursive. Expect a night of personal catharsis; a live musical exorcism led by front man Tim Kasher with his aggressive manner of unleashing his vocals.

Aloha’s fifth album, and fifth for Polyvinyl, finds the band shedding their electric guitars, and focusing more on the their songwriting craft.

In fact, there are no electric guitar driven tracks on the entire record. Light Works is a new sound for Aloha, showing the pursuit of releasing the most straight pop approached album in their catalogue.

It’s not every week that an act from overseas decides to stop in town, and tomorrow night the Canopy Club has Brighton England’s indie-rock post-punk revivalists British Sea Power.

From their great frantic spazztastic debut The Decline of British Sea Power, and their excellent sophomore effort, Open Season, the "Power" are now on tour supporting their latest full length, Do You Like Rock Music?

There is something to be said for growth and maturity.

Whereas Headlights' debut album Kill Them With Kindness sounded like a band still shedding atmospheric remnants of influence from the band member's former creative outlet, Absinthe Blind, their sophomore album from Polyvinyl Records, Some Racing, Some Stopping, finds Headlights coming into their own breezy pop sound.

Common Loon’s first official release is a two song 7”, out now on Berkeley, CA based label Ideal Utopia. At a very stripped down level, the duo that make up the band, Matt Campbell and Robert Hirschfeld, are doing something that resembles what a band like Apples In Stereo did with “Strawberry Fire” off Her Wallpaper Reverie, and they create their LSD-inspired sounds pretty well; it seems that they have mastered the genre's sound upon the recording of their first two songs.

The popularity of instrumental music is growing every year, and it’s truly amazing how people respond to solely music playing with no words. It’s like having no words takes the music down to its bare bones and pure emotion, revealing the true transcendental nature of a composition. Everyone is listening to the same notes, but are they hearing the same thing? I don’t think so, but I could understand why some people would say yes. A certain spirit (or drug) moves through each person; they make up their own words, paint their own pictures and feel more than think.

There was plenty of wide-eyed optimism in almost every one of the audience members in the line that wrapped around the corner for the Jan. 31st STS9 show, super stars of the original Bonnaroo and a known live show experience. I heard people saying they had come from as far as Tennessee and Long Island, all packing into The Canopy Club.

The third and final night of this year’s Great Cover-Up has come and gone, so let’s get straight to work.

Reds (above) took the stage in a swell of smoke and colors, playing Depeche Mode’s European version of electro-synth pop. The crowd didn’t really seem to know who the band was covering, and the dreaded standing half-circle formed in front of the stage. Although it might have taken some warming up to get the crowd going, the music was definitely club worthy.

[Ed. note: Special thanks to our writers, photographer, and videographers who are going above and beyond while "covering the Cover-Up" this year, turning over their articles, (analog!) photography and video very quickly in the wee hours of the morning in order to deliver the quickest and most thorough coverage of the event for our readers.]

With the line blurred between irony and inspiration by questionable taste and multiple drinks to the bar, The 17th Annual Great Cover-Up kicked off at The Highdive with the disco ball in full force and the crowd buzzing with anticipation. All participants are trying their hand at being the Sphinx in Vegas for those who can’t go to Egypt for the real thing, all while hopefully avoiding the karaoke- or Guitar-Hero-esque possibilities of the night.

Johnny and the Moon is another offshoot of the ever-productive Wolf Parade crew. Where the music of Handsome Furs and Sunset Rubdown are sonic cousins to the Wolf Parade output, this time the lesser-known guitarist of the band, Dante DeCaro (former Hot Hot Heat guitarist), delivers an album right out from Folkway Records and Greenwich Village. Pre-Black Sheep Boy Okkervil River releases or Springsteen's Seeger Sessions are the closest contemporary pieces of music which come to mind for musical similarities.

Radiohead do not make B-sides, they make non-album tracks (listen to the stuff that didn't make Kid A, Amnesiac or OK Computer). In Rainbows (Disc 2), a 30 minute mini-album, includes various tracks recorded and culled from the In Rainbows sessions. Each of the songs here could have fit somewhere on the first disc's October release, but the album is still very much its own unified entity.

Tunnels / New Ruins / Shipwreck / Headlights

I walked into the largest starting crowd of the Fall Showdown thus far with Tunnels, the first band of the night's great lineup, on stage. Tunnels is fronted by Steve Ucherek, lead singer of The Living Blue, and in the past I’ve only seen the band as a duo with drummer Ben Ucherek, but tonight there was also a bassist and two drummers. Where The Living Blue are more psychedelic garage rock n’ roll, Tunnels is more of a pop jam outlet. With the singer's faux British accent, and great mid-tempo pop-rock songs like “Little Sister” and “Trouble,” the band sounds like The Kinks influenced by way of Blur. And the two drummers were great together, sometimes working on the same beat or filling each other out. Tunnels sounded great and I hope their first release comes out sometime soon.

Curb Service / Common Loon / (The Living Blue) / (elsinore)

The third night of the local music showcase started off with Larry Gates, the former lead singer of local legends Lorenzo Goetz. Now Gates, playing under the name Curb Service, performs with a setup that includes an acoustic guitar, turn tables, drum machine and mixer, instead of a full rock band behind him. The hip-hop aspect of the music makes the music really easy to get behind and nod your head to, as the modest crowd that gathered during the set certainly did.

