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

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.

It might not go down as the most unforgettable song of the year. But Mark Foster’s #1 smash with his punky fizz-pop trio Foster The People, “Pumped Up Kicks,” certainly provided the soundtrack to the summer of 2011, thanks to its infectious blend of handclap percussion, bubbly bass, vocodered verses, and a sugary – but weirdly homicidal – chorus of “All the other kids with the pumped-up kicks/ You better run, better run/Outrun my gun.” On the surface its sentiment is so Columbine-creepy that the words “gun” and “bullet” are usually bleeped when its concert-taped video clip airs.

But listen a little closer, “Kicks”’s composer invites, and you’ll see his true intention – a Raskolnikov-pensive rumination on the possibility of offing every last kid at school who’s tormented you. His protagonist, Foster explains, “doesn’t actually do it – it’s really more about the psychology of what makes him tick, and him playing with the idea of doing something like that. I really wanted to just paint his world, his home life, his emotions, the conversation that’s going on in his head. That’s more interesting to me than telling a story about someone killing somebody – like, What is driving this person to think this way?”

Foster The People’s whirlwind year led up to a kinetic performance of their smash on the Ben Stiller-hosted episode of “Saturday Night Live” this October, plus an even more hyper run through another track from their recent Torches (Columbia) debut disc – the soulful keyboard stomper “Houdini” – in which they were joined onstage by the wailing sax of Kenny G. Currently, Foster and his bandmates – drummer Mark Pontius and bassist Cubbie Fink – are finishing up a fall/winter tour of Europe, where their thinking man’s alt-rock has caught on like wildfire.

Is it possible to be a seriously literate musician in this shallow, social-networking era? Foster thinks so. He’s a huge fan of Oscar Wilde and C.S. Lewis, and seedier American authors like John Fante and Charles Bukowski. Ayn Rand’s Objectivism theories have also affected him. “And I just read this great sci-fi series by the late Philip Jose Farmer, the ‘Riverworld’ chronicles, a series of books that are just brilliant,” the singer/keyboardist enthuses. “It takes place in the afterlife, and everybody wakes up along this 10-million-mile-long river, and all their lives and beliefs were smashed, and there’s no heaven and no hell. And everybody who’s ever lived in civilization is there, including neanderthals, and Cyrano De Bergerac, Mark Twain, and Odysseus are main characters. And they’re all basically trying to get to the head of the river, to figure out where it starts and who’s running the show.”

Is there an FTP track in there somewhere? Probably so. Foster – whose voice often slips into an old-school-R&B falsetto in song – has plenty of clever tricks up his sleeve. In fact, he says, he was so soulful that he was actually invited to showcase for Dr. Dre himself, who was interested in signing the kid, pre FTP. Dre’s company envisioned a smooth, Raphael Saadiq-assisted solo set, but Foster said No. “I wanted to make the type of music that I’m making now,” he asserts. “But I had this other batch of songs that was just vocal and piano, more Elton John and Billy Joel-type stuff. More like classic songwriting, and that’s what they wanted – they wanted to make a classic-soul record with me.”

But said solo demos do exist, Foster clarifies. And maybe one day, he’ll release them. “Because that’s a side of me that I love, and that’s a side that I want to start working in on Foster The People’s second record,” he says. The group already tracked one tune in that vein called “Ruby,” and it was originally meant to be included on Torches. “And I think we’re gonna start playing the song on this tour, actually – it’s a piano ballad. But it’s a big side of me that nobody really knows about yet.”

Where did it all begin for Foster? Oddly enough, his backstory is even quirkier than his success with “Pumped Up Kicks.” By the time he’d graduated from high school in Cleveland, he’d parlayed his love of The Beach Boys into several short-lived bands. His father’s graduation gift proved crucial: knowing his son’s diehard love of music, he urged him to relocate to Hollywood for a year or so, just to test his songwriting chops. He knew the Midwest simply couldn’t contain him anymore.

But at the tender age of 18, Foster was unprepared for the Bukowski-grim side of Los Angeles. He lived at a pimp-and-gangster-frequented flophouse, subsisted on one 7-Eleven hot dog per day, and worked more dead-end jobs than he can remember, just to survive. Still, he managed to teach himself keyboards, then production skills, and eventually saved enough money for a PC, Cubase software, and a MIDI controller. Four years later, he wound up right back where he started, essentially – sick of showbiz and unsure which direction to pursue. He needed a guideline, he decided, other musicians to help shape and evolve his vision – enter Fink and Pontius in October 2009, and soon FTP had played their first show in Santa Monica to a crowd of 30 or so friends. By the close of their residency at L.A.’s Echo club, hundreds of fans were lining up every night to catch one of the city’s biggest new buzz bands. Foster The People had arrived.

Meanwhile, Foster – now in his mid-20s – had graduated to an eye-opening, craft-enhancing day job: writing advertising jingles for a company called Mophonics. In his spare time, he threw “Pumped Up Kicks” together and put it up on the FTP website, accidentally setting the blogosphere alight with 1.4 million streams, which quickly led to a contract (and an introductory EP) with Columbia/Star Time International. “A friend of mine introduced me to [Mophonics] a few years back, and I started doing spec work for them,” the auteur recalls. “I already had a home studio, so then I just kind of learned the ropes. And then maybe a year and a half later, they brought me on full-time and made me an in-house composer.”

