Though obviously feted every year, this February 14th is particularly special as Arizona celebrates 100 years of statehood. (Happy b-day to you too, Oregon!) Lined up for local festivities are Heartless Bastards, Talkdemonic, and Andrew Belle! Emboss M&Ms with your message now!

Heartless Bastards‘ first two albums portended force: Erika Wennerstrom’s howling voice strained and growled over churning indie blues-rock rhythms. There was a sense of imminence, that something could explode at any moment. It would have been a difficult pace to sustain, and one the trio ultimately decided against. The new Arrow (Partisan) offers urgency, but in a Neil Young minus Crazy Horse way. The dusty title track (“The Arrow Killed The Beast”) withers in the sun with a hellish thirst, and Wennerstrom’s wounded performance makes the song actually feel like it’s about death (not love). When they arrive at the oasis for some a-rockin’, the band would rather roll out lighter influences (T. Rex in “Got To Have Rock And Roll,” Beatles for “Simple Feeling,” and Skynyrd with “Late In The Night”) than roll you with the steam-engine approach of yore. They’re kinder, gentler Bastards. (Tuesday@Lincoln Hall with Hacienda and Precious Blood.)

Similar to Valentine’s Day, it’s Arizona statehood-day tradition to eat a meal while being serenaded by a cellist, drummer, and their laptop. Demand is so great, however, that Talkdemonic decided to shun dinner arrangements and invite lovers to a concert. On last fall’s Ruins (Glacial Pace), the duo spread out, and Lisa Molinaro’s viola and cello took a less lyrical approach. Adding swaths of texture, she mimics guitar solos on “Violet” and hits moaning lines on “Midnight Pass” that burn up in feedback. The tempos range from ethereal (“Time Draws On”) to borderline jungle (“Midcentury Motion”) . . . what better way to say I Love You? (Tuesday@Schubas with Cate LeBon and Bone & Bell.)

But perhaps most indicative of the festivities surrounding the 48th — and last of those carved from the contiguous — state, hometowner Andrew Belle brings his vitriolic, nationalistic right-wing screeds to bear. Actually, fewer artists are as inoffensive as Belle, whose pillowy voice and leather-armchair arrangements strive for the realm of early John Mayer or Coldplay — so much as “strive” is an applicable term. He’ll soon be celebrating the release of concert-staple “The Daylight” as a three-song single; it arrives on the 28th, a.k.a. the second-most important date in Arizona history. (Tuesday@Space with Peter Groenwald.)

– Steve Forstneger

A quartet of acts traipsing through Chicago within the week all dangle their feet over the brink of Complete, Utter Mistake. Do Lost Lander, Scale The Summit, Wim, and Foxy Shazam survive?

Singer/songwriters seem like introverts as it is, but the development of home-recording equipment has enticed a frothy stein of them to board up in their bedrooms and craft underwater opuses. The problem with this — assuming they get their work professionally mixed and mastered — is the homespun arrangements are often rendered arbitrarily, and stuck to a particular song simply because the effort was put in, and shit-no it’s just going to sit unused. Lost Lander, a.k.a. Matt Sheehy, tenuously does this balancing act on DRRT, fully immersed in his compositions but standing in the way of some of them. Tracks like “Cold Feet,” “Afraid Of Summer,” and “Gossamer” branch out of their stylistic underpinnings to become vibrant, individual slices integral to the album’s fabric. But “Kangaroo” and “Your Name Is A Fire” suffer the opposite: restrained by the ornamentation when they should really just rock the fuck out. (Thursday@Panchos with Exit Ghost and Jack & Ace.)

Speaking of inhibitions, something about instru-metal bands like Pelican and Russian Circles has sometimes felt withheld. The riffs are meaty, the playing ambitious and professional, but maybe something suppressed is what really fuels their crescendos and climaxes. Scale The Summit deal in similarly winding, post-rocky terrain, but they also aren’t shy about a little pizzazz. The Houston-based quartet is fronted by a pair of guitarists who worship John Petrucci, and went to great pains to build their own guitars from scratch. The Collective tracks like “Secret Earth” take some care not to be overrun by the stampeding solos, but know that music doesn’t really live unless it feels as if it might lose control. (Thursday@Reggies Rock with Elitist, Centaurus, and Burn The Remains.)

More than anything Radiohead did, the post-millennial flood of mamby-pamby British bands can be traced to Travis’ The Man Who. That Coldplay and Snow Patrol could get away with it while Travis were stuck with Keane, Starsailor, and Embrace was little consolation, as was the band’s own diminishing returns. Wim come in with a fresher outlook, not promising much by way of innovation but cutting through to the emotional core on their self-titled Modular debut. The Australians come close to that power of Travis’ “As You Are,” or Andy Dunlop’s underrated solo on “Writing To Reach You.” There are also shades of the Boo Radleys, Rufus Wainwright, and Sufjan Stevens, but their dignified approach to resurrecting a broken lineage is what resonates most. (Friday@Lincoln Hall with Other Lives.)

It’s not Foxy Shazam’s fault that Queen’s 40th anniversary was last year, or that it would be met with a full catalog reissue campaign. But with it fresh in the memory, this winter’s The Church Of Rock And Roll feels especially hamfisted. With valiant attempts at recreating the spirit of Queen, Cincy’s Shazam don’t have the talent to look past impersonation. (Saturday@Metro with The Darkness.)

– Steve Forstneger

It hasn’t even started yet, but we know everyone’s thrilled to root for the guy who made a jerk of himself when he was drafted, versus the guy who’s already won it enough. New York against Boston! No one’s tired of that! Cleanse your spirit with Red Wanting Blue or Asteroids Galaxy Tour this week.

An insane number of snobs believe that a number of bands are successful because they have fans who don’t really like music. They point to Goo Goo Dolls, Tonic, The Fray, Augustana, and maybe down the line hate will spread to Red Wanting Blue. It’s easy to tick the boxes on last month’s From The Vanishing Point: easy-going, unassertive acoustirock chord progressions; rhyming “missed” with “kissed”; a hint of muscle to convince male fans that they’re not a date away from a Katherine Heigl film fest. Yet some of those same critics will line up to pay homage to the mindless inanity of LMFAO. Sometimes it’s best to leave your hangups at the coat check. (Tuesday@Schubas with Jeremiah Higgins.)

The Asteroids Galaxy Tour might sound like a package deal — an idea that could be applied to the band’s cornucopia of sounds. The Danes recently swept Europe with their future funk, a pulsating marriage of Deee-Lite and Junior Senior. Out Of Frequency banks on ’60s soul in a way that has led some to compare frontwoman Mette Lindberg to Amy Winehouse, but more often she recalls ’50s torch singers — one who just got caught up in the groove. (Tuesday@Lincoln Hall with Vacationer.)

– Steve Forstneger

The British take a lot of pride in their rock ‘n’ roll, boasting that they studied its roots better than its host country; rescued the form after the crooners rushed in to fill Elvis’ void; and, if you canvas the ’60s titans, only the Queen’s subjects showed any real longevity.

On that last part, the numbers sure are hard to ignore. Beyond those Rolling Stones – whose reputation now is more Barnum & Bailey than actual Rock ‘N’ Roll Circus – The Who, The Kinks, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin far outlasted the careers of The Band, The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Velvet Underground, or Simon & Garfunkel. The lone holdout are The Grateful Dead, while you’d want to put duct tape over the more embarrassing permutations of The Beach Boys and Jefferson Airplane/Starship.

Death, of course, intervened indiscriminately, which has led more than a couple people to wonder what would have become of The Doors. The conversation was controversially steered into view when keyboardist (and native Chicagoan) Ray Manzarek and guitarist Robby Krieger ignored the cries of drummer John Densmore and critics by asking The Cult’s Ian Astbury (and recently Hawkwind’s Dave Brock) to fill Jim Morrison’s role on their Doors Of Perception tours, beginning 2002.

The tone is far less circumspect this year, however, as Rhino and Eagle Rock – on behalf of the original label, Elektra – revisit The Doors’ swan song, L.A. Woman. Despite the broken – physical and mental – status of their frontman, L.A. Woman and its Morrison Hotel predecessor declared a band who’d reorganized and been revitalized. That Morrison was to move to France matters not – it was an indefinite hiatus before there were indefinate hiatuses. The trio of Manzarek, Krieger, and Densmore would “complete” and release music they’d been working on at the time of Morrison’s death – music Morrison intended to complete.

Still, his ragged vocals on L.A. Woman and the collective decision to shelve touring before Morrison’s relocation to Paris suggest the set might have been an end forthcoming. In the new, authorized documentary Mr. Mojo Risin’: The Story Of L.A. Woman, Manzarek himself reckons, “We had one last album to go, and we’re gonna make this album. In this zen moment in time, we didn’t discuss the future: the future’s uncertain. The end is always near.”

Call it a crafty editing job.

“That would be a good story, what people want,” he jeers to IE, “that when Jim left for Paris we knew it was the end. That would be a good story. Like we’re fucking psychic. We knew he was at his end. That his destiny had been completed.”

You knew with the court case that he’d been under a lot of pressure, and that his voice was pretty shot.

“Have you listened to L.A. Woman?”

Yes.

“And you think his voice is shot?”

On certain tracks, it sounds a little ragged.

“Hey, you know? It’d been five years of singing his ass off, sure. You’re getting a little bit of that whiskey voice. Oh! What a shame! That means he’s going to die? He’s getting a little older. [Referring to the DVD:] Is that exactly what I said? Or did I say, ‘It was our last recording contract with Elektra Records. Our last record on the contract of the seven.’ That’s what the last is. It’s not The Doors’ last record.”

This, of course, is discussion of the end of The Doors. Let’s start with Ray at his musical beginnings.

