| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | ||||
| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 17 | |
| 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
| 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |
From REO Speedwagon to that band in your neighbor’s garage that likes to practice when you’re trying to sleep, Smile Politely’s music team keeps you up on all the news that makes this town hum.
Lincoln Square Village will be crawling with hundreds of audiophiles starting as early as doors will allow, this Saturday, May 17 at 8 a.m. The annual Vintage Vinyl sale begins at the crack of dawn (for those the love to r-a-w-k). Those waiting in line usually can be found scanning their prepared list of records to hunt for as soon as they step foot in the sale.
Have you heard that in the voting booths this year, the members of Elsinore are casting their ballots for Tom Selleck's mustache? Or that Snowsera's favorite horror film is monster movie The Host?
Then you may have noticed that WPGU, the college-run station broadcasting from Green Street, has been paying more attention to local music lately.
Since the controversial Local Music Awards last month, Operations Manager Jon Hansen has listened to many criticisms and suggestions for the station — and, working against managerial-type, when Hansen listens, he actually listens. In the past month, WPGU has put into play, so to speak, a "band of the week" feature, which includes quirky band profiles read on-air, as well as a featured track played every day at a regular time. In addition, WPGU has amped up its local show coverage, updated its music digital database and added newer songs by current local artists.
In my younger days, I used to be affiliated with the underground metal scene in Champaign-Urbana. In the partying, drinking and recreational times, I had many run-ins with a guy named “Brother Rich.” Brother Rich Berg was the lead singer of a band called Hate Choir back in the 90s. He was also a visionary, always having new ideas to promote himself or others in the scene — especially the hardcore, speed-metal bands. It was then in 1996 when Brother Rich released the best album ever, Loco Diablo Local Underground Compilation Vol. 1.
There are fundamental questions to ask before opening a discussion of The Felice Brothers, namely regarding what many consider to be “throwback” music: when an artist creates music that strongly hearkens to music of the past, notably of the sort that returns to a form of the basics, it should be assumed — at least for the review that follows — that we can declare a sort of unique brilliance. But to what extent do shoot-em-up romps, trips to the circus, and murder ballads apply to our contemporary lives? And further, to call a band (or record) brilliant, do the songs have to apply?
This, of course, is where metaphor becomes one of our greatest friends.
The Felice Brothers play a brand of what can only be described as folk music, and as such inherently is bred in a sort of tradition. The band strongly recalls Dylan’s foray with The Band (notably the infamous Basement Tapes) and, at times, the carnival-esque atmosphere of choice Tom Waits compositions and the wry humor (and dry drawl) of John Prine’s early records. But as with most old sounding records, this self-titled gem boasts an airiness whose climate could only be modern.
Some artists are just going to become popular, simple fact, and The Ting Tings are going to experience a rush — right about now, actually — especially after the push forward from their latest iPod commercial debut. Their full album, We Started Nothing, is scheduled to come out on May 18, but they have three singles out in the U.S. including Great DJ, Shut Up and Let Me Go and today’s That’s Not My Name:
The folks at the Canopy Club love local music. And so do we.
Tonight the Canopy will host an evening of local performances, dubbed "A Tribute to Local Bands." The schedule features nearly everyone that can play an instrument in town — and their mothers. (Well, maybe not moms, though given the weekend it wouldn't be a bad idea.) If you can't find something in this lineup to appeal to your ears, well, you just aren't listening. So away we go with the enormous roster.
To compare M83’s proprietor Anthony Gonzalez to Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine is perhaps old hat, but what’s now the most remarkable aspect of this comparison is how Gonzalez continues to nurture Shields’s influence while still creating interesting, progressive music. Shimmering, shoegazey electronic music it’s not, exactly; on Saturdays=Youth M83 sounds more like the New Wave reborn, as Gonzalez seems to channel Tears For Fears (pick any song from the Donnie Darko soundtrack, really) more than anything else. While this might seem the classic case of trying to fix something that isn’t broken (the band’s 2003 Dead Seas, Red Cities, and Lost Ghosts is brilliant in every sense of the word), Gonzalez has still managed to corral a sharp, spacious musical texture with that distinctive ring of fresh influence.
With effort, the two-member set of Mit'n have furthered their experimentation with bizarre musical compositions since I saw them last at the Man Man concert at the Courtyard Cafe. I don't remember much of a line-up description of each of their songs, but fortunately I did receive some explanations last night at the IMC. I say fortunately because while listening to the songs, it is difficult to pull out the lyrics and understand them enough to correlate them into a consecutive story or emotion.