Why does Foster think he was selected? He thinks about it for a minute. “Well, I think melodies are my strength,” says the unabashed pop lover. “And coming from the background of a songwriter, I know how to build and deliver a chorus, whether it’s instrumental or whatever. I guess I just have a good handle on dynamics, which is kind of what all commercials are about. So it was very natural for me. And I write in a lot of different styles of music, which is also an asset for composing, because you get jobs calling for hip-hop or bossa nova, rock, emo, or even Danny Elfman-type stuff. So you kind of have to be able to do all of it.”

His first assignment, in fact, really put Foster’s abilities to the test. To date, it was his most challenging work, he admits – a car commercial that required a synthesizer simplification of a complex Billie Holiday standard. “It was insane, because I don’t really know music theory,” he remembers. “So I was searching for the sheet music, because I play by ear and I could not figure out what the progression was, because it was pretty difficult jazz with a lot of different moving parts. They wanted me to do an electronic cover of the song, and I ended up getting there and making it my own, and it ended up being really cool. But that was definitely one of my toughest jobs, and it was my first week of work!”

Another head-scratcher: Getting hired by a Japanese boy band called SMAP for a multi-genre overhaul. “We did a series of things for them where we took this SMAP song that we had to remake in different styles,” Foster sighs, thinking back on the surreal situation. “We made a country version, a ranchero version, a classical version. We made all these different versions and had all these different session players come in. So there I was, recording this ranchero band that had won a Grammy, complete with trumpets and guitarrón and traditional Hispanic ranchero singers, but singing this Japanese pop song. It was, you might say, pretty epic!”

– Tom Lanham

For the full feature, click the December issue’s cover image, or grab a copy of Illinois Entertainer — free throughout Chicagoland.

You’re grinding through a grueling tour and your long-anticipated day off finally arrives. How would you like to spend your time? How about hammering out answers for interview questions?

“I guess I’m going to have to cancel all my fun plans for our off day in Ljublana [Slovenia] and hang out in a hotel room for the next few hours. Either that or get scolded by our management or label. Just kidding, kinda.”

Such is the plight for As I Lay Dying guitarist Nick Hipa, who graciously shoulders the burden and provides a short novel’s worth of material responding to our e-mail queries. Currently in the midst of a world-wide tour, aptly promoted as “A Decade Of Destruction,” As I Lay Dying is circling the globe to celebrate its 10-year anniversary. It’s a natural point to take a retrospective glance at the band’s history, refresh current activity, and set the stage for what lies ahead. As Hipa relates the band development, his narrative takes shape as an archeological excavation that reveals the evolution of earnest, wild-eyed kids into professional artists poised at the very top echelon of metal/hardcore artists.

“When Tim [Lambesis, vocals] and Jordan [Mancino, drums] first started the band back in 2001, they were pretty much the only ones absolutely dedicated to ‘the cause.’ At that point, however, there was never a clear direction as to what the band’s sound was. More than anything, it was a culmination of tastes influenced by the revolving cast of contributing musicians.”

Fast forward a couple of years . . .

“In late 2003 and early 2004 Phil [Sgrosso, guitar] and I joined the band. It was at this point that Tim and Jordan finally found dudes who were equally as passionate about pursuing music and also willing to stick it out, for better or worse. The first release we were part of was Shadows Are Security [(Metal Blade)]. Phil was 18 and I was 21 when we recorded it. As musicians, we were all still really young and had tons of room to improve, but that release is us doing the best with what we had.”

Unquestionably, the raw energy and razor-edged intensity are there, but in wild, frayed form; you can hear the limitations in the songwriting on Shadows, especially compared to where the band is today. There’s hardened precision and powerful depth on subsequent albums that are a result of the guys becoming more technically proficient while developing a methodical, deliberate songwriting process, and simply meshing together over time. Hipa explains how the creative process improved with each album.

“I guess it depends on who you ask, but we all felt like [2007's] An Ocean Between Us was a big step up from Shadows . . . [W]e were able to be more meticulous with our parts and the album become even more of what we had intended . . . Before, we would do the ol’ ’show up to practice and see if anyone had a cool idea’ routine. By the time we started writing for [last year's] The Powerless Rise, we were sending full song ideas to each other before actually jamming. We had more material than ever before recording, and the caliber of that material was better than it had ever been. The older we get and the longer we do this, the more we understand exactly what we like and what we don’t.”

Hipa further elaborates the democratic and egalitarian nature of the songwriting process, which still retains a degree of fluidity despite the routine that they’ve developed.

“Typically, someone sends out an e-mail with an MP3 of a complete song, or at least rough arrangement of several riffs. Whichever of those songs gets the majority of the other members stoked is the one we end up rehearsing together. From there, everyone adds their own touch based upon what they feel it needs. It is this process that dictates how our songs come out. Since we’re all usually listening to and drawing influence from different things, we’re never certain of what to expect from our collective collaboration with one another. This has been a huge factor in the development of our sound, and we prefer it to occur organically and naturally this way.”