Ray Manzarek: Everett grammar school. St. Rita High School. And DePaul University.
IE: Local history then was all about the folk revival at the Gate Of Horn, etc. Were you involved in that at all?
RM: No, the blues scene and the jazz scene.
IE: So the South Side and West Side clubs?
RM: South Side, yeah. I went to see Muddy Waters at 47th and Racine at whatever the heck the club was. So I saw Waters live. That was a most amazing evening.
IE: You were known for inserting nods to your heros in those keyboard lines.
RM: Oh, absolutely. A tip of the hat. With The Doors, we always credited John Coltrane; “My Favorite Things” and “Ole Coltrane” were the inspiration to play the solo in “Light My Fire.” Those two were in 3/4, but I’m basically playing it in 4/4. Gosh, Miles Davis – what an influence he was. We used to open our sets at the Whisky A Go-Go [in Los Angeles] at 9 o’clock – nobody’s in the club; no need for Jim to start singing – so John, Robby, and I would play “Milestones” and then “Kind Of Blue,” and then improvise like a jazz quartet. It was always a tip of the hat. I cut my eyeteeth on the piano players of rock ‘n’ roll. My deepest influence was the blues, South Side of Chicago. Al Benson I’d come home from school and he’d play blues [on WGES-AM]. Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Richard, Magic Sam . . . holy Christ! Howlin’ Wolf, all of it. You hear those sounds as a young keyboard player, it’s mesmerizing. The depth of the emotion of those men singing their songs: absolutely profound.
IE: You’re in your late teens, early 20s . . .
RM: I was gone by 21.
IE: So before that, when you saw Muddy on Racine – was it easy to do that? Just any kid at school?
RM: Oh, yeah, but [my classmates] just weren’t hip to it. It was pre-Butterfield. And pre-Stones. So the Stones showed white kids what the blues was, and Paul Butterfield opened up Chicago and probably college students to listening to the blues. But there we were, the South Side of Chicago. The blues permeated the South Side. So it was no big deal. But I could never find anybody who was into the blues. Rock ‘n’ roll? Definitely. They were definitely into rock ‘n’ roll.
IE: Well, you grew up on Western. And the city was/is segregated.
RM: Oof! Wasn’t it ever! That was a totally white neighborhood. There were no black guys at St. Rita, not until much later. It’s pretty well mixed now, but at the time it was a totally white school. “We do not play the blues in St. Rita High School.” But they sure do now.
IE: But you could cross into the clubs on Michigan Avenue and Roosevelt Road without a problem?
RM: Absolutely. Things were pretty cool. I was there at Peppers Lounge, and Muddy Waters was playing, and we’re three white guys: me and two buddies from DePaul. Muddy thought it was so charming, that he introduced us. [Laughs.] “I’ve got my white fanclub here.” And we’re going, “Nooo!” “Stand up boys, and take a bow.” So we stood up, and people are applauding, and we sat back down. Talk about embarrassment. We tried to melt into the floor and be totally inconspicuous. But it was fine, like, “There’s some white guys. Hey, it’s cool! Come on, you kids!”
IE: Was everyone else listening to rock at that time?
RM: Yep. A couple guys I knew, one was a musician and the other was our buddy. We said, “You gotta go see this show.” “We’re gonna go where?” “47th and Racine, Peppers Lounge. Come on, man!” “O.K. That could be quite the adventure.” “It’s Muddy! Playing live!” They were reticent, but had the time of our lives. We came out of the club like, “Holy fuck, man.” It was a ritual, out of the transposed soul of Africa to America.
IE: When you moved to Los Angeles, what sort of musicians did you grip onto?
RM: The jazz musicians. It was also in Chicago. I went down to the Blue Note – I think it was called the Blue Note. What was great about it was, well because you had to be 21 to get into it, this was for under-21 and in the back they had a railing separating the kids area. They actually had a kids area. They weren’t 12-year-olds, but 18, 19, and 20-year-olds. And they would only serve Cokes. And man, I saw Duke Ellington, Count Basie’s Big Band with Joe Williams singing the blues.
IE: That was when West Coast jazz was just hitting its stride.
RM: Just getting started. Very rarely did you hear Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Shorty Rogers, Shelly Mann, and those people.
IE: Whom do you hear in Robby? Obviously there’s blues overtones, but when you hear his jazz you don’t hear Wes Montgomery or George Benson.
RM: No.
IE: He sounds more like a sax player.
RM: Yeah. Well he’s fast now. Holy Christ, can he play fast. He was a rock ‘n’ roller when we first started. He played blues, with a bottle neck like country blues. That’s what he played, and he played flamenco. With The Doors, he didn’t play with a pick. So it was flamenco-style guitar in a rock ‘n’ roll band with blues influence. And that was Robby Krieger.
IE: Was that like most bands in L.A., like Love? Amalgams of different players? Today, rock bands are all weaned on rock.
RM: Psychedelic rock was too young. It had its Little Richard era. But the ’60s were a cross-cultural time in which white people and black people all embraced each other. Anybody who was psychedelic was a member of the tribe. The battle for supremacy was between the squares and the hip people. The heads and the straights – and the straights win.
IE: There was a book a couple years ago, called How The Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘N’ Roll, and the point was that snobbery didn’t exist among listeners until a certain point. You could listen to The Association and The Beach Boys as well as the Dead and Incredible String Band. There was no differentiation between what music was cool. Do you agree?
RM: Oh, yeah. I don’t know that The Beatles did that. And if you think of rock ‘n’ roll as ’50s music as Little Richard and Elvis Presley – that expanded from the original genre it was into almost world music. Hell, there was folk rock in Los Angeles that was very big, like The Byrds. Then into the mid-’70s like Jackson Browne, the Eagles, and Linda Ronstadt. Almost country rock. Jingle-jangle morning. Everything was going on.
IE: You didn’t happen to know [The Byrds'] Roger McGuinn back in Chicago, did you?
RM: No, I didn’t know anybody. That’s why I got out of there. I wasn’t going to stay around. I never played with any bands in Chicago – I played with my own band. There were no bands. There were little lounge gigs. I guess if there were bands, they were little folk-rock bands. And the only guys playing R&B and rock ‘n’ roll were black guys. With electric basses. Holy shit, the first time I ever heard that live!
IE: When you think about The Doors’ history – we can look at it now like the first one came out, the next one, L.A. Woman came out in ‘71. Does it seem like a blur, or can you see each as stages?
RM: The stages were pretty short, man. We were recording as fast as we could. The first album came out in January of ‘67, the second came out in October. We were moving. We were hauling ass. We were recording, playing, and the whole thing. It was just a rollercoaster ride.
IE: Today, four years is two albums. If that.
RM: It’s an album, two years of touring, and a year of recording the next album. People take their time. Jim’s got a great line: “In that year, we had a great visitation of energy” – that’s The Doors. That was a five-year year. It lasted January ‘67 to July 3rd, 1971, Jim’s death. But now, my God, it seems like 40 years.
IE: When you and Robby tour and do interviews, do you have conflicting memories?
RM: Oh, sure. It’s the reality plus 40 years of memory. But then we have memories that are identical. We are different people, different human beings. We were four people, now we’re three, and we all have our own version of it. I make my own stories. Robby and I can be sitting next to each other and talking about something and tell two different stories.
IE: Are there any specific instances where you can’t believe he doesn’t have the same memory as you?
RM: All the time, but there are no specifics that I can give you that would make an amusing point in your article. You’d have to be interviewing Robby and I at the exact same time.

(Here is where the chat turned to the misunderstanding on the DVD at the beginning of the article.)

IE: You may have been joking or being sarcastic.
RM: Hey, [people] love that shit. “We thought the end was coming, and we were making our last album together.” Even greater, if all three of us, if after Jim died, we’d committed suicide. That’s four brothers, a great rock ‘n’ roll story! But the fact is, we were making our music and playing away, and Jim was going to Paris to take a break. Jim never said anything about Paris until the album was virtually completed. All the recording was done, all the vocals were done, we were mixing, we had three/four more to go, and Jim said, “I’m leaving for Paris next week.” It was like, “What?” “I’m going to Paris.” “Good idea, man.” The contract was up. We’ve completed our contractual obligation. We are now free to break up and never play together again; sign with a new record company; or take a break and sign with another record company in six months or a year. “Go! Jesus Christ! You’ve been drinking too much, man. You’ve got too many groupies and too many bad friends. Perfect. Go to Paris, become Jim Morrison poet again in Paris.” An American In Paris. Hemingway. Fitzgerald. Who wrote Tropic Of Cancer/Tropic Of Capricorn? Henry Miller.

So, anyway, that was Jim Morrison. The next American in Paris. “Get your shit together: write.” Of course, he only lasted four months. And who knows what his thoughts were? “He was breaking up the band. He had quit.” People know that? If he had, in his mind, quit, and went to Paris without telling me? Then he broke the magic circle. If he’d said to me, “Ray! That’s it, buddy. We had a great run. We put this band together out of nothing, graduated out of UCLA, didn’t see each other for two months, didn’t see each other until July 1965, right on the beach and we started the band, we dreamed the dream but I’ve had it. That’s it. The dream is now over.” I would have said, “My friend, go to Paris. Send me a poem or two every once in a while, and I’ll see you.” That would have been fine.

IE: The music you were working on when he left, Full Circle . . .
RM: Full Circle would have been great had Jim been there.

IE: Was it normal for you guys to just jam, the three of you?
RM: Jim would be on a midnight creep for a week and a half, and then he’d come back. We’d have rehearsals every Tues-day/Thursday, Monday/Wednesday/Fri-day depending how ambitious we felt, how close we were, how exicted we were in the recording studio. And we’d work on songs. Jim would be there, not be there, Robby would have songs, when Jim left John and I started writing songs. We had plenty of material to work on, and we were just rehearsing as we usually did, and waiting for Jim to come back.

He said to John, he called John, and asked how L.A. Woman was doing, and [John] said fine. “It’s the Doors’ comeback.” And Jim said, “That’s great. Sure was fun making that record.” And John said, “We were talking about going on the road with Jerry Scheff [Elvis Presley's bassist, who played on the album] and Mark Benno on rhythm guitar, so instead of four there’d be six of us on stage and we’d do the album just like we recorded it.” And Morrison said, “What a great idea! Sounds fabulous! Let’s do that as soon as I get back.” John said, “Cool. When are you coming back?” “I don’t know.”
IE: When you guys were working on what would have become the album after L.A. Woman, would Morrison have been writing melodies as well as lyrics?
RM: Never.
IE: Never?
RM: Jim was the word-man. If he initiated the song, he would sing the melody. Well, he could add words to Robby’s stuff. That was Jim’s words to Robby’s melody. His songs, he sings the melody, that’s his melody. And he had a good sense of bars and phrases, and when to lay out and when to come back in. He was a very musical guy.

And the British very certainly couldn’t call this one their own.

– Steve Forstneger

Just because Martha Berner’s finally closed a six-year gap between full-length studio outings, it doesn’t mean the singer/songwriter was inactive. In fact, she’s used the half decade and change to practically start from scratch, reinventing her already alluring folk flavorings under the umbrella of insurgent country, good ol’ fashioned rock ‘n’ roll, and Stax soul. Much of the evolution comes from slogging it out on the local circuit and beyond, but another key element was the cementing of her supporting band, The Significant Others, with whom Berner shares co-billing throughout the new Fool’s Fantasy (Poprock).

Appearing: Friday, February 4th at Lincoln Hall with Andrew Fraker and Raised On Zenith.

“I never expected it to be six years since I put out my last full-length, and I actually had plans to make the next one shortly after [debut album] . . . this side of yesterday!” exclaims the troubadour by phone from her Windy City home. “In the end, what probably took an additional three years [more than I wanted] was just a shift in who I was working with and really wanting to differ this record from the others. [It's] not that one way was right and the other was wrong, but [I preferred] just to have a very cohesive and intimate band feel with musicians who knew the songs for awhile and experienced them live for a long time before going into the studio. Basically the timing isn’t always what we think it’s going to be as artists, and even though I’m kicking myself a little bit, I feel really great having it come out now and I’m excited for where the band is at.”

Berner’s idea for The Significant Others began with a call to longtime friend and collaborator Scott Fritz, who produced Fool’s Fantasy, played a slew of instruments (from guitar on down), and helped recruit the other musicians. Keyboardist Will Sprawls and drummer Tyson Ellert round out the group, contributing to the comparatively thicker, full-band feel and extra aggression.

“The new music has a little bit more grit and edge that my other albums didn’t have, and it’s a little more rock ‘n’ roll,” confirms Berner. “I wrote all the songs, but the guys wrote their own parts and we all sort of co-produced it together. It’s still billed as Martha Berner & The Significant Others, but it definitely is a band effort. I see them as the special sauce, and I couldn’t achieve this sound without them.”

As for those specific sounds on Fool’s Fantasy, they range from the 10,000 Maniacs-styled title track to the smoky soul of “Some Stay A While” and the alternative country grit of “Cry.” On the other hand, “Where Does The Day Go” could easily fit alongside the easygoing indie pop of Feist, while “Irene” and “Burning Candles” recall recent collaborations of Robert Plant with Alison Krauss. (Because this collection features four-time Grammy-winning mastering engineer Gavin Lurssen, perhaps that last comparison is no coincidence.)