Anyone who grew up in these "twin towns" knows about the Chester Street Bar. During Reagan's first and second terms, when tolerance about the LGBT lifestyle was far lower than it is now, the bar was uniformly stereotyped as such: a gay bar. Now, since Ellen came out of the closet on television and people like RuPaul and Carson Kressley were almost universally embraced, Chester Street has become what it was always meant to be: simply, a tolerant club that offers central Illinois the best place to dance in 150 miles.
Nekromancy on Monday nights are no exception. The residency is held by DJ Sorcerykid (pictured above on the left) is the longest running industrial and electronic club night in the state of Illinois. Considering the fact that Chicago is arguably home to the strongest industrial scene in the western world, that is saying a lot.
What could get you out and about tonight, despite the thunderstorm warnings?
How about a show at friendly downtown hub Mike 'N Molly's?
How about local hip-hop hero Krukid (feat. The Sugargliders) headlining, following sets by fellow Broke Rappers Text and Cornbread?
What if we threw in Kristovs Agenda and fantastic electro-pop act Eureka Brown?
That's what is offered to you, folks, and admission's not going to cost you ten dollars. It's not going to cost you five dollars, or even two dollars, or even one single dollar.
All this is available for you tonight absolutely free of charge.
The free show begins tonight at Mike 'N Molly's, 105 N. Market St. in Champaign, at 7 p.m. Click the jump to experience Eureka Brown and add some sunshine to your Friday.
The Link Gallery at Krannert Art Museum is exactly that: a hallway that essentially serves as a link between the School of Art + Design and the art museum that houses the university's permanent collection, as well as touring shows and exhibitions. Tonight, May 1, the Link Gallery will reprise its role as one of the newest and most welcomed venues in the local music scene.
Oceans, who have been known to throw a house party or two, will take to the stage starting at 5:30 p.m. to support the Animation Festival that is being showcased by students of FAA.
This show should be an excellent warm-up for the band, who plans to spend part of their summer on the road. Check out their MySpace link above for the dates.
The genre tags on Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s MySpace read “Indie/Psychedelic/Alternative.” Rarely do these meaningless little signifiers communicate so effectively a band’s inherent dilemma. Peter Hayes, Robert Turner, and Nick Jago have spent their career as a band sort of gingerly straddling these three genres and the attendant fan bases, resulting in a somewhat muddled oeuvre marked by moments of transcendence, but also a persistent hesitancy. They never quite go the whole nine yards in any one sonic direction, and one result of this tendency has been mercurial and occasionally awkward departures from album to album. They always seem a bit too self-consciously stylized for the indie kids, a little too rough for mainstream alternative, and nowhere near as oddball as hardcore psych fans would require. The result has been a band that is constantly on the radar, but who no one can really claim as his or her favorite. Perhaps it’s in the name.
Programming at the Urbana Free Library never ceases to amaze me. Tonight Sarah Lee Guthrie and Johnny Irion's nationwide tour brings them to town to perform a free concert a part of the library's "Heroes" series. The concert begins at 7 p.m.
Sarah Lee is the daughter of folk rocker Arlo Guthrie and granddaughter of the legendary Woody Guthrie — there's no doubt that talent runs in the family. Guthrie and Irion's music resembles the lyricism of Bob Dylan, mirror the spirits of June and Johnny Cash and continues the legacy of her grandfather's one-of-a-kind sound. Click here for a quick taste of Guthrie and Irion performing an acoustic set. And make your way to the library tonight to catch the darling duo live.
The Urbana Free Library is located at 210 W. Green St. in Urbana.
Cristy: Ah...the mid-1990s. Before Nickelback and Limp Bizkit clogged up radio with generic tattooed sludge, the rock that rose from Nirvana's Pacific-Northwestern ash was everywhere. Exquisite Sunny Day Real Estate. Mellow Toad the Wet Sprocket. And, of course, Radiohead B.C. (Before Critical-darlingness). St. Louis/Bloomington's Red Edmund hearkens back to that glorious time period.
A trio consisting of Cory Graddy (guitar, vocals, keyboards, songwritng), Tim Lyons (bass, vocals) and Chad Geiser (drums, vocals, trumpet), Red Edmund wear those mid-1990s influences on the their sleeves — their bold cover of Radiohead's "Planet Telex" (from The Bends) is part of their live show. In fact, their eponymous CD is rife with the Pablo Honey-era Radiohead sound.
Tribal drums rain down, town folk flock over, bass and saxophone debate, but in the end, get together. Afro-Cuban drumming meets free jazz and flirts with electronica. And the ensemble is constituted of 11 members. My oh my, what do we have here?
Sonic Liberation Front, a Philadelphia based group, performs this Saturday at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. With their first album, Water and Stone, released in 2001, SLF continues to expand the all-encompassing genre known as jazz. Now with three albums and several collaborations ranging from free jazz pioneer James “Sunny” Murray to alternative television producer Termite TV Collective, SLF is set to push the boundaries of music.