As he describes it, Hipa’s growth as a player follows a similar trajectory, and he conveys a comfortable self-awareness and keen sense of purpose, which drives his approach.

“Have you ever known someone who does something so naturally and excellently that it appears effortless? I see all of my favorite musicians this way. Unfortunately, I was not dealt the talent-developing luck. What I did get was the ability to love it enough to never give up at it. Whether I’m trying to write something or just trying to get better technically, I run into the same walls of frustration that any guitar player does. The trick is to keep on ‘keepin’ on’ and being tenacious.”

The culmination of that tenacity could be AILD’s Grammy nomination, and Hipa confirms how significant that was for the band. It wasn’t a signal of selling out or succumbing to mainstream pressures, but rather it was validation of their dedication and professionalism.

“Being nominated for a Grammy in 2007 is something I’ll never forget. Not necessarily because it meant we had ‘made it’ or anything, but because it was an achievement that my family could actually look to as tangible evidence that I was doing something worthwhile. Dropping out of college to play in a band wasn’t actually met with tons of fanfare, but when we started ending up high on the Billboard charts and getting award nominations, my extended family started to take what I did a little more seriously.”

– Patrick Conlan

For the full feature, click the December issue’s cover image, or grab a copy of Illinois Entertainer — free throughout Chicagoland.

Modern-art museums scare people. Maybe it’s a conservative hatred of the NEA and controversial exhibits, or a preemptive exhaustion for an afternoon to be spent doubting, That’s art? Getting in the door is the hardest part.

Running: 12/6 to 12/30 at Museum Of Contemporary Art (220 E. Chicago Ave.) in Chicago, with special ticketed performances 12/20 and 12/21.

For the month of December, the Museum Of Contemporary Art has agreed to let a pair of gentlemen musicians use their space in a symbiotic relationship that should help newcomers in the immersion process. One, Andrew Bird, is a local treasure who doubles as a world-renowned erudite violinist/troubadour, while the other, Ian Schneller, creates internationally sought-after, handcrafted instruments and amplifiers for his own company, Specimen Products.

The two have been at this before, most notably at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum in 2010, though Bird had already been utilizing Schneller’s unique horn speakers to great effect – as when he played a winter residency at Chicago’s 4th Presbyterian Church in 2009. The MCA provided a fresh challenge for their evolving collaborations.

“In a way it was a eureka moment,” says Schneller from his Chicago office. “There used to be 4-track, then 8-track, then 16-track, and 48-track recording studios. Most of us are familiar with the notion of layering up a massive song with all those tracks and mixing them all back down to channels. But what if you didn’t mix them all back down to two channels? What if you had an extra-special system to play back all the channels that were in a specified location? So that you had an orchestral representation of a composition? That’s the basic concept. It creates an environment that, what if you went to Orchestra Hall and, during Beethoven’s 9th [Symphony], you were able to walk up on stage and mingle amongst the viola and trombone section, and then saunter over to the tympani and cello. That’s sort of what the Sonic Arboretum is, and it lends itself beautifully to the concept of installation in an art museum, because that’s what that’s all about is walking around and checking out stuff.”

To pull it off, Schneller has installed more than six- dozen horn amplifiers in the MCA’s atrium, which will perpetually broadcast singular elements of a looping Bird composition created in an empty museum.
“[Bird]’s going to workshop for a couple weeks,” Schneller told IE in October, “and then once it’s installed he’s going to come in and work after hours and build up a library of compositions that will cycle and play during museum hours for the entire month. So, in a way, Andrew’s going to be in the room as a phantom entity along with his music as it plays back and recreates this spatial and sonic phenomenon when he comes and works on the system.”

It sounds . . . ridiculously compelling and completely out there. One can’t quite picture Schneller convincing the museum’s trustees much less himself that the project was even feasible.

“That’s an interesting diplomatic thing,” he says about those conversations. “It’s a museum, and they have other shows going on and other curators working and all this stuff. We work with what they put on our platter, and we tell them what they like, and we’ve come to very amicable terms about where the architecture will be. They’ve been very generous. We’re occupying a large portion of the atrium, and there’s going to be a giant, brand-new spinning horn right in front of the revolving doors at the entrance. I love that. It should be quite a spectacle.”

As for himself, “If you want to succeed at anything in life, it takes immense endurance and conviction. And when I get ahold of a concept, there are no limits. I’ll admit that certain concepts are preposterous, but I don’t want to hear about it. The first 150 sound engineers I mentioned this concept to, the first words out of their mouths were, ‘The reason this won’t work . . .’ I’m like, ‘Fuck that!’ I guess I’m obsessed. We’re gonna take close to 80 horns to the MCA and install this system. I’m building a 24-channel single-ended triode tube amplification the good ol’ fashioned way: completely from scratch, from the ground up using all discreet components and built like a tank infrastructure, enclosures. And we’re gonna feed this thing with a digital Tascam X48 recording deck, and once this thing’s installed, Andrew Bird’s gonna show up and compose on to it specifically for this location. I believe it’s probably an unprecedented undertaking. It’s totally site-specific, destination-specific. There’s only one place in the world to absorb these compositions.”

One gets the sense Schneller didn’t need to give Bird the hard-sell.