“I met Gavin through a good friend and fellow artist Erika Rose, and I flew out to L.A. [to work with him],” she explains. “It was super fun sitting there seeing his Grammys, and it was a real honor to watch whatever it is that he does. He seemed to really hang on to the textures, warmth, and depth, and not lose it in the compression process.”

Another area of depth comes on the songwriting side of the coin, which Berner culls from a composite of everyone from Leonard Cohen to Sinead O’Connor, The Sundays, Wilco, Bon Iver, and Rogue Wave. Lyrically, many of her tunes take a storytelling approach, and even though they’re coming from the perspective of a burgeoning artist hoping to make a mark on the world at large, Berner makes a point to relate to listeners from any walk of life.

“‘Fool’s Fantasy’ as a song and the record as a whole are my examination of life, not just for me, but people in general on a journey to achieve what they want in life,” she says. “It’s the song that kind of questions how do you know when to draw the line in your pursuit, whether that be a music career or relationships. How do you know when you should work harder or just walk away? [In my case], whether I’m foolish or not, I’ll carry on this [musical] path.”

Even if Berner’s yet to become a household name, she’s been making a push through multiple appearances at Austin’s gem-uncovering South By Southwest conference and Milwaukee Summerfest, plus an aggressive campaign to be heard on television programs, most notably MTV’s “The Real World.” Add in some WXRT radio airplay, mounds of positive press, plus a continual presence on the road, and the tunesmith is certainly popping up in all the right places.

“I think there’s a natural desire to push [my career] forward, even with the state of the music industry right now,” she considers. “There’s some great stuff going on and some tougher stuff, too, but I just want to strike a balance between being very driven and also really wanting to preserve my love for it. I always have something I’m working on, and at the end of the day, I want to love performing and writing and being in a band. It all ebbs and flows as it would for anyone, especially in today’s economy, but I’m going to keep on doing it.”

Despite having to weather the music industry’s uncertainty, Berner’s thankful for Chicago’s support over the past eight years she’s lived here, which follows a provincial Wisconsin upbringing, through spending time in cosmopolitan San Francisco, and more exotic locales like the Virgin Islands and Thailand. She attributes the frequent moves to wanderlust, though one has to question the tendency away from paradise and toward the wintry Great Lakes.

“Chicago is a very inviting and warm city and I love the Midwest strategy of picking yourself up by your bootstraps and cracking a good joke while you’re doing it,” she explains. “I love the drive and humor and, music-wise, I just continue to have great relationships with musicians in the city. Chicago has the big city opportunity, sophistication, and talent, but still the small-town hospitality. We back each other up, we’re all in this together and we have a good time above all.”

It’s all part of her fantasy.

– Andy Argyrakis

Chicago hip-hop artists who make and perform music full-time are too few and far between – that is, artists who actually still reside in the area. But while it becomes even tougher for local rappers to ditch their day jobs, 20-year-old Chicagoan Rockie Fresh is among a select few who are already on their way to stardom before ever having to step inside a cubicle.

“It’s definitely become my life,” says Fresh of his music. “I’ve been able to make an earning off of it and take care of things that I need to take care of – get the things that I need and I want. I wanna do this forever, so it keeps me on track and focused.”

If Fresh were a label-manufactured act, his ascension wouldn’t be so surprising. To his credit, though, this MC with the slow flow has been able to garner a decent amount of downloads and book a whole lot of shows independently. Yes, some of this was done with the aid of a management and public-relations team, but before he had any publicist, he was still able to fill Reggies Rock Club in 2009 for the release party of his debut mixtape, Rockie’s Modern Life. This was also his first live show ever.

“I was kind spoiled because that was the crowd that was all of my fans and they knew the words and were super happy to see me,” he reflects about his debut.

And so 2010 was the true test of Fresh’s abilities when he hit the road rocking shows along with fests like South By Southwest and CMJ in front of largely unfamiliar audiences. He accepted the challenge and embraced the positive response from new fans. In fact, he says it was certain Chicagoans at that time who began to have a problem with his growing popularity – something he addresses openly throughout his second mixtape, 2010’s The Otherside.

On the synthy, smoked-out “They Don’t Understand Why” he raps, “Anytime you gettin’ money then you bound to get respect/but you gonna find a problem when you find success/the ones that used to hate you feel like they know you the best.”

Without calling out anyone specifically, Fresh explains that “people on the Internet and people outside of Chicago, they were definitely showing a lot of love for the music, but I kind of expected more from people at home. And in turn, I realized that the way Chicago people treated me as an artist really made me a lot tougher and it gave me a lot of strength that a lot of artists don’t get in other cities. So it was cool in the long run.”

It makes sense why Fresh has been compared to Drake – a pair of meditative MCs who can show their self-consciousness about their haters but ultimately aren’t afraid fire back or boast about their achievements – whether they be within hip-hop or with women.

One can pluck just about any line from his tracks for proof, but especially as he raps on “Otherside,” “All my life I’ve been picked on, slept on, stared at/however, I refuse to be stepped on.”

He’s less than three years into his career, but Fresh, the Prairie State College dropout, is already easing into his own style. What sets him apart from Drake or other acts to whom he’s been compared is his alt-rock edge. Yes, he can do straight-up braggadocio rap as heard on “Sofa King Cole” or his collaboration with West Coast act Casey Veggies (“Duckin N Dodgin”), but his rock tendencies are just as prevalent. They’re the creations of his production team The Cartoonz and others, who are often adding guitar riffs into his beats or to a greater extent by doing collaborations with his rock influences like Good Charlotte.

While he now lives in the city, as a teen attending Homewood-Flossmoor High School, it wasn’t beats and rhymes all day.

“Growing up in the suburbs and being introduced to alternative rock and different types of music outside of rap, like punk, it made me really get into that type of stuff,” he explains. “Fall Out Boy was a band that I really appreciated and same with Good Charlotte. John Mayer is one of my favorite artists of all time. So for me, there were certain things that I wanted to do to make myself different from everybody else. I never really saw anybody add that dark element of rap to music and be consistent with it and so that was something that I wanted to be my thing and I just ran with it.”

That dark element is something Fresh is no doubt still building upon within his reflective raps. The first single off his new mixtape, Driving 88, is called “No Fear” and rife with moody backup vocals, downtempo drums, and lyrical meditations. It’s not exactly happy-go-lucky material when he kicks off by rhyming, “Reporting live from Chicago/where they tell me I’m the future/but I’m not promised tomorrow.”

Fresh is a live-in-the-moment type of person, whether gloomy or grandiose at the moment. When he performed a homecoming show of sorts at the Metro last November with Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump, it was hard to tell how the crowd full of the headliner’s fans would react to the young rapper, even if Fresh had already toured coast-to-coast with Stump. But he didn’t appear worried when he hit the stage. Ripping through “Sofa King Cole,” calling himself “so fucking cold,” the crowd was visually lifted.

“This is the most love I’ve gotten, I swear to God,” he told the Metro between songs.

As Fresh continues to develop his sonics, his fanbase expands as well. During our interview he talks with equal enthusiasm about his work with NYC rhymer Action Bronson and SoCal rockers Good Charlotte.

“I do realize that my fans range from all different types,” he says. “Some of ‘em appreciate rap music, some of ‘em like urban rap, some of ‘em like when I sing so it’s just really trying to get people all of those things and all of the different types of music that I appreciate.”

It’s all a balancing act that this full-time rhymer thus far has proven possible – hard times or not.

Rockie Fresh released the Driving 88 mixtape at the end of January. Download for free at rockiefresh.com.

– Max Herman

If the Thirsty Whale could do it, why not? Durty Nellie’s in Palatine has slotted February 26th to reanimate a potential competitor: Haymakers. The Prospect Heights club, shuttered in 1984, will return for one night before rushing home in glass slippers. Coming from as far as California and Florida, members of some of the venue’s stalwart acts (Bitch, Dreamer, Hounds, Madfox, One Arm Bandit, Pezband Allstars, and Tantrum) will suit up once again and rock like it’s the Reagan era. Former IE Editor Guy Arnston co-masterminded the event with Kathy Powers-Hall, wife of former owner Chuck Hall. Far from a hangout for bygone local musicians, Haymakers also hosted Cheap Trick, Survivor, The Bangles, Shoes, The Kind, Sly Stone, Queensryche, and Twisted Sister. Visit the Facebook page for more info.

WWW.SMACKDOWN.COM

The opposition cheered as caustic, conservative attacks sullied the GOP’s own primary debates, but then the glove-dropping contagion afflicted the nominally liberal world of musicians. Veteran local rapper/actor (and White House honoree) Common kicked off, telling WGCI that the “soft” MCs attacked in his new track, “Sweet,” included sensitive singer/rapper Drake. The Canadian answered back by calling Common out on the Rick Ross side “Stay Schemin’” – despite earlier pledging, “Diss me and you’ll never hear a reply for it.” Not missing a beat, Common remixed the same track with his retort, saying Drake can’t get girls, um, excited, because he’s Canada Dry – and then encouraged people to print Canada Dry shirts. The weird thing is it’s reportedly a beef over the affections of tennis star Serena Williams, who could probably kick both their asses. (Fakeshoredrive posted this news about Drake after we went to press.)

– Steve Forstneger

IE: Was the hype for your debut thrilling or scary?
Alaina Moore: It was definitely more scary. Obviously, we appreciated it and were going to take the opportunity, but we didn’t know what we were doing. Our way of handling that was forcing things to stay as small as possible. We ended up saying “no” to lots of things: no producer, no management. We said “no” to support tours because we weren’t sure if we could tour for very long.

IE: So another force was pushing you along?
AM: This time the momentum behind us is more sustained and created by us, and we feel more in control. Anyone who, at some stage in their career, has been considered a buzz band understands it’s like riding a tidal wave. You have no say, it’s just happening. It’s really amazing, but you keep finding yourself with decisions that you don’t want. I remember the first time we got a publicist, they asked us about doing late [TV] shows and they could push for that, and we were like, “No. Not at all.” I shut it down immediately. “I do not want to be on TV – it sounds horrible.”

IE: Are you ready for your tag to be, “Patrick Carney produced their album; they’re the band the Black Keys guy is involved with.”
AM: It’s funny, maybe nihilistic, but I’d be relieved if people thought that than the dismissive stereotype of us as the wedding-couple-sailing band. [Tennis' first album was inspired by a boat trip.]

IE: What inspired Young And Old?
AM: I immersed myself in Todd Rundgren; I wanted to write things on piano. I listened to a lot of Elton John and Rundgren. Patrick [Riley, guitarist/husband] switched to playing baritone guitar instead of wall-of-sound surf guitar, so that brought out a lot of differences in songwriting.

IE: Rundgren’s one of those guys who I get why people enjoy him, but I can’t stand his music.
AM: [Laughs.] When I first started dating Patrick he played me Todd Rundgren and I totally hated it. Three-years later we were at someone’s house and Something/Anything was playing and I was like, what is this? And I ended up delving into his catalog.

IE: In what sense is the Tennis name a metaphor for the dynamic?
AM: Sometimes I see me and Patrick in those classic matches, where the competition is fierce but then they hug afterwards. But I cannot emphasize enough the complete, flippant lark [it was]. If we’d thought about it, we probably wouldn’t have picked it.

Tennis’ Young And Old arrives Valentine’s Day through Fat Possum. They play Lincoln Hall on February 26th. Q&A by Steve Forstneger.

When exploring the formidable list of Chicago’s blues divas, Deitra Farr’s name is always front and center. Versatile and energetic, her smooth and controlled voice tackles a range of genres from soul to gospel but it always remains grounded in the blues. Growing up on the South Side, it was clear that Farr was headed for a life on stage. Her youth was filled with exceptional situations that kept thrusting her into the spotlight.