To all the patrons of the local music scene who keep looking for a way to make a difference: here is a way to make a difference.
High Anxiety Music Center — where local bands can rent rehearsal space, local fans can see great all-ages shows (with an old-school house party vibe) and anyone with the proper hankering can receive recording advice, studio time and, perhaps, even a record deal — is closing.
The house, located at 302 S. State St., was put on the market last week due to the landlord's financial troubles and an illness in the family. None of the parties interested in purchasing the house are similarly interested in letting High Anxiety Music remain.
President Ralph Petrella (a Smile Politely contributor) is putting out an open call for volunteers to help move some large items from the house this Sunday, April 27th. In addition, much of the furniture from the house will be for sale, so stop by if you're interested in some pieces with a bit of local history.
High Anxiety is hosting two remaining shows in the space before they have to fully vacate early next month, and the first is tomorrow with High Anxiety favorites Deconstructing Jim and Withershins. Admission to the 9 p.m. show is $5, so pack up your friends, give your money, lend a hand or an ear, and see what you can do to help. Who knows — perhaps the next home of High Anxiety Music is for rent on your street.
When I was a kid, I loved Star Wars. I had pretty much every collectible known to man. I had the movies, the soundtracks on vinyl, the action figures, bed sheets, curtains, talking Ewoks…all of it. My first word as a baby was “Yoda." I had a severe mental complex that had me thinking that I was actually Luke Skywalker bulls-eying womp rats on Tatooine for much of my childhood. I lived and breathed Star Wars.
I eventually grew out of my SW phase and moved on to more sophisticated movies like The Wizard and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but every now and then, my brain will snap and I’ll see the world in Star Wars vision again. This week, I took a hard look at the Champaign-Urbana local music scene and made stunning comparisons of people in our local universe to people in the galaxy far, far away.
A show like this, on the surface, sounds like something of a novelty: hip-hop and indie rock? Together? This is the stuff that gets pulled off on major festival circuits, but how will it fare in the C-U community? Perhaps that’s putting naïve words into the mouths of our hyper-educated viewers, but it’s a question worth asking despite the fact that this type of show has gone on for quite some time around town. Krukid shows up here, Larry Gates shows up there; at The Great Cover-Up, rock bands cover hip-hop acts for a full set, from Absinthe Blind performing as the Beastie Boys on through Beat Kitchen’s rendition of Run-DMC. Point in case, though this might be the first to call attention to the relationship between hip-hop and indie rock by name, the C-U music community is no stranger to cross-genre shows.
Also of note is that the pairing of these genres, increasingly related in terms of PR if nothing else, makes a whole lot of sense: In both cases, grassroots promotion plays a giant role in getting the word spread about the quality of musical acts, from venues such as MySpace to the traditional word-of-mouth. To boot, independent acts of both the rock and hip-hop varieties (not to mention most other genres) are the ones who consistently expand upon respective boundaries, the proverbial meal tickets for the future of music.
Food, Sex, and Death... and Insects (2007)William: The Venus 3—Peter Buck (R.E.M.), Bill Rieflin (formerly with Ministry) and Scott McCaughey (leader of the Young Fresh Fellows)—have been playing together since 2005. In October 2006 they released Olé! Tarantula with Robyn Hitchcock and visited London to record more material at Hitchcock's house.
The subject of this documentary is the time they spent recording, then touring America. The camera follows the band from Hitchcock’s house in London to Maxwell's in Hoboken, New Jersey, and then to the Crocodile Cafe in Seattle. Chris Ballew (Presidents of the United States of America), John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin), Morris Windsor (Hitchcock’s lifelong collaborator, usually on drums and harmonies), Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, and Nick Lowe all put in appearances in this film, just dropping by to hang out or to lay down tracks in Robyn’s surprisingly normal-looking living room.
The most open-minded fans of experimental or avant-garde music will — in their most private moments — admit they know precisely why the great majority of music-listeners tend to shy away from their chosen genre. It' s not necessarily because the music is harsh or dissonant, or because it lacks a recognizable structure. Everything from new age to Timbaland contains some or all of these elements.
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.
[The Highdive, Saturday, April 19]
Cristy: Power pop—the candy aisle of rock. You got your classic Hershey’s chocolate (Big Star); tangy Smarties (Weezer); and sparkly gold Werthers caramel (Matthew Sweet). If you're a power pop fan, Three Hour Tour and The Redwalls are pure sugary confections.
“Sometimes I feel like hip-hop has me runnin’ in place.”
True. But, the ability to move minds and bodies keeps you from standing still for too long.