“He’s the man for the job,” Schneller explains, “because he has a special sensitivity to building up and layering these kinds of tracks. He’s a phenom. His solo stuff, behind the looping pedals, I think he’s unparalleled at this sport. The beauty of our collaboration is he’s got his part to do, and I’ve got my part. I’m loathe to use this analogy, but one guy writes the lyrics and another writes the melodies. Obviously they have to integrate, and there is some collaboration, but basically we both have our specialties and there’s an immense amount of trust involved to let the other do their thing. I know that Andrew’s gonna show up and make beautiful music on the system, and he knows I’m going to bring a system that’s going to open up new possibilities for him compositionally.”

Schneller approaches sound, he says, from the standpoint of a repairman. And while he’s adept at restoring an aging or damaged piece, his mind flies ahead to imagine how sound in any capacity could be improved. So much so that he’s funding the Sonic Arboretum – “a labor of love” – himself. But ideas like these aren’t far-flung, random projects of a mad inventor. There’s a goal.

“I would say one of the causes I’m trying to champion here that’s an aside from my artistic revelations regarding the horns,” he says, “is bringing 1940s electronic technology into the present tense. We live in a world that’s full of disposable crap. Nobody expects to still be using the iPhone they have in their hand in two years, because they’re going to replace it with a newer model. We just take all this in stride. What I’m trying to convey and present is the notion that even in the present tense, with our hands we can make these beautifully simple, low-wattage tube amplifiers that blow away any kind of high-fidelity system that’s made today. The 2A3 electron tube is the most linear audio device ever made, and I’ll put its 3 watts up against anybody’s 200 watts of solid-state bullshit any day of the week. You’ve simply got to hear it to believe it. So that’s part of the Arboretum, is to present this ‘ancient’ technology and illustrate how it interfaces beautifully with today’s cutting-edge, digital technology. You plug an iPhone directly into this 3-watt amplifier that’s hooked up to my horns and it will blow your mind.”

Just so we can distinguish the puddles of brains from the actual art.

– Steve Forstneger

Don’t go the top-40 route or an Amazon recommendation on a passe indie-rock band. Give the music lover who has nothing or everything an item to really chew on this season. It might cost ya, but the following boxsets will occupy them for years.

The Beach Boys
The Smile Sessions
The Smile saga died down prematurely in 2004, when Brian Wilson completed his decades-shelved followup to The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds with a backing band he’d cultivated. Seven years – exponentially less agonizing than the 37 that had preceded them – later, and audiophiles/completists/rock snobs get what they were initially asking for: the Smile archives.

Part of the ongoing fascination has been Wilson’s reportedly fragile mental state, which The Smile Sessions (Capitol) amply demonstrates over five CDs, two LPs, two 7-inch singles, and a 60-page book. Between waiting for the acid to kick in at one point, and sounding exhausted between two other takes, the Wilson drama lives up to the myth the sessions acquired. Beyond that, the documentation this $140 set provides far outstrips reissues of completed records, and reaches as far into the mind of a 24-year-old savant as could be reasonably expected.

Pink Floyd
Discovery Box Set
Pink Floyd’s tardy iTunes Store debut was deftly spun as a dispute over artistic control and royalty rates, though many saw it as a profound commercial miscalculation. Not completely sold on the new paradigm, they’ve combined their official digital launch with a heap of physical product: visually expanded “Immersion” looks at Dark Side Of The Moon (see “Digital Divide”), Wish You Were Here, and The Wall; their first greatest hits (A Foot In The Door); as well as this Discovery box that bundles all 14 studio albums.

Floyd fans are a committed lot, and most can have been counted on to ensnare the assorted remasterings through the years. If they haven’t, this repackaging offers highest bitrate resamplings from the original master tapes. (Bonus material is negligible.) The band were nothing if not immensely visual, however, which is where Discovery disappoints. Inside the sleek, discreet box, individual albums have been stuffed into flimsy cardboard cases prone to scratching the discs. Artwork on a whole has been diminished, with the runoff siphoned into a textless booklet of photos of guys who weren’t much to look at in the first place. Floyd might be late to the party, but understand you’ll rip the music to your hard drive and box the box in a storage box.

Billy Joel
Piano Man
If Discovery shows Pink Floyd trying to stuff their double-Ds into an A-cup, Columbia/Legacy has taken a big-picture approach to deliver a tasteful, concise, two-disc anniversary packaging of Billy Joel’s breakthrough.

After a pair of flops – one in the woeful Attila, then as a fledgling singer/songwriter – Joel became a lounge act in L.A. and changed his writing style from autobiographer to observer. Though Piano Man doesn’t represent him as a finished product – the Southwestern overtones try too hard to match Elton John and James Taylor – the second disc of this anniversary set gives a fascinating glimpse at his metamorphosis. While rebuilding his regional reputation back east, he stopped in Philadelphia’s WMMR a year-and-a-half before Piano Man’s release, and the often-bootlegged performance sealed his new image with audiences.