“When I was 7, I went to see my uncle perform. There was a female lead singer and I told them, ‘When you get tired of her, give me a call,’” Farr recalls of her early start. “Everybody thought I was cute, but when I was 17, the girl quit the band. I was ready. I had my songs, I knew the top-40 hits.” She auditioned for her uncle’s R&B band, Central Power Station, and beat out 11 others for the job. They performed pop hits at local parties, but it was just the first step in her quick ascent up the music business ladder.

By the time she graduated high school, Farr was already set to record her first single. She was studying music at Loop College (now Harold Washington College) with noted music producer James Mack and one of her classmates was looking for a lead singer for his group, Mill Street Depo. Farr snagged the job and recorded a single, “You Won’t Support Me,” with the band on Platinum Records, which was Sylvia Robinson’s (of Sugar Hill Records fame) label. The recording become a Cashbox Top 100 R&B hit in 1976, supplying 18-year-old Farr with a smash record and two professional groups with which she regularly performed. It was all heady stuff for anyone – especially a teen – but she viewed it as simply part of her path. “Because of the way my life has been, I expect the unusual and I do the unusual,” she says. Unusual indeed. When she was growing up in Englewood, her biggest dream was playing the Grand Ballroom on 63rd. She never imagined that she would eventually play in 40 countries. Her next step was obtaining blues-club gigs.

At 22, she was working as a desk clerk at the U Of I and one of her friends dared her to get up and sing with Phil Guy, who was performing at the school. “They didn’t know I could; I got up and sang ‘Steel Away’ and Phil said, ‘You can really sing, you need to play with us.’” Farr played with Guy at the Checkerboard and Theresa’s, meeting Junior Wells and Buddy Guy. “I thought, maybe I can be a blues singer. I liked it. My dad had a big blues collection so it wasn’t foreign to me.” She quickly became absorbed in the scene and was amazed at the wealth of legendary blues people who formed the local scene in the ’80s. She played Kingston Mines, Blue Chicago, and Wise Fools Pub. “I was in awe that I could meet people on blues records,” she says. “These people were my heroes. I met Louis Myers, who was Little Walter’s sideman. People coming on the blues scene now, I feel sorry for them because it’s gone. They can only learn it on records.”

Farr grabbed the opportunity to learn from legendary blues icons and it served her well. She went down to play in Birmingham, Alabama with Howlin’ Wolf drummer Sam Lay in the early ’80s. The band was white except for Farr and Lay, but they played a black club. With Lay in the back on drums and Farr backstage, all the club’s patrons saw were white faces and they walked out. When Farr came out to sing, the club was empty except a lone figure at the bar.

“I went out and decided to do my show and I sang my heart out,” she remembers, “pretending it was a full house. I got off stage and saw somebody sitting at the bar and it’s Eddie Kendricks of The Temptations. This was one of my idols and he was the only one in the audience. The lesson is to do your show because you don’t know who is watching.”

The world is watching Farr now. In the ’90s, she performed as the lead singer of Mississippi Heat, touring and recording two CDs. “They were the brothers I never had,” she says. She left the group to focus on her solo career and produced her first solo outing, The Search Is Over (JSP), in 1997. That album showcased her rich vocals and the smooth blues that has become her trademark. She followed with Let It Go! in 2005, which reflected her soul and gospel influences.

“I’m not strictly blues, I also do soul,” Farr says. “I sing what I feel. I feel blues. I feel soul. That’s the best way I can express myself. I’m not shy about singing jazz. I sing gospel. I’m a music lover. The way I best express me is blues, soul, gospel.” As a songwriter, she stands out as one of the most evocative in contemporary blues. All of her work displays a strong narrative and well-defined emotions.

“I’m inspired by what I hear, what I’m going through, and what I read,” she says of her process. “Sometimes the music gets to me first. I’ll hear chords in my head. I write all of my music in my head. I go through periods where I don’t write anything because I just wasn’t inspired. You can’t force creativity. It’s either there or not there.”

Always multi-faceted in terms of creativity, Farr is currently working on her memoirs, two movies, as well as her monthly “Artist To Artist” column in Living Blues. She kicks off a South American tour this summer, so catch her while you can.

Apparing: 2/2 at Buddy Guy’s Legends (700 S. Wabash) in Chicago.

Harp master Sugar Blue will make beautiful music at his blues wedding on February 16th at Rosa’s, 3420 W. Armitage. The event will start at 9 p.m. with the band playing, including groom Sugar Blue and bride Ilaria.

– Rosalind Cummings-Yeates

Firing some early February shows across your bow before we launch the new issue: the next CHIRP “First Time” recital, Swearwords’ record release, Stolen Silver’s residency, and Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

Chicago Independent Radio Project (CHIRP) have a fresh “First Time” reading series lined up, this one called “First Record.” Miles Raymer (Chicago Reader), Whet Moser (Chicago Magazine), Shawn Campbell (CHIRP), Chuck Sudo (Chicagoist), and Sabrina Harper (Second City) will dig into their memories about the music they were first exposed to, hopefully to comedic effect. Then, a live band consisting of former Frisbie members Steve Frisbie, Liam Davis, and Gerald Dowd perform related songs in an acoustic setting without rehearsal. (Wednesday@Beat Kitchen.)

The birthplace of modern architecture. Twenty miles of sweeping lakefront vistas. Gritty, urban decay. Chicago has all these things, but what do local bands most incorporate into their imagery and press photos? The bridges that traverse the Chicago River downtown. Swearwords add their website to the scrolls, giving their peppy, modern-rock a handicap from the outset. The three, free tracks on their Ration The Joy EP are hard to resist however, pumping unself-conscious fun into the scraggy, headachey world of The Strokes and Longwave. (Thursday@Empty Bottle with Minor Characters.)

Appearances by the South African choir generally sell out, but this arrival comes on the heels of Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s collaboration compilation: Ladysmith Black Mambazo And Friends (Listen2). Including cuts from the album that introduced them to mainstream America (Paul Simon’s Graceland), the album spans a jawdropping variety from Bob Dylan covers with Dolly Parton, a gospel medley with Emmylou Harris, combinations with contemporaries like The SABC Choir, western institutions like The English Chamber Orchestra, and pure pop on a cover of Sam Cooke’s “Chain Gang” featuring Lou Rawls. (Friday@Old Town School Of Folk Music — two shows.)

Last year’s debut album opened with a deceptive opener for Stolen Silver. As anyone who ventured past the opening track will attest, the indie R&B of “Anticipation” leads not into a TV On The Radio headspace, but oaken harmonies to fit somewhere between Fleet Foxes and Seryn. Occupying the monthly “Practice Space,” the former Down The Line kleptocrats – singer Dan Myers also used to play with Gary Sinise’s Lt. Dan Band – will be working over new material as well as the 10 songs on their debut. You can call them the local chapter of Bon Iver-induced soft-rock revival. (Mondays@Schubas in February.)

– Steve Forstneger

Ronald McDonald House is hosting a youth-choir benefit this weekend, in order to raise funds for a new facility in Streeterville. The charity’s Chicagoland & Northwest Indiana chapter has organized the event at Harris Theater.

Voices Of The Future assembles a number of kids’ ensembles: Walt Whitman & The Soul Children Of Chicago, All City High School Choir, The Kenwood Academy Concert Choir, the Loyola Academy Honors Chamber Singers, Midwest Young Artists, Kelly High School Cantantes, Franklin Fine Arts Academy Choir, and, new this year, the Lincoln Park High School Chamber Singers. In honor of The Beatles’ 50th anniversary, each group will sing a Fab tune.

Proceeds from donations will go toward the construction — already underway — of a new Ronald McDonald House next to the new Lurie’s Children Hospital (formerly named Children’s Memorial) at 225 W. Chicago Ave. The concert begins at 2 p.m. (Sunday@Harris Theater in Millennium Park.)

When Cass McCombs lived in Chicago, he made himself difficult to find; his former publicist once meekly offered an e-mail interview to IE if McCombs could be tracked down before deadline. His first of two albums last year, Wit’s End (Domino) doesn’t behave as the work of a recluse. In fact, it has everything in common with Harry Nilsson’s non-Lennon trials except for where to stick the coconut. Combine your electric piano with terms like lonely, buried alive, stain, cave, shadow . . . a beautiful bummer. It often teeters on the brink of sadsack moaning, which can’t be side of the followup. Humor Risk is more inline with the eclectic, roaming indie songcrafter of yore. We say -crafter not -writer, because McCombs has always been as involved in sonics, which made the confessional tones of Wit’s End the catalog anomaly. (Sunday@Lincoln Hall with Frank Fairfield.)

It’s hard to imagine there being another Bruce Springsteen. Like Jason Anderson, Adam Acuragi’s going to try. Like a fire that consumes all before it (Thirty Tigers) wants your feet on your seat, or at least imagining Acuragi in a setting that has rows and rows of seats. It’s a rousing, anthemic affair with a backdrop of “let’s celebrate how life can suck.” (Monday@Empty Bottle with The Pear Traps and Will Phalen.)

– Steve Forstneger

When an artist stages a farewell tour, it’s generally just a bluff to sell more tickets and they wind up coming through town for an endless parade of victory laps. (Cher and the Eagles come to mind.) But in the case of Glen Campbell, this really is his last hurrah, due to a recent diagnosis with Alzheimer’s disease that will force him to retire from the road and recording studio.

Even with the bittersweet premise behind his first of two nights at the Rialto Square Theatre in Joliet (where he returns on Friday), Campbell went out with a bang thanks to a slew of country to pop crossovers and tunes from the new Ghost On The Canvas (Surfdog). Much like Johnny Cash in his golden years, the collection takes on a decidedly introspective nature, but as the 75-year-old assured the near-capacity crowd, he’s maintaining a positive attitude.

Despite admitting mild memory loss in recent interviews and having a teleprompter by his feet in case of emergencies, Campbell was coherent and personable throughout 75 short but sweet minutes, sounding particularly spry on the familiar opener “Gentle On My Mind” and his subsequent mining through 50-plus years of material. No matter how many times they’re told, Jimmy Webb narratives like “Galveston” (which he almost started a second time before quickly steering back on course) and “By The Time I Get To Phoenix” and are still relatable tales of romantic yearning, though Campbell just as quickly turned the tides towards his cowboy side come “True Grit.”

The evening also unveiled glimpses of the veteran as a family man with his daughter Ashley backing him on banjo and keys, alongside his sons Shannon on guitar and Cal on drums (all of whom also served in the stellar opening act Instant People, a harmony-heavy, Southern-tinted indie-pop outfit). Aside from their obvious chemistry, a banjo/guitar duel between Ashley and her pop was most impressive, especially considering no teleprompter could ever deliver the fiery licks the elder Campbell effortlessly commanded. The communal feeling also paved the way for the gospel-infused current cuts like “It’s Your Amazing Grace” and “Ghost On The Canvas,” two primary examples of Campbell’s vitality and refusal to go down without swinging.

A home stretch of his most celebrated cuts (“Wichita Lineman,” “Rhinestone Cowboy,” “Southern Nights”) hinted at the musical legacy he’ll leave behind, while the new “A Better Place” suggested Campbell’s more concerned about the mark he’ll make as a human being. If this swansong show was any indication, he has nothing to worry about in either category thanks to a cherished catalog and the ability to courageously thrive in the face of adversity.

– Andy Argyrakis

Would, say, Lollapalooza be more enjoyable if it were scattered over a couple weekends? Obviously, tearing down and rebuilding the stages/leaving Grant Park blocked would be bad. But we like how Chicago Bluegrass & Blues takes a break and restarts.