The Beauty Shop / The Chemicals / Darling Disarm / Books Died On

Starting their set with what would be described as an empty room, Books Died On played a pleasing set of electro-acoustic pop with delicate male lead vocals and female backup vocals sung over looped drums, a tiny keyboard organ, and acoustic guitars lighter than the breeze. For fans of Onelinedrawing or Owen, Books Died On is worth checking out.

Okkervil River fans in the Champaign-Urbana area: in case you didn’t already know, your new favorite eclectic rock n’ roll band not only recently stopped by at Daytrotter for a quick recording session (downloadable for free), but Will Sheff just put up on the Okkervil River website “a kind of album of covers."

"Some of them were recorded on radio shows, some at live performances, some at people's apartments, and one of them was recorded in the stairway at our hotel in Muenster while the maid was angrily banging things around. (…)These are all covers I worked up on the last tour whenever I had the occasion, with the eventual intention of putting them out somewhere for free. They all kind of have something to do with themselves and kind of to The Stage Names material” (quote from the band’s message board). So like Black Sheep Boy before it, The Stage Names is getting the Appendix treatment.

Tonight through Saturday, December 15, The Canopy Club will be hosting bills featuring a total of sixteen local or area musicians. All for a moderate 5 bucks a night ($7 after 10pm), that’s only $1.25 a band, if that were how it worked.

Acts range from locally well-known bands like Polyvinyl's indie-pop darlings Headlights, alt. country stars The Beauty Shop, the psychedelic garage-rock of The Living Blue, and the Midwestern indie-rock gloom of New Ruins, to the new bands quickly establishing themselves in the Champaign-Urbana scene, like Common Loon and their Beatles-inspired sonic pop songs, Tall Tale's piano power emo-rock, and World's First Flying Machine’s mini-chamber pop.

The Canopy Club’s Void Room filled up relatively quick with a couple dozen friends of all three local bands. For a late show, this was a surprisingly big and encouraging turn out.

Collusion was the first band. They are an alternative and classic rock cover band, and played "Voodoo Chile," “Evenflow,” a Black Crowes song, and a couple of others. But, these guys did something more than just play the songs straight up. Throwing in huge solos and a couple breakdowns, they adapted the songs and made them unique, even if they didn’t write them. Hopefully they'll channel that into something they can really call their own.

While home for Thanksgiving break, I didn't expect to see one of the best indie-rock shows to come to town in a long time booked at a bar downtown, closer to the smaller private Illinois Wesleyan than ISU.

Bloomington-Normal doesn't get that many shows, so to see the lineup of Chin Up Chin Up and The Ponys, two great Chicago touring bands, I had to get in despite the 21+ age restriction.

Although often grouped with the Devendra Banhart gypsy-folk circus, Bowerbirds' Hymns For A Dark Horse is nowhere near as bloated or tangentially indulgent as all of Banhart’s records. Instead, Bowerbirds sound like they are coming straight from an Appalachian back porch, utilizing violin, acoustic guitar, upright bass, banjo, accordion, percussion, and piano, into a mix that comes out sounding like gloomy nature-based freak-folk. Sometimes the lead singer’s great male singing voice is backed with instrumentation that will recall even early Decemberists.

The 1900s’ debut album Cold & Kind follows up last year’s EP Plume Delivery and delivers the same 60s-inspired boy-girl pop which borderlines on twee, but never crosses over into the sickeningly sweet. Their music is really lighthearted, fun, and catchy too.

Arthur & Yu’s debut album In Camera has the same production feeling Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” has, as if Arthur & Yu holed up in bed to record. Maybe that’s what gives this album its hazed out, relaxed, and rolling feeling. There’s a clear influence from the last two studio albums of The Velvet Underground.

Arthur & Yu play 60s-inspired fried folk with tradeoff boy-girl lead vocals. Tonight, Arthur’s voice was in top shape, and even though Yu’s vocals sounded unconfident alone, they still sounded good together. “Afterglow,” “Lion’s Mouth,” and “The Ghost Of Old Bull Lee” are all highlights off their debut album In Camera, and all sounded great live.

With the crowd still filling in, as it would be throughout the first two bands’ sets, Tractor Kings took the stage. Influenced by Bob Dylan and his disciples, it was a special set with The Living Blue lead singer Steve Ucherek adding his electric guitar to the band, giving the songs a post-rock sound. They covered Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” and trampled the stage with rattling drums, a walking bass, and psychedelic fuzz guitar, making for a better version than Dylan himself plays these days.

I walked into Caffé Paradiso in-between the sets of Mit’n and The Western Civilization. Privacy, the band normally backing up Mount Eerie on the tour, was very sick, but luckily a couple of other concerts were in town, so The WS played an acoustic set before their full-band show later in the night. They played with three acoustic guitars and emotional boy-girl lead vocals. Someone not in attendance would just have to think of Margot and the Nuclear So and Sos, Straylight Run, or Bright Eyes, and they’d get the idea of the type of music being played.