Howlin’ Wolf
Smokestack Lightning: The Complete Chess Masters
More than 20 years ago, the Chess Records masters were revived for nearly a dozen box sets, an emphatic stamp on a pivotal era in 20th-century music. Why the account has been reopened with Howlin’ Wolf isn’t entirely clear, but an extra disc and a halved timespan tell us things are about to get more in-depth. This quartet of discs takes a fine comb to Wolf in Chicago from ‘51 to ‘60, or when nearly all of his essential cuts – up until and including “Spoonful” – had been recorded. Wolf was by far the most idiosyncratic of the iconic Chicago bluesmen, but his role and influence were no lesser than Waters, Dixon, or Walter’s.

The Who
Quadrophenia: The Director’s Cut
The five demos in this vast reissue that didn’t make the original version don’t quite match movie-world “director’s cut” standards – they’re nowhere near finished – though Pete Townshend does deserve credit for contributing extensive commentary. Seen both as a new beginning and the beginning of the end of The Who, Quadrophenia nonetheless was a towering achievement in ’70s rock, and a personal vindication for Townshend, who almost destroyed the band and himself in the failed Lifehouse project.

Director’s Cut includes the obligatory remastering (last done in 2003), with a 25-track archival demo reel, and a 5.1 Surround-Sound mix. The treat, however, is a 100-page hardcover book including a 13,000-word essay by the guitarist himself.

Paul Simon
One-Trick Pony/Hearts And Bones/
Graceland/The Rhythm Of The Saints
Lucky for Paul Simon he’s a skilled songwriter, because this phase of his recording career (‘77 to ‘90) shows him experimenting with production values that show their age. Hearts And Bones has some devastatingly precise lyrics, but trips over opener “Allergies,” and its frenzy of competing sonic interests. Even the vaunted Graceland could use a sonic-scrubnow that the wider world knows South African pop doesn’t require guitar processing. Rhythm Of The Saints feels fresh in comparison, and fares better than Hearts even as though its painted lyrics suggest an empty post-Graceland tank. One-Trick Pony, the most derided of the quartet (at least upon its release), actually rises in stature because its litely jazzy transition from Still Crazy After All These Years feels seamless, even if most of the material – intended, sort of, for a soundtrack – is slight. Suprisingly, at its silver-anniversary Graceland doesn’t get the expanded treatment; it, like the other three, includes a smattering of demos that have been officially available for years.

The Supremes
The Temptations
50th Anniversary: The Singles
While the James Brown singles collections lurch into an 11th volume, upon their half-centennials Motown’s most recognizable groups get all their As and Bs locked into three-CD sets. For The Supremes, this encapsulates their whole career and for the Tempts, to the point in ‘71 when Eddie Kendricks and Paul Williams looked across the river to Windsor and then back at Detroit to say, “Take off, eh?”

While there’s no shortage of compilations for either outfit, collectors will dine on the German and Italian versions of some of the hits (“Baby, Baby, Wo Ist Unsere Liebe?”) and new comers get a chronology not just of Motown, but black America as the ’60s collapsed into the ’70s (“Love Child” and “Ball Of Confusion”), and these bands with them.

The Rolling Stones
Some Girls
Up until Exile On Main St. last year, The Stones – for all the money-grubbing accusations they field – have been rather lax in the expanded/reissued goldrush. Yes, the full catalog underwent a massive remastering campaign, but despite their mild reputation as a singles act the archives are reportedly lush. Some Girls is an interesting place to continue because not only is it of recent vintage and unique, but also the last great Stones album. One thing the empire is banking on is a “new” single, “No Spare Parts,” which Don Was rediscovered on session tapes. The 100-page book is a nice touch. But the real reason to come back is the songs – perhaps the last time the Stones were confused, a little angry, and thought they had nothing to lose. (Eagle Rock has also released Some Girls Live In Texas ‘78 on DVD.)

– Steve Forstneger

It’s 9:30 p.m. on a Friday. Mastodon drummer/vocalist Brann Dailor is having dinner in his hometown of Atlanta at a joint called The Rusty Nail. With his wife. Illinois Entertainer is interrupting. Obviously.

Appearing: November 13th at Riviera Theatre in Chicago with Dillinger Escape Plan and Red Fang.

“They said, ‘Hey, you wanna do an interview on Friday night at 9:30?’ I said, ‘Hell yeah, sign me up,’” Dailor jokes to make us feel better. We think.

Fact is, we feel awful about stealing Dailor away from his meal, his wife, and the Led Zeppelin on the jukebox. But it ain’t easy scoring an interview with Mastodon nowadays. Seventy-two hours earlier, the heavy-metal heavyweight released its fifth full-length, The Hunter (Reprise). Five days after we talk to Dailor, Billboard announces that the 39,000 copies it shipped in the United States are good enough for 10th on their main album chart. That same night, Mastodon performed The Hunter’s first single, “Curl Of The Burl,” on “The Late Show With David Letterman.”

See where we’re going, here?

Basically, we were lucky to talk to Dailor when we did, ’cause The Hunter is hot shit. Any doubts or questions about whether Dailor, bassist/vocalist Troy Sanders, guitarist/vocalist Brent Hinds (that’s three vocalists if you’re scoring at home), and guitarist Bill Kelliher could follow up 2009’s Crack The Skye, The Hunter shoots them down. There is riffage (“Blasteroid”), brutality (“Spectrelight”), beauty (“The Sparrow”), groove (“Curl Of The Burl” is ZZ Top on a metal trip), and, simply put, weird-ass shit (“Creature Lives”).