This weekend comes the finale, or part two, or a completely separate event in this winter’s CBB12, and hoes down at an entirely different venue than last week’s Auditorium Theatre, and we still don’t quite understand why “blues” is in the fest title. Maybe Chicago Bluegrass & Americana sounds too narrow or whitebread. Headliners Drive-By Truckers play self-aware Southern rock, though their latest album (Go-Go Boots on ATO) finds them celebrating their inner session musicians and taking it easy on the body count. Reliable, local folk rockers Joe Pug, Bailiff, Van Ghost, Jaik Willis, The Shams Band, Jon Drake & The Shakes, Ben Ripani Music Co., The Future Laureates, Band Called Catch, Michele McGuire, and Paper Thick Walls round out the bill. Maybe Jon Spencer consulted on the lineup (go to 2:13). What’s in a festival name anyway? It’s not like Pitchfork books rural bands.(Saturday@Congress.)

If, two days after CBB, you still can’t shake the feeling, Charlie Parr might show you salvation. Parr’s latest album, Keep Your Hands On The Plow, collects a number of gospel standards and renders them on a drought-plagued prairie at dusk. The Minnesotan’s interpretations aim for grim, fire-and-brimstone tones, but with a distance that suggests Parr doesn’t subscribe to the content. Even the hallowing capabilities of Low guests Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk create a gray area where Parr’s detachment is either totally compelling or a dry turnoff. The battle for the soul should be filled with such ambivalence. (Monday@Reggies with Kent Rose and Me & The Devil.)

– Steve Forstneger

There’s a benefit/memorial show for Curtis “2C” Canino on the 28th at Bottom lounge. Canino was in Lygate and Death By Design, and had worked at Exit and other chicago venues.

– IE

Sometimes a subtle shift is all a band needs to find rejuvenation. Los Campesinos haven’t pulled a Kid A or even an OK Computer, but they’ve pulled enough to get out of a rut. They’re in town, as are Cheyenne Marie Mize and David Nail.

On 2010’s Romance Is Boring, the Welsh septet missed the target in an attempt to fire their bratty indie-punk into the heart of their more sincere expressions. Hello Sadness (Arts & Crafts) takes more or less the same approach, but with less haste and more of a clear sense of who they want to be. Almost unrecognizable from the coattail-Art Brut’ers who spun “You! Me! Dancing!”, Sadness feels genuine, as if the personal and creative struggles that emerged in Romance’s aftermath were the genesis for some actual examination. “You! Me! Dancing!” fans needn’t be totally worried, as the Campesinos can still work up an over-caffeinated fervor, but they’re a better veteran band than they were an album ago. (Friday@Metro with Parenthetical Girls.)

Some day, Cheyenne Marie Mize is going to look at her album titles and wonder what-if. The We Don’t Need (Yep Roc) EP follows the similarly truncated Before Lately, both suggesting a convoluted or self-serious singer/songwriter. Mize’s determination in her craft, shouldn’t be questioned either way. For a short set, We Don’t Need prismatically combines and refracts the colors that constitute her work. “Wishing Well” is the disco ball, combining her earthy energy, ad hoc percussion, and organic thrust that gets scattered through the haunted, less accessible “Call Me Beautiful” and the buoyant piano-pop of “Going Under.” If only the words that bound them weren’t so inscrutable. (Wednesday@Schubas with Secret Colours.)

If you had David Nail’s studio band, you’d play forever, too. With the power to turn even Nail’s slightest, pop-rock material into modern-country gold, it’s no wonder the average track on his sophomore label outing, The Sound Of A Million Dreams (MCA Nashville), runs about 90 seconds too long. A discordant, yet gritty moan greets opener “Grandpa’s Farm,” while “I Thought You Knew” harkens subconsciously to Def Leppard’s Hysteria without losing the plot. Nail, who nails the sweeping melody to “Let It Rain,” workmanly digs through country boilerplate, but never really has anything to say. Even the potentially devastating “Half Mile Hill” – about a boy watching daddy walk away – reads like it could have been written by anyone with a mild understanding of child psychology. You’d let the band play, too. (Thursday@Joe’s On Weed.)

– Steve Forstneger

Converse has been canvassing the land for its new music series, “Rubber Meets The Road,” which follows independent bands on tour. The first episode features local fellows Yawn, who trek to Brooklyn for the shoe manufacturer’s Rubber Tracks recording studio. Click on!

Part one was posted earlier, and the second of three is online now!

If it seems like “Mamma Mia!” tours through Chicago almost every year, that’s because it usually does, if only for Abba’s ongoing popularity and its single-stacked soundtrack. At this stage of its shelf-life, the musical created by original band members Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus was witnessed by more than 50-million people around the world and continues running on both Broadway and London’s West End.

Besides its 1999 debut, the show’s seen several surges, especially following 2008’s film adaptation (starring Meryl Streep, Colin Firth, Pierce Brosnan, Amanda Seyfried, Christine Baranski, and Julie Walters) and in 2010 after Abba was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. Though there’s a story to be told (a girl who’s trying to find her father in advance of getting married), the real reason fans keep flocking are the songs themselves.

After all, who can resist singing along to “Lay All Your Love On Me,” “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!,” “S.O.S.,” and “Take A Chance On Me,” which are all weaved seamlessly into the humorous and sometimes touching tale. And here’s a tip for first time theatergoers: Don’t leave after the first curtain call because an encore segment ensures a mini tribute concert featuring a few reprises and favorites that didn’t fit in the storyline. “Dancing Queen” anyone? (Tuesday, January 24-Sunday, January 29@Oriental Theatre www.broadwayinchicago.com)

– Andy Argyrakis

CBGB in New York is a tourist attraction now. Never mind that it became a punk club. Chicago Bluegrass & Blues Festival might not be a haven for fundamentalists and zealots, but the first night, this Saturday, makes a case for the styles’ futures.

With a lineup featuring The Del McCoury Band with David Grisman, The Bluegrass Ball featuring The Travelin’ McCourys, Bill Nershi of String Cheese Incident with Jeff Austin of Yonder Mountain String Band, Joe Purdy, The Giving Tree Band, Henhouse Prowlers, and Majors Junction, you’re out of your element if you expect something akin to Joe’s On Weed or the North Halsted blues venues. The Auditorium Theatre’s pristine acoustics might be an odd match for music that rose up from the dirt, but it’s all the better to hear a madcap innovator like Grisman plying his trade.

Next Saturday, the 28th, the party moves to Congress Theatre with a 5 p.m. start. Drive-By Truckers headline, with Dawes and Joe Pug in tow.

– Steve Forstneger

Golden Globes: over. Mitt Romney: inevitable. Packers: safely packed away (though surely God won’t give Eli a second title, right?). Lana Del Rey: crashed and burned. Guess it’s Man Is Man, Martin Sexton, or Machine Head.

Husband-and-wife-duo Puerto Muerto existed on the margins of Chicago rock for a decade (which is why we didn’t have a problem adding them Shelby Lynne-like to our 10 local artists to watch for 2010), but despite continually keeping the Bottle and Hideout in their thrall never quite established themselves in the larger conversation. For whatever reason, Christa Meyer’s transformation into Man Is Man seems poised to change that. Without retreating from PM’s haunting aesthetic or showing any deviation from her musical evolution, Those Birds Will Eat Us feels more direct and personal. At first, that seems a foolish declaration, because PM’s lyrics always had a fly-on-the-wall element for the married couple producing them. Meyer’s gaze is eerily fixed as she moans “I love you” again and again, while cabernet-swilling Nick Cave runs through “Love Leaves Us.” There’s a titular fixation with animals — doves, horses, starlings, bears — but it’s Meyers soul that’s restive through a string of torch songs; her primal urges have been shown death’s door. (Thursday@Hideout with Angela James.)

The general ineffectiveness of music journalism and critics glares most when some apocalypse-harbinging sham scales the charts in defiance of the ink spilled against them. But there’s also a quieter, more dispiriting quandary posed by the likes of Martin Sexton. The Boston-based singer/songwriter tours consistently and fills midsize venues, but when you Google him, the most common hits are the varying pages of his own site. Nothing recent from Rolling Stone, Spin, Pitchfork, the L.A. Times, Boston Herald, New Yorker, Time Out . . . just a Pop Matters review and a smattering of praise from individual, aspiring bloggers. His soulful, acoustic pop is nothing new, for one, and though there’s the occasional political foray his sentimentality (the new Fall Like Rain EP includes both a cover of “For What It’s Worth” and a happy-sixth-anniversary ode to his wife) rules the day. So what gives? People just like him. Occasionally, the press is on the outside looking in. (Friday@Park West with Bhi Bhiman.)

Grunge rock absorbs a lot of blame for what happened to metal’s popularity in the ’90s, though honestly nu-metal did more internal damage. Gliding through trends and crashes, Machine Head come to town celebrating their 20th anniversary this year. Overshadowed in the beginning commercially by Pantera, Sepultura, and Korn, and in the underground by black metal’s swift, menacing rise, Machine Head dropped an album roughly every 30 months and only lost the plot once, in 1999. Their failure to issue an unimpeachable masterpiece will always blot the Oaklanders’ record, but without fanfare, last year’s Unto The Locust (Roadrunner) built another brick layer around their formidable reputation. (Sunday@House Of Blues with Suicide Silence and Darkest Hour.)

– Steve Forstneger

You may have noticed that we skip coverage of some pretty big-time releases each month. Sometimes, that’s because the artists hold on to music until the last second, at which point we’ve already planned the next issue. But not this time, boyo! Common, Pistol Annies, and Elvis himself merit mention.

Common has always been at the vanguard of conscious rap and, being on the edge he’s made some iffy decisions like Electric Circus. Universal Mind Control? His club-rat bid was downright lobotomous. While history has shown that the Chicago-bred rapper often over-corrects a folly like a hydroplaning, fishtailing motorist, The Dreamer/The Believer isn’t a full-throated call to his more reflective self. True, it reunites him with producer No ID, and the opening track’s coda features a spoken-word piece by none other than Maya Angelou. But the true reveal is the guest on the ensuing cut, “Ghetto Dreams,” which features the equally mercurial Nas. More tellingly, the song’s first verse — which directly follows Angelou’s call to consciousness — jerks itself to a girl who looks as good as she cooks. As a collection, Dreamer/Believer rivals Be for side-for-side bangers, and No ID takes a star turn with a masterful mesh of his ’90s and ’00s selves. Common still shows bald spots that tempted Maxim-owned Blender into naming him one of the worst lyricists of all time (with his acting career on the side, “The Bitch In Yoo” is always on the margins of his “toughest” rhymes), but better he be himself than something he’s not.

When former editor Michael C. Harris undressed Lydia Loveless‘ debut LP, we found ourselves nodding in agreement. So how could Pistol Annies possibly stand up? For one — like Danzig vs. all those Satanic metal types — the Annies seem to be in on the joke. Hell On Heels, despite its awful cover image, zips through 10 tracks while using country as an idiom and a setup, and actually turns its attempts at authenticity to elucidate failures (not toughness). Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe, and Angaleena Presley preen and pose, but with a sympathy for their archetypes. “Takin’ Pills” doesn’t toast to oblivion the same way the title track sees through its own posturing. Lambert, as Arsenio Orteza writes in our January issue, shows less inhibition in this context, which either helps or is helped by her colleagues.