I admit: as one of the fresh-faced youth that came to Champaign-Urbana in 2002, and having been exposed to the hip-hop scene here for the lot of my college career (5.5 years and going strong!), I can say that the way Text describes his passion could be readily applied to hip-hop heads in this town. But, with a very hopeful outcome, if the current trend of albums and releases continue.
If you haven’t come across the Broke Rappers Coalition, or BRC, then you may want to stand in their path for a little while, if for nothing else but to catch Text performing. His most recent release, Jameson Dreams, is anything but a drunken romp through 13 tracks. Text weaves a web that dodges between full-on rhythmic confessional, to lyrical onslaught with several of his BRC brethren.
Do you hear that? It's the collective sigh of disappointment from American Idol fans across Central Illinois.
Last year's winner, Jordin Sparks, canceled her concert at the Assembly Hall scheduled for Friday.
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.
Hey kids, did ya hear? “World music” is fast becoming the new hipster-approved genre of the week. A recent spate of indie rock bands like Vampire Weekend, and Yeasayer and the requisite Pitchfork best new frenzy prompted a recent Tribune article proclaiming the “fading boundaries of world music.” Freak-folk? Yesterday’s news. Bust out your marimbas. Paul Simon is the new Vashti Bunyan. Take that, Sasha Frere-Jones!
Tonight at the Independent Media Center, Modern Skirts, hailing from Athens, Georgia, will perform as openers for Nashville indie-rockers Parachute Musical and local atmospheric rock duo Common Loon. The power-poppy Modern Skirts, gearing up to release their sophomore album this fall, recently had their single "Motorcade" featured on a Q Magazine sampler, and will be opening for REM this summer in Amsterdam.
Be sure to catch them tonight before it costs you more than one of those creepy new fives to see them.
The Independent Media Center is located at 202 S. Broadway Ave. in Urbana. The show starts at 8 p.m., admission is five dollars, and is all-ages and alcohol-free.
Brace yourselves, campus dwellers.
Ben Folds, the actually really great pop songsmith, returns to campus for the third time in the last eight years. Ben Lee opens the show, which will no doubt be more fun than a trip to the zoo on ecstasy.
Starcourse, the campus-based concert committee must have really reached deep into their bag of tricks for this one. A quick glance at their website will tell you who they have brought to town over the past 100 years. And the last ten years confirms it: this organization is hanging out with the wrong people.
Tickets are $29 for students and $31 for the general public.
I might be the only twenty-something from the Western suburbs of Chicago who had never seen Lucky Boys Confusion live. They have a somewhat legendary reputation in my old neck of the woods, including with my younger brothers. However, being the skeptic that I am, I will admit I have always assumed this reputation to be somewhat exaggerated. So it was with fresh eyes that I attended their performance at The Canopy Club on Saturday, April 12.
[Kimya Dawson, L’Orchidee D’Hawai and Angelo Spencer at the Independent Media Center on April 13]
Angelo Spencer, the first opener of the evening, was quite the modern day troubadour. Taking ambidexterity to the limit, he played guitar with the upper half of his body and an abbreviated drum kit with his feet. There was something inescapably amateur about his sound, but even when the Frenchman’s banter was a bit lost in translation, people continued cheering for him. The speak-sung lyrics and spastic strums highlighted both a slight similarity to Art Brut, and unfortunately, the void of not having a full band.
This weekend promises variety when it comes to one of the finest new bands in town. Kristov’s Agenda has finally arrived. So, what makes this particular weekend so special?
Why none other than not just one, but two, CD release shows for the band that takes cues from everyone from Radiohead, to Massive Attack, to Portishead, to MF Doom, that's what.
Illini Union Courtyard Café, 4/10/08
William: The venue's website said the show would start at 8 p.m. The DJ on WPGU said 7:30. The poster said 9:00. The guy at the Illini Union Box Office said "Caribou...That's a band, right?"
The opening act, Fuck Buttons, was for some reason not mentioned on the radio or in the university's official promotional material.
So we arrived late. And as a result missed the best part of Fuck Buttons' set, catching just the tail end. We heard only two songs we missed the names of, and so refer to them as"The Washing Machine Song" and "The Lawnmower Song." A few adventurous fans were nodding along to the very loud grinding beat, though most stood around the stage like witnesses at a car crash, staring petrified into the distortion. I sensed a Velvet Underground influence, or at least Metal Machine Music.
It was previously reported that the likeness of Ryan Groff, frontman for local band Elsinore, had appeared in an elderly woman’s morning breakfast. Now, another story regarding Groff has surfaced.
Last week, our C-U Siz reporters have retrieved this video of Groff apparently writing new solo material while communicating with geese at a local park. He appears in the video to be taking inspiration from the friendly fellows:
Story is developing.
| 