What there isn’t, is a concept. So technically, not all expectations can be thrown out the window because, who didn’t expect another massive, soaring, epic “concept album” from Mastodon? It’s been the Southern group’s modus operandi for some time now, dating back to its 2004 breakout, Leviathan. It, Mastodon’s “water” record, was loosely based on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Blood Mountain, from 2006, was its “earth” record, and Crack The Skye, about astral travel (and Rasputin!), its “air.”

The Hunter? Well, it’s just an “album” album. No one song answers to another, giving Dailor and co. the option of going wherever the hell they want from one track to another, which is exactly what they do. “It was really kind of freeing, you know? We had done three concept records in a row, and they are very hard to do,” Dailor says. “They are very labor intensive, and you have to come up with the storyline; you have to try to build some sort of continuity without losing the way the record flows. It’s a fine line. It’s not easy. It’s really stressful.”

Try interrupting someone’s dinner with a half-hour of questions.

IE: Was it strange, initially, writing songs that weren’t intertwined thematically?
Brann Dailor: No, not really. It was a lot easier, to be honest. It was way easier. It was almost like we didn’t even have to try. [Laughs.] No, we still had to try, obviously. It was a breath of fresh air for sure, when the decision was made not to do a concept album. I had already come up with a concept. My feelings were that’s what everyone expected from me, to come up with a lofty concept. I liked what I had come up with, but it needed some work. I went and shared it with the class, basically, and everyone dug it, but when we really started digging in and started writing, I think it was Brent who came up and said, “Dude, do we have to do another concept album?” I was like, “No, we don’t have to. We don’t have to do anything. Do whatever we want, you know – no big deal.

IE: So was it right there on the spot you decided to pull back the reins, so to speak?
BD: We decided to take a more stress-free approach to writing the record in the first place. There was a lot of stress surrounding the band, like personal things that were going on with different band members that were stressful enough. Whereas previously when you went in to write a Mastodon record, it’s a really stressful thing because you have concepts involved and really intricate song structures, and you’re in there every day banging your head against the wall trying to link up all these riffs that really don’t belong together – which is fun, to an extent, and also labor-intensive, and you’re there every day all day long trying to work it out. It’s stressful. You go home at night and you can’t sleep. Not that that was different this time around. I was stressed out, but more stressed out at what was happening at the outside of Mastodon. Then when we got in there and started writing music, we just sort of decided not to let that part of our lives be stressful and go from the gut as far as what we were writing music-wise. Like, three or four riffs strung together is a pretty basic rock song. Record it, put some vocals over the top, and yeah, we like that. On to the next song. Instead of really trying to be, “Oh, it’s not complicated enough.” We didn’t really crave that this time. It needed to be more of a fun release.

IE: How hard would it have been to top Crack The Skye as far as super-epic, super-proggy, super out-there, anyway?
BD: I don’t know. For us, we don’t think too much about previous releases once we start working on new music. We are just sort of consumed with the music that is being created at hand, not really even . . . the music that happened before is gone. It just doesn’t even exist. We want to sound like us still, but we definitely don’t want to be retreading. We don’t want to be running in place. We wanna hear something new, you know? We’ve had that same question after every record. How are you going to top Remission? How are you going to top Leviathan? How are you going to top Blood Mountain? So on and so forth. I guess the answer is that you just don’t really pay attention to those records once you go in to write new stuff. You just write new stuff and trust yourself to police yourself in the same way, and you’re gonna travel down all those musical roads that are offered up, I guess. You can talk all day about what kind of record you wanna write, but then when it starts coming to life, it definitely takes on a life on its own. I think you’d be doing that particular music injustice to stop mid-stride and say, “Oh we can’t do this. We can’t write this. We can’t play this song because it’s not Mastodon.” We’re playing it, we’re liking it, so there must be a reason for that. You need to go all the way down that road, otherwise you’re not really doing what you want to do. You’re kind of letting the possibility of someone else’s opinion govern what your art sounds like and looks like. That’s not fair.

IE: “Creature Lives” is a good example of what you’re saying. Is that the weirdest song Mastodon has ever released?
BD: I guess that’s a good example of a song where, it’s really, um, I just think it’s a really great thing that [song] can live on a Mastodon record and be a Mastodon song and, in some people’s eyes, have the audacity to call it a Mastodon song. In other people’s eyes it’s something fantastic. The guys in the band, we really love it. We welcome it into the catalog as something that could spark music in the future from us that, maybe wouldn’t sound exactly the same, but another musical avenue that we’re interested in. I just think it’s cool to have stuff like that in there. Once it’s all said and done and Mastodon goes away, hopefully the catalog, and the type of music the catalog is representative of, is vast and extremely varied.

IE: Sticking with this theme, “All The Heavy Lifting” seems like one of the catchiest songs you guys have ever done. Troy’s vocals are amazing on that tune. It seems every album he makes leaps and bounds as a vocalist.
BD: Yeah, that’s pretty catchy, I guess. Troy is awesome on the record. He killed it for sure. He worked really hard and took voice lessons and stuff like that, so he’s been working hard on his vocals. He’s stepped up on this record. The last record Brent sang a lot, so Troy was like, “I’m gonna sing a lot on this record.” [Laughs.] It’s not as cut-and-dried as that, but it was kind of the idea to get more Troy in there for this record. But yeah, he did a great job and that chorus is pretty infectious, I’d have to say.