Elvis Presley’s 75th birthday — two years ago — unleashed an unfocused bleeding of his catalog, but few people could argue the sense behind reissuing Elvis Country. With a rollicking rendition of “I’m 10,000 Years Old” segueing the cuts like a chopped commercial, it drags post-comeback King back to his roots, and not without fanfare. “Country” in the ’70s sure as hell meant something different in the ’50s, but few could have predicted that opener “Snowbird” would have its melody doubled on sitar. (Let that sink in, for a moment.) The big single, “Funny How Time Slips Away,” still marks as one of his great unheralded vocal performances, while gospel tries like “I Washed My Hands In The Muddy Water” and the stitched “10,000″ version find his religious attempts at their zenith. Filling space, the accompanying Love Letters From Elvis is a slight letdown — a campy reminder that ’60s Elvis was just a couple years away — but, in a chronological sense, he would never be this good again.

– Steve Forstneger

As a number of enthusiasts have pointed out, there are currently more pop-music genres than there are artists to occupy them. Whether such a sneering jab is true, the slotting of acts into ready-made categories has always been a vice of critics and fans.

The practice of labeling often gets dismissed as laziness, but the feverish production of new phyla seems to stem more from over-active minds than the other way around. Cross that industriousness with the inexhaustible supply of fresh sounds online, and it’s no wonder the cup is overflowing.

The result, however, has been the opposite of intent: there are so many alleged styles that nobody can agree on what each signifies, and they often come about with little regard for whether an existing tag suffices. (Or if – as in the case of mumblecore and crabcore – we’re even discussing music.) The “-core” suffix gets applied so liberally, you’d think the hacks who attach “-gate” to news scandals are behind it. The English-bred field of “drum and bass,” which sprang out of ’90s rave culture, has nearly two-dozen permutations (darkstep, breakcore, techstep, darkcore . . .) most of which appear designed to only appease the organizational demands of beats-per-minute Talmuds.

With local artists as a prism, we’re going to try and help you determine which sounds correspond to which circles on your Scantron sheet. In a cosmopolitan metropolis like Chicago, you never know if the next blues or house will spring from dubstep. Or drumstep. Or moombahton. Or moombahcore.

United States Black Metal (USBM)

While black metal itself is unfamiliar to most, the USBM delineation is hardly perfunctory. The mother genre arose out of Scandinavia with deceptively conservative architecture and an equally dogmatic culture (which is ironic, because it’s rooted in opposition to organized religion). Black metal is frequently written and recorded by individuals in solitude, by melding violent blast beats (percussive cannonades akin to machine-gun fire), low-fidelity recording techniques, a raspy, nihilistic Cobra Commander-esque vocal, and punishing, tremolo-picked guitar arrangements. A generation of Americans, however, have abused the genre for their own nefarious means. While many practice traditional black metal (and spend their days crafting perfectly indecipherable logos), others surgically dissect it, taking only what they need.

Chicago is perhaps the best place to start, with Nachtmystium (championed by “Caught In A Mosh” columnist Trevor Fisher) and some bands you’d only think of as tangentially heavy metal – though tangential seems to be the nature of USBM. Because for as important it is to note USBM’s similarities to and differences with regular black metal, it’s also a neutral identity. Nachtmystium sound no more like Liturgy than Jimi Hendrix sounds like Crosby, Stills & Nash. The former, fronted by Blake Judd, began as a trad outfit and who began splashing their core influences with classic metal signatures and even modern rock. (Key track: “Addicts.”) Locrian involve so much of the no-wave noise rock pioneered by Glenn Branca that, with a couple tweaks, they could almost be Sonic Youth. Utilizing chants, earthy percussion, and things that go bump in the night, they’ve become the sonic equivalent of a terrifying horror film that never shows you the gore. (Key track: “At Night’s End.”)

Dubstep

Typically an electronic-music movement makes its way through England and Europe before winding up in stateside pop songs and hip-hop samples. Dubstep emerged about a dozen years ago in London, from the mingling pools of drum and bass, grime (a mercurial strain of hip-hop), 2step, and dub reggae. Its American manifestation has shown up at the neo-raves of DJs like Skrillex, who’ve been slammed by purists for creating “brostep”: a frat-boy friendly bastardization. Mostly instrumental (save when samples have vocals), dubstep typically relies on a half-step rhythm and menacing bassline filled in by some or all of synth figures, syncopation, and samples. The modern/commercial tracks all lead to what’s known as the drop. “Filthy” drops are akin to bass solos conducted by malfunctioning automobile factories. Customized dance moves resemble breakdancing seizures, and remixes typically add teeth to the most innocent of tracks (Adele, Ellie Goulding). While Chicago has no one on the level of Skrillex or Bassnectar, DJs Chris Widman and Phaded (1/29 at Reggies) hold down regularly at Smart Bar, while Nameloc was among those at the Lava Lounge beginnings and who regularly throws down at Subterranean. (Key track: Nameloc “Ever After.”)

Juke

Juke juke juke juke juke. You won’t have trouble finding local examples of juke hip-hop, because juke is a Chicago idiom. Like go-go to D.C. or hyphy to Oakland, juke represents a regional culture that hasn’t really traveled outside the area. An offshoot of ghetto house, minimalist – and we mean minimalist – beats move at a breakneck pace to push dancers to the limit. The dancing (“footwork”) is more essential to juke than breakdancing was to early hip-hop, and it rivals dubstep moves in mind-bending ingenuity. You’re more likely to find representative CDs sold from of a car trunk than a Best Buy, with the more mainstream artists being Chrissy Murderbot, Zebo, Flosstradamus, and Kid Sister (Key track: “Luuk Out Girl“). But if you find yourself in a South Side fix and need to flash some cred to save your neck, you can always ask anybody if they have any DJ Rashad, Gant-Man, Traxman, DJ Client, Dude’n Nem, Ghetto Division, or Starfoxxx. (Key track: DJ Rashad ft. Gant-Man “Juke Dat.”)

Moombahton

The term “moombahton” sounds far more international than the Hispanic high-school where it was born. Invented when a DJ (Nadastrom’s Dave Nada) turned up for a dance with only techno, and deliberately modulated it to sound like reggaeton (the first song he tried was called “Moombah“), the style’s vocabulary has exploded in ways that variably amp or downplay the ethnic aspects. Chicago already has top men working on it – Top. Men. – with fierce parties hosted by Willy Joy (1/13 with Nadastrom at Metro) or Rampage & Nader, while Stratus – who also deals in dubstep – released the addictive cut, “Jasper’s Theme.”

Witch House

Nothing announces an arrival like a good backlash, and maybe all you need to know about witch house is that there’s an arbitrary band-name generator online: it spits out ideas with each capital A replaced by a triangle. The second thing is the deceptive use of the word “house,” which doesn’t necessarily signify the dance-music form. The best way we can describe it is ineffably slow and languid late-’80s goth-pop for the American Apparel generation. Vocals are purposefully drowned out and not particularly melodic, which lead to an impression of hauntedness. Pitchfork alleges that early, ambient dubstep and Swedish electro band The Knife were key influences, though witch house’s burgeoning star, Charli XCX, shatters the buried-voice rule and sounds like a synthed-out Siouxsie & The Banshees. With a scene that’s almost purely Internet-based, locating practicing local outfits is difficult. Local booking agents recommended Magicks, the nom de plume of a Reggies employee whose latest upload, “Catalyst,” tells you everything and nothing about witch house, because it might be considered . . . (Magicks: 1/19 at Reggies with Rituals)

Chillwave

Chillwave also goes by glo-fi, though the only people still calling it that are also calling witch house “drag.” The difference between the two depends on how you grade the amount of light you feel. The – semi-dismissive – shorthand on chillwave is “electronic vacation music,” if you believe vacationing to be sitting on a warm beach and letting the wind sift through your hair. (Male-pattern baldness need not apply.) Chillwave also prefers strong vocal lines, though in the eyes of Chicago’s Glitter Bones, they don’t have to be high in the mix. Houses (Key track: “Soak It Up“) amiably fit the holiday description, while Young Man (Key track: “Up So Fast“) – releasing another album on French Kiss this winter – drifts into and out of Animal Collective/Beach Boys space.

Noise pop

Not new by any stretch, noise pop has shown a spectacular ability to regenerate and mutate, recently adding middling success to its repertoire. As distinguished from full-assault, Boredoms-esque noise rock, noise pop’s game is to hide the melody. The bigger national bands like Animal Collective and No Age get prominent slots at major festivals, washing their tunefulness in waves of distortion and electronics that are less ferocious than textural. Provocation remains integral, but even local outfits like Yawn have managed to sculpt bracing psychedelia into something user-friendly. Bigcolour kicked off with sizzling, chillwave compositions but have since morphed into a garage-rock hybrid that trembles while trying to focus. But if it’s discomfort you seek, Gypsyblood’s Cold In The Guestway (Sargent House) doesn’t sound at all out of place on a label with serial Japanese noise terrorists Boris – as if when they were kids they put saw blades in their bicycle spokes.

Lazer Bass

Such is the yen for artists to feel insulated from traditional scenes, MC Zulu told the Chicago Reader he’d rather not live where there are large Afro-Caribbean communities. While Toronto and Queens teem with competitors, Zulu – born in Panama to a military family – has few peers in Chicago’s field of lazer-bass saplings. (Other descriptors include “future blap” and “turbo crunk.”) The sci-fi-like genre couldn’t be more of a melting pot if it tried, combining dancehall MCs, clunky hip-hop, hyperdrive techno, bossa nova, and whatever else you got. French-Canadian DJ Ghislain Poirier initially announced the “movement” to be stillborn, that it was only a small circle of people who were fiddling with the same sounds. Central to it – as for dubstep, moombahton, etc. – are deep, industrial-grade basslines that are frequently doubled in octaves above and below, plus the odd conflicting bass pattern. Zulu, quasi-Caribbean by birth, seems primed to overtake it. (Key track: “Call Red Alert.”)

Genre Unto Themselves

We could really run with this forever. Besides frequent citations of “post-chillwave” and well-populated but sufficiently underground categories like glitch-hop or crust punk, we’ve come across purple sound, acid crunk . . . it’s overwhelming. But one of the biggest square pegs we’ve found among Chicago-based musicians have already been put on the shoulders of an unlikely source: Victory Records. The punk label’s roster, which seems to aggressively recycle the same hard-edged tones, dug up Victorian Halls and no one knows what to do with them other than blast them for being Blood Brothers clones with high-tech dance beats. It’s a fair argument, though clearly the sound didn’t get the BBs anywhere – something else must be afoot. Dance punk, so myopically rooted in Gang Of Four since forever, needs an exit strategy. Even if that means Auto-Tune. Victorian Halls might not find the door, but with some occasionally embarrassing and thrilling solutions, they’re doing quite a bit more than fumbling through their keys. (1/27 at Double Door)

And if you only seek a pure, guitar-pop rush, there’s always Clip Art. They’ll be on display at Schubas every Monday (beginning the 9th) in January, and spiritually following Shoes and The Redwalls – or, if you like to get grandiose, Badfinger and Big Star. Their immediate antecedents, The Smith Westerns, headline Metro on February 3rd.?

Winter is always the hardest season for music lovers in Chicago because so few bands hit the road. And who can blame them? After all, the below-freezing temperatures, blustery snow, and icy roads are enough to make even the proudest native wish they were somewhere south, while tourist traffic is slim, especially since cash is short after the holidays.

Thankfully though, there is one relatively recent development in the indie-rock scene that’s giving faithful a much needed new-year fix. Enter Tomorrow Never Knows, a festival spanning January 11th to 15th, that’s spread across Schubas, Lincoln Hall, Metro, Smart Bar, and Hideout, bringing a mix of national and local bands, plus a handful of DJs and standup comics.

“It started in 2005, essentially out of Jeremiah Wallace from Paper Airplane Pilots, who worked here [at Schubas], looking to find support for a record-release show,” recalls Matt Rucins, talent buyer and promoter for both Lincoln Hall and Schubas. “We figured it would be best to make it two nights of local bands and – by naming it – it would be easier to promote. It went well, so the next year we stuck to local bands, but added a third night and the idea stuck. Then we started introducing regional bands and wound up with five days at Schubas. We continue expanding a little bit each year and wound up adding Lincoln Hall. We’ve always been close with Metro and last year we brought them on board for a couple of nights. This year we wanted to add another venue, but went to the smaller end with the Hideout, where comedy will be a nice addition to the room.”

Though acts continue to be added, confirmed artists at press time included headliners The Walkmen (performing a 10th-anniversary concert), along with Grouplove, Glass Candy, Chromatics, Theophilus London, Two Gallants, Tycho, Active Child, and Chairlift (above). Of course, there’s also a slew of even less familiar faces, but Rucins recommends showing up early because chances are one of the future’s most beloved bands could emerge from the event.

“Some of the stuff you might not be aware of unless you do some research, but if you know and like the headliner, you’re probably going to be fairly happy with who goes on before them,” he confirms. “Bon Iver did his first show in Chicago as part of Tomorrow Never Knows and now you have to pay $30 to see him play at Chicago Theatre or UIC Pavilion. We’ve also had Tapes ‘N Tapes, Dr. Dog, Handsome Furs, The Helio Sequence, Atlas Sound, Freelance Whales, Maps & Atlases, White Rabbits, and The Redwalls, to name a few.”

Given the event’s Chicago roots, it’s understandable for prospective attendees to draw a mental parallel to Lollapalooza or Pitchfork Music Festival, but Rucins likens it loosely to South By Southwest in Austin or CMJ Music Marathon in New York. “I think this is for pretty serious music fans,” he continues. “Pavement’s not headlining and you’ve got to come out in the depths of winter in Chicago to see it. It also takes more effort from you and it’s not all one-stop shopping. We provide a trolley to all venues, but there are also buses, trains, and cabs. That makes it more along the lines of CMJ and South By Southwest, but it’s much, much smaller and it’s not a music conference. We don’t have panels and I don’t envision us going that route, but we do hope to keep up a diverse lineup and continuing partnering with other venues.”

Perhaps the smartest planning angle of the entire event is the immense amount of attention it and the participating bands receive, if only for the lack of competition. Even though TNK is a shoe-in to saturate the blogosphere and print papers, all of the attention is certainly warranted since so many new musical discoveries are ripe for the picking.

“When we started this, we didn’t sit down and say, ‘Let’s start a music fest in January’; it’s more organic than that,” promises Rucins. “There’s not a whole lot going in live music or much else really, so we quickly found out the coverage of it between press, blogs, and word-of-mouth was pretty all encompassing. Having it a part of the Martin Luther King Jr. weekend buys us a little extra energy, and it gives Chicago music fans something to look forward to in the middle of winter.”

Bands to watch

The Walkmen
Formed from the ashes of late-’90s buzz band Jonathan Fire Eater, The Walkmen not only survived the garage-rock boom of a decade ago, but are surging. Though their biggest commercial achievement remains the arena-friendly “The Rat,” a romantic flair and widescreen arrangements keep them fresh.

Active Child
Frontman Pat Grossi could probably give you the mathematical and theoretical breakdown for why his vocal arrangements drop peoples’ jaws open. He doesn’t hide his skill or training, and filled You Are All I See (Vagrant) with influences that range from Jeff Buckley and Owen Pallett to Antony & The Johnsons and Baby Dee. He offsets his classical composure with the pent-up, minimal R&B that built James Blake a house, but streaks that quad wearing a Petruccio mask.

Chairlift
One of those Apple television-ad bands, Chairlift’s 2008 debut didn’t always work but came from so many directions that the possibilities on the folluwup are manifold. They’ve released two singles from their forthcoming Columbia debut, Something, and both “Met Before” and “Sidewalk Safari” reveal a more assured, focused band – now a duo – without losing an ounce of enthusiasm.

Class Actress
Elizabeth Harper started as an earnest singer/songwriter, and now seems to prefer mugging for photo shoots. Class Actress’ effortlessly sexy, glittery synth-pop meets somewhere between The Knife and Goldfrapp, and can be both teasingly girly and relentlessly powerful. Rapproacher (Carpark) never goes anywhere without its makeup on, even if it’s tellingly smeared.

Dom
Coming seemingly out of nowhere, Dom’s decidedly lo-fi, fuzzy, surfy-psychy, synthy, reverb-heavy-just-out-of-the-garage rock has been building buzz since it first started circulating on cassette. The band deliver solid hooks, with riffs recalling “La Bamba,” “Get Off My Cloud,” and “China Girl” – or, in short, touching all of pop/rock’s historic high points.

Plants & Animals
Plants & Animals sound like the work of a theater company. Seeking more power from their trio, the band stack songs with brass, clarinet, flute, and choir. A big choir. Evoking Polyphonic Spree, Beta Band, and Head Of Femur, they alternate between a pensive romanticism, desperate and sultry R&B, shy folk, and glam Bowie without seeming out of their element.

Grouplove
If ever a song were sole justification for Lollapalooza to invite a band, “Colours” is it. A flailing, acoustic thumper with stuttered verses and adlibbed harmonies, the track frantically ticks all the boxes on the summer-anthem checklist (“Things are not thaaaaaaaaaaat bad”).

Herman Dune
This band’s approach to songwriting might cause some to stick them with the dreaded “quirky” tag, an effect most likely from David-Ivar Herman Dune’s conversational lyrics. But slowly, you join the Tell Me Something I Don’t Know EP’s discourse and find yourself one with the geeks.

Willis Earl Beal
This reclusive West Side artist will probably spark a number of uncomfortable conversations this year. Acousmatic Sorcery, due in late March via XL, might strike you as gut-wrenching gospel/blues of the Fire In My Bones order, Wesley Willis-level exploitation, or pure minstrelsy. Moments of unbridled, soulful majesty are broken by passages of utter inscrutability, making for an exhausting yet rewarding listen.

Cloudbirds and Carter Tanton
Familiarity (and clouds) strikes twice on the 12th at Schubas. Cloudbirds are 3/4 of Kinks-bred local boys The M’s, who’ve transformed into a gentle, hymnlike acoustic-harmonies trio. Their self-titled debut can be had for free here. Tanton used to travel the globe as Tulsa, but ushered a shimmering version of his echoing Americana into Freeclouds, which was released last fall on Western Vinyl.

Nadastrom and Willy Joy
The term “moombahton” sounds far more international than the Hispanic high-school where it was born. Invented when a DJ (Nadastrom’s Dave Nada) turned up for a dance with only techno, and deliberately modulated it to sound like reggaeton. (The first song he tried was called “Moombah.“) The style’s vocabulary has exploded in ways that variably amp or downplay the ethnic aspects. Chicago already has top men working on it – Top. Men. – with fierce parties hosted by Willy Joy.

Tycho
Scott Hansen knows that his graphic-design job and music gig are deeply intertwined, but he’s given them separate names (ISO50 and Tycho) anyway. He embraces the chillwave aesthetic – waking up on the beach – in both, though his latest outing, Dive (Ghostly International), will get you more in the mood than staring at sun-bleached visuals (on a cold January day in Chicago) ever would.

Poliça
It’s always a good thing when the psychedelic, Animal Collective paradigm gets stretched into something less recognizable. There are far too many artists who orbit too closely. Poliça, an offshoot of Gayngs, manage the swirling effect but come at it with the mindset of underground R&B producers. Channy Leaneagh’s fluttering, faux-Auto-Tuned vocals on next month’s Give You The Ghost recall James Blake with a heartbeat, and her pulse gets a boost from Ryan Olson’s beats — and he’s not afraid to rock out if he has to.

Caveman
On its debut (head-scratchingly named after an ’80s-era middling bad guy WWE wrestler?), current Brooklyn-based five-piece band o’ month Caveman serve up high-fretted, whooshly keyboarded ethereal indie pop with an electro/ambient edge, which serves as perfect backdrop tight harmonic vocals that all members appear to contribute. Think jangly pop without the jangle from Autechre backing Enya singing in English and you get the idea. On cuts like “Old Friend” and “Thankful” it can get irresistibly compelling that one keeps returning to.

Hospitality
That giant swoosh you just heard was a premature donning of corduroys by Belle & Sebastian nation upon hearing the opening tones of Hospitality’s forthcoming Merge debut. A (merciful) red-herring if there ever was, the New York-based trio can surely deal in wistful twee as well as any Glaswegian waif in a cardigan, but it’s Amber Papini’s unexpected sass on tracks like “Friends Of Friends” and “The Right Profession” that move the record along.

Canon Blue
If you’re the type of person who enjoys Mutemath, you’ll probably not be caught lurking around TNK this week. Everyone else will need to make this set a priority, because the next time multi-instrumentalist Daniel James and co. come through, it’ll be opening for the keyboard-smashing cabal. Canon’s Rumspringa opts for brightly popping classical-related fills, samples, and loops, giving the album a distinctly British feel.

– Interview by Andy Argyrakis; preview by Steve Forstneger and David C. Eldredge

Grab your torches, we found the person responsible for Kanye West. Actually, while most of local hip-hop history goes relatively unsung, people far and wide shout No I.D.’s praises – probably without knowing it.

The South Sider, born Dion Wilson (his moniker is the reverse spelling of his first name), has made several unremovable marks on rap music in two distinctly different eras, and is one of the few artists in any genre to successfully choreograph a second act. The first came at the side of rapper/actor Common in supplying the beat for “I Used To Love H.E.R.,” raising the Midwest’s game above the East Coast/West Coast fray in ‘94. (It was during this stage that a green-eared West would sit in the studio and watch a master at work.) The second act, we’re living with him: he’s an A-list producer/songwriter behind Jay-Z, West, Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Drake, among others, who was recently tapped to become an Executive Vice President at Def Jam Records – the New York-based label that is hip-hop.

“Well actually,” he laughs, “I’m in control at this moment.”

Looking at that history, the eyes are drawn to a gap in the chronology almost perfectly sandwiched by Common’s voyage east to become a Soulquarian and West’s rocket-like ascendancy of the pop-music zeitgeist. Peoples’ taste for the jazzy elements that were his signature turned to the live-band approach favored by The Roots. Then, sample freaks in general flocked as commercial hip-hop went the way of hook-heavy Puff Daddy productions and the jerky punch of Timbaland. No I.D. actually released a couple solo albums in this interim, but otherwise laid low.

“I took a break,” he says matter of factly. “It’s not like [artists] go to school, and get a handbook, and it’s laid out. We make our mistakes, have our ups and downs. A lot of people don’t get past the downs. So, I took some time, refocused, rethought. I educated myself a little bit and decided on a path. So pretty much everything happening was a choice, an educated choice. Experience taught me a lot. The [Def Jam job] wasn’t an accident: it’s a job, a specific project with goals that I set. From that aspect, I wasn’t surprised [to get it] other than the fact that I’m good enough to achieve these things. I may be the one producer from my era that is still working at this level. I feel kind of over-qualified for what I’m doing.”

It’s hard not to notice his confidence, or hear the similarities in the way Common talks about his own career: there are no extraordinary gambles, miscalculations, or accidents. Everything happens for a reason, or for each door that closes another opens. Asked if he feels his current status feels like a vindication or a longtime coming, he steadily repeats himself.