IE: How do you work out the vocal parts with three of you singing now?
BD: It’s real diplomatic. A lot of times when we’re writing, we already have a vocalist in mind for a certain part. Like for “All The Heavy Lifting,” I went in and laid the groundwork for it, but we knew Troy would sing over top of it. For “Thickening,” we knew Brent had an idea for that part, and for like “Dry Bone Valley” I went in and sang it and everybody dug it. We all admire each other’s vocal stylings, and basically, a lot of times, it comes down to whether you are able to pull it off live. “Can you sing that and play it at the same time?” If someone is dying to sing something, we’re going to let them.

IE: And how about the mandatory Scott Kelly [Neurosis] appearance?
BD: Well Scott’s just a great person and a good friend of ours, and he’s a huge inspiration on the band. We’ve said it many times before, but if it weren’t for Neurosis there wouldn’t be Mastodon. Any time we can get him to sing on something, it’s definitely welcomed. But we wouldn’t shoehorn it in there. We have to sort of hear it on a part. We wrote “Spectrelight” and weren’t sure that song was really going to come together. But once we were in the studio, Bill came up with a couple different parts to add to the two parts I had, and we just kinda slammed it out. It ended up being pretty killer. Then we gave it to Scott to see if he would be interested in doing something on it, and he was all about it.

– Trevor Fisher

For the complete interivew, click the November issue’s cover thumbnail, or grab a copy free throughout Chicagoland.

Ozzy Osbourne. Kiss. The Ramones. Ministry. And, of course, Cher. It’s not a game of “one of these things is not like the other” (um, Ozzy?), but a list of artists from whom Judas Priest are straining to create some distance. Yes, the November 12th date in Hammond is part of the veteran British metal outfit’s “Epitaph” farewell tour. But it’s a not a retirement: they very well could come back.

Maybe.

Appearing: November 12th at The Venue at Horseshoe Casino in Hammond, IN with Black Label Society and Thin Lizzy.

“We’ve been touring for 40 years now,” exhales guitarist Glenn Tipton, “and every tour takes at least 18 months out of your life. We didn’t want to cause confusion with the initial announcement: we’re not going to be doing anymore global tours. If a string of dates came along that made sense, we’d certainly consider them. We definitely have one more album in us, maybe more. So it’s certainly not the end of the band, but we don’t plan to do any enormous tours anymore.”

You could say Priest backed themselves into such a disclaimer by not only being colleagues of offending unretirees, but by also naming themselves for one of history’s most notorious double-crossers. Yet for Chicagoans and Midwesterners in flyover country, this could seriously be it. Since the dawn of press junkets, British and European musicians have traditionally flown to the U.S. only for handfuls of East and West Coast dates before returning home or continuing to Japan or Australia. The States on a whole are endangered, because even a jaunt to New York requires work visas and invasive body scans. It’d be so much easier to chunnel to Paris and then embark upon Europe on the band’s newly favored conveyance: the coach.

“Our touring schedule is arduous,” Tipton reflects. “It’s enjoyable time, but now we prefer just a tourbus because of all the airport security. It’s pretty tiring, really. We’ve always taken a break at the end of a tour. A lot of it’s psychological, as well as physical. You get saturated with [music]. You write it, you record it, you perform it, you tour with it.”

He’s not complaining. In fact, you get the sense that Tipton gets more fatigued talking about nearly a half-century of mileage as he is the travel itself. In his own words, “The future’s bright. It’s looking good. There’s always things to delve into.” With the carefree attitude of an athlete looking forward to free-agency, Tipton, Rob Halford, Ian Hill, Scott Travis, and KK Downing’s understudy Richie Faulkner outsourced the track selection of their most recent compilation, the 17-strong The Chosen Few (Epic). A veritable A-list of metal contemporaries and followers picked the selections, a roster of automatics and deep cuts from Slayer to Metallica, Osbourne to Alice Cooper, and David Coverdale to Lamb Of God’s Randy Blythe, the latter pair of which each chose Priest’s cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “The Green Manalishi.”

“As the years have gone by you obviously become more experienced as a songwriter,” Tipton says. “On the other side of the coin, there were times where we’d write one thing and write another, and put those two together. And probably there’s some bit of naivete there. But the actual fact is that naivete may have worked for us and done something quite unusual that you wouldn’t have done if you [thought like] an experienced songwriter. You do gain experience at it, but whether that’s a good thing I don’t know. You just have to look at it.”

He’s reluctant to pick favorite sons – hence the manner in which they approached Chosen Few – but Tipton marvels at the sheer quantity the band amassed.

– Steve Forstneger

For the complete interivew, click the November issue’s cover thumbnail, or grab a copy free throughout Chicagoland.