“I think it’s not more of a longtime coming, but being qualified to do a job,” he assures. “Not a vindication.”

No I.D. cut his teeth spinning records at house-music clubs and parties when he was a teenager. DJ technology was still pretty primitive in the late-’80s, so cutting tracks and matching speeds took not only an inherent feel for rhythm, but the ability to read an audience whose mood balanced on the mercurial mix of chemicals in their bloodstreams. House music, as it related on the South Side to step music and eventually juke, wasn’t simply pressing buttons.

“I started out with Farley Keith, Steve Hurley, Andre Hatchet, Ron Hardy,” he remembers, “you name ‘em: all the classy house DJs. It was a Chicago culture. I was a young kid and I got the experience of playing music for 2,000 people and having the responsibility of making them react to things they’d never heard. I was just all into it. The music business and house music were not . . . it’s not a business you can make money off of. It was more for the love of the music and the culture of going to the clubs, the instant gratification. You’d dance all night, and Chicago’s one of those places where a person from Chicago will just start dancing by themselves. It’s weird. You don’t see that too many places, outside of New Jersey, maybe. It was just something fun. The excitement was musical, challenging, and in a city where there was no music industry where I was growing up, it was my introduction to everything.”

He soaked up ideas from anyone who’d give him the time, and transferred his house skills into the studio where he and Common would form a lethal combo. His spellbinding mix under “I Used To Love H.E.R.” gave a psychedelic, mysterious feel to a parabolic tale of hip-hop as a tragic female. They also started a minor war with Ice Cube via “The Bitch In Yoo,” and meshed seamlessly with the neo-soul coming out of Philadelphia. After three albums together and laying the blueprint for conscious rap, No I.D. seemed to disappear.

“I have a system of thoughts that focused me to deal with that,” he explains. “Me stumbling and everything: I realized most people don’t have a long career and I kind of made an assessment that it’s because once you start living within the successes or acknowledging them as you set new goals – setting them next to your goals – you’re liable to trip and fall. I’m a person who never takes my plaques and puts them on the wall. I treat everyday like I never did anything. And I also leave space to make mistakes and try different things and stay humble, not turn people off. It’s a calculated move on my part, because I realized the only way to make a full, real-life career out of this is to keep having space to reinvent yourself, re-educate, and readjust. And don’t let success get in the way of that.”

So he bided his time until moving to Atlanta and hooking up with Jermaine Dupri. Along the way, he had introduced West to friend Kyambo Joshua, an A&R rep at Jay-Z’s Roc-A-Fella imprint. Joshua signed West to his own Hip Hop Since 1978 label, paving the way for West to work with hip-hop’s elite. West would drop No I.D.’s name in album verses, which facilitated his unprecedented return. While he never stopped doing beats and kept busy in the South, No I.D. was permanently back in the game with two key credits on Jay-Z’s Blueprint 3, “Death Of Auto-Tune” and “Run This Town.”

“A lot of what I learned early is what I used,” he says, “and I kind of ‘hybrided’ it with what’s popular now. So, again, it’s like a nice tool set or skill set to have been in that era and know how to do it properly – even down to the fact when I came into music, people were using reel-to-reel and now it’s just computers. But that perspective teaches me a lot of how to make a record sound different. Most people are just working with what they have, and it’s all they know. But I have a different reference point just because of the eras I’ve been through while making music.”

As for the age-old quandary of making Chicago a hip-hop capitol, he says it’s up to artists like him to share what they know. The talent level is unquestioned.

“We don’t have teachers, so we have to teach ourselves,” No I.D. believes. “We make innovative choices, and there’s a will and desire to work over every single obstacle to prove your worth, versus, ‘Hey, I’m handing you an opportunity.’ It’s like, the heavier the weight, the stronger you get.”

But still, it seems our talent needs to leave to shine.

“It’s not that we’re not good enough, but the business infrastructure is what’s not in Chicago,” he argues. “That’s why people have to leave Chicago. You can’t just build the business aspect of it. Because, again, you’ve got to have the people to show you how, the resources, and it’s just the simple fact of cash flow in that sense. You’ve got to have qualified people, experienced people . . . that’s just not in Chicago. You can’t say, ‘When will it get it together?’ Chicago has some of the better artists. You look at R. Kelly, Kanye West, Common. When you look at [a smaller city like] Atlanta, the first thing you see is [Antonio] L.A. Reid, who had this experience with Babyface and let him be more of an executive than a producer. So they built a business scene and helped educate Jermaine Dupri. Experienced people helped build the infrastructure as well as money streams from their success.”

It wouldn’t hurt to have more proteges like West, who, when 14, No I.D. chided as “Hammerish.”

“When he was younger,” he snickers, “he really looked up to [MC] Hammer as an artist. He thought he was a really good artist – not saying that I don’t – but I’ll always remember a day when he was wearing the actual Hammer pants. He was a character.”

Well, he had a good teacher.

The IE staff picks its favorite albums, reissues, live shows, and local bands of 2011.

Curt Baran: Albums
1. Wild Flag Wild Flag (Merge)
2. PJ Harvey Let England Shake (Island)
3. Le Butcherettes Sin Sin Sin (Rodriguez-Lopez)
4. Tune-Yards whokill (4AD)
5. Fleet Foxes Helplessness Blues (Sub Pop)
6. Fucked Up David Comes To Life (Matador)
7. Radiohead The King Of Limbs (TBD)
8. Wilco The Whole Love (dBPM)
9. Wye Oak Civilian (Merge)
10. The Black Keys El Camino (Nonesuch)

Steve Forstneger: Albums
1. Wilco The Whole Love (dBPM)
2. Raphael Saadiq Stone Rollin‘ (Columbia)
3. Seryn This Is Where We Are (Velvet Blue)
4. Elbow Build A Rocket Boys! (Fiction/Polydor)
5. The Tunnel Fathoms Deep (Glorious Alchemical)
6. Meshell Ndegeocello Weather (Naive)
7. Frank Ocean Nostalgia, Ultra (mixtape)
8. Eleanor Friedberger Last Summer (Merge)
9. Drive-By Truckers Go-Go Boots (ATO)
10. KEN Mode Venerable (Profound Lore)

John Vernon: Reissues
1. Material Issue International Pop Overthrow (Hip-O)
2. The Smashing Pumpkins Gish (Virgin)
3. R.E.M. Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage: 1982-2011 (Warner Bros.)
4. Peter Tosh Equal Rights (Legacy)
5. Nirvana Nevermind: 20th Anniversary Edition (Geffen)
6. Sugar Minott Hard Time Pressure (VP)
7. The Jesus And Mary Chain Darklands (Edsel UK)
8. The Beach Boys The Smile Sessions (Capitol)
9. The Who Quadrophenia: The Director’s Cut (Geffen)
10. Marvin Gaye What’s Going On (Motown)

Andy Argyrakis: Concerts
1. Paul McCartney – Wrigley Field, August 1
2. U2 – Soldier Field, July 5
3. Lady Gaga – United Center, February 28
4. Bryan Ferry – Civic Opera House, October 12
5. Steely Dan – Ravinia, August 12
6. Alison Krauss & Union Station – Summerfest, September 10
7. Roger Daltrey – The Venue, October 7
8. Weezer – Aragon Ballroom, January 7
9. Robert Plant – Ravinia, June 16
10. Gang Of Four – Metro, February 11

Around Hear staff: Local Bands
California Wives
Jeff Elbel + Ping
Daniel Knox
The Maybenauts
Musikanto
Joseph Messing & The Wisemen
Northpilot
Will Phalen
Tiger Bones
YP

Is that a giant list of songs, or are we just happy to see ya? For all the discussion surrounding the deaths of various recording styles and formats, 2011 was a fantastic year for songs. IE found very little overlap when our writers submitted their votes, which is astounding. If you can find 10 new singles you’re ecstatic about, and none of those would land on a peer’s top 50? You bemoan the lack of consensus – we say, bring on more salad bar!

Too many listeners take a philistine attitude to year-end lists: the Spin and Rolling Stone comment boards overflow with readers disappointed not to see their own delicately chosen tastes reflected back at them. Here’s an idea: treat them as recommendations. Almost all of IE’s top songs can be streamed, YouTube’d, caught on Soundcloud, Spotify, or legally and freely downloaded as MP3s. And if you hate every single one, exult in the knowledge that you’re an individual!

In alphabetical order:

Akron/Family “Island”
The Antlers “I Don’t Want Love”
The Bees “I Really Need Love”
The Belle Brigade “Losers”
Big K.R.I.T. ft. David Banner “Sookie Now”
James Blake “The Wilhelm Scream”
Bon Iver “Holocene”

Jeff Bridges “Falling Short”
Buffalo Tom “Down”
Hayes Carll “KMAG YOYO”
Chairlift “Met Before”
Class Actress “Keep You”
Cornershop “Double Decker Eyelashes”

Danger Mouse & Daniel Lippi ft. Jack White “Two Against One”
Lana Del Rey “Blue Jeans”
Dev “Bass Down Low (Proper Villains)”
Thomas Dolby “Nothing New Under The Sun”
Drake “Marvins Room”
The-Dream “Body Work”

Elbow “Neat Little Rows”
*The Electric ft. Pugz Atomz “Toot Toot”
Foo Fighters “Walk”
Foster The People “Helena Beat”
Fountains Of Wayne “Action Hero”
*Ezra Furman & The Harpoons “I Killed Myself But I Didn’t Die”
Gotye ft. Kimbra “Somebody That I Used To Know”
Cee-Lo Green “You’re So Square”
Grouplove “Colours”
Lisa Hannigan ft. Ray Lamontagne “O Sleep”
Hey Sholay “Dreamboat”
Incubus “Adolescents”
Iron & Wine “Walking Far From Home”
Mason Jennings “Bitter Heart”

Wiz Khalifa “On My Level”
*Kid Sister ft. Riff Raff “Hide & Seek”
Takahiro Kido “Oranges & Lemons”
King Creosote “And The Racket They Made”
Kendrick Lamar “The Spiteful Chant”

LMFAO “One Day”
Low “Try To Sleep”
M83 “Midnight City”
Major Lazer “Original Don”
Mastodon “All The Heavy Lifting”
Nicki Minaj “Super Bass”
Meshell Ndegeocello “Weather”
Nekromantheon “Divinity Of Death”
Notorious B.I.G. “Gimme The Loot (Superginger remix)”
*Russian Circles “Mladek”

*Scattered Trees “A Conversation About Death On New Years Eve”
Sebastian “Embody”
Seryn “We Will All Be Changed”
The Shoes “Crack My Bones”
*Smith Westerns “Dye The World”
The Smithereens “What Went Wrong”
Sneaky Sound System “Big”
Star Slinger ft. Reggie B. “Dumbin’ (Diplo Remix)”
Stay+ “Young Luv”
Still Corners “Into The Trees”
*Stratus “Jasper’s Theme”
Switchfoot “Afterlife”

*Urge Overkill “Rock&Roll Submarine”
The Vaccines “Wetsuit”
Tom Waits “Hell Broke Luce”
We Were Promised Jetpacks “Sore Thumb”
The Weeknd “Wicked Games”
*Wilco “Whole Love”
Wild Flag “Something Came Over Me”
Wooden Wand & Briarwood “Winter In Kentucky”
Willie Wright “Dressing For The Occasion”
Yelawolf ft. Kid Rock “Let’s Roll”

Young Chris ft. Future “Racks On Racks”
Young Galaxy “The Angels Are Surely Weeping”

* = local