Walking away from what some consider to be the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band might seem like a shocking and perplexing decision. But when speaking with Bill Wyman about his retirement from The Rolling Stones to form The Rhythm Kings, it was simply a matter of personal preference. Though he’s told the tale before, the founding bassist – who’d logged 31 years of service – was simply sick of traveling by air and, perhaps more importantly, wanted to dive deeper into vintage blues, jazz, and good old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll.

“There was a gap [after leaving The Stones in 1992] when I wrote a book, opened a restaurant, and got married, so there was a space before starting The Rhythm Kings,” he explains via phone from his U.K. home. “When we started touring, the audience would yell out for Stones’ songs and I used to say, ‘Sorry guys: this ain’t The Stones, this is The Rhythm Kings and we don’t do Stones songs.’ Then soon after that, nobody ever yelled anymore and they just accepted what we were doing and they loved it. I’m still doing it with them because it’s such a pleasure to go out there and play just a whole variety of music to an audience. We’ll play a blues song, then a soul song like ‘Land Of A Thousand Dances,’ then we’ll do a ballad, then a JJ Cale song, then maybe Fats Waller, Chuck Berry, or Elmore James – everything’s possible in this band.”

Wyman’s quest for variety over the past decade and a half arrives on full display on the brand new Collectors’ Edition Box Set (Proper American). The five-disc set bundles the studio projects Struttin’ Our Stuff (1997), Anyway The Wind Blows (1999), Groovin’ (2000), and the double-disc Double Bill (2001).

The 66 tracks span four hours, excavating obscure memories from Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Cab Calloway, and Louis Jordan, alongside a slew of like-minded originals.

“We basically just want to show people there’s so much nice music out there that [has been] forgotten about,” explains Wyman. “You do have your collectors who know about this kind of music, but the general public isn’t aware of certain people from the past. It’s nice to do these archeological digs into music and come out with these little gems from the ’20s to the ’70s. We just redo them as close to the original as possible, while making sure you capture the original essence.”

Though fans in England have already become privy to such discoveries, Collectors’ Edition Box Set marks the first time American audiences can devour the discs domestically. And considering Wyman insists he’ll never board an airplane again, it remains the only opportunity for American fans to capture The Rhythm Kings in any format.

“We’ve had offers to tour America, Japan, Australia, and everywhere really, but I don’t fly anymore, so that’s out the window,” he assures. “I might come if you build a tunnel or a bridge, but I did it 40 years and I just got sick and tired of it. I was flying when I was doing my military service way before The Stones, and so I’ve been flying all my life. With The Rhythm Kings, we get in a coach and drive through Scandinavia, Finland, Eastern Europe, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, Holland – you name it. And we get to see the countryside, which I never got to when I was in The Stones. All we saw was the airports, the hotels, and the gig.”

At 74-years old, Wyman is certainly taking more time to soak up the scenery, but he’s far from sedentary, also moonlighting with careers as an author, photographer, and even amateur archeologist. However, he’ll put all those interests on hold for a 38-city European tour this fall alongside The Rhythm Kings and special guest collaborator Mary Wilson from The Supremes.

– Andy Argyrakis

For the complete interivew, click the November issue’s cover thumbnail, or grab a copy free throughout Chicagoland.

When one mentions Disneyland, perhaps the most immediate connotation is “The happiest place on Earth” – a location built around innocence and happiness where one can engage in childlike celebration.

Such is not the case for Madina Lake.

Appearing: December 16th at Mojoes in Joliet with Me Talk Pretty.

“We called [our situation] ‘Disneyland’ to try to cushion the blow on our own end,” quips bassist Matthew Leone. In late 2009, the band were dropped by Roadrunner Records, which had released the group’s Attics To Eden only months prior. It sparked a run of bad luck that was of cartoonish proportions.

“Once the record deal was gone, [our] management company just absolutely disappeared,” he recalls. “From booking agents to everybody, as soon as the band gets dropped, nobody’s conviction really [held] enough weight to stick by the band. Everybody bailed. So, we were sitting here as a band that is left sort of with nothing but our conviction, our hard work, and belief that it will ultimately work out.”

Unfortunately for Madina Lake – which includes brothers Matthew and Nathan Leone, drummer Dan Torelli, and guitarist/programmer Mateo Camargo – the worst was yet to come, especially for the Leones. For Nathan, that meant a painful and sudden romantic separation.

“We’re not really one of those bands that writes a lot about heartbreak,” Matthew submits, “but Nathan had been dating this girl, who he thought was the love of his life, and, they were talking about plans to get their life going, to move forward with the relationship, and it was a very fulfilling feeling for Nathan. And suddenly, that all vanished. There was like a sort of, I guess, a mental condition that was veiled, that Nathan didn’t see. It sort of came undone, and she disappeared from his life overnight.”

Yet nothing could have prepared anyone for what would happen to Matthew Leone in June 2010. Coming upon a violent domestic fight, the bassist leapt into action to the woman’s aid. The heroic gesture would prove costly, however, as the attacker turned his aggression on the interloper. The beating not only left Leone with a fractured skull, broken jaw, and swelling in his brain, but put him in a five-day coma. It was a trauma that inspired and heavily plays into the band’s latest full length, World War III (Razor & Tie).

Released this past September, WWIII is the sound of artists finding solace in their craft. That the record was made at all, let alone released not even 18 months after the attack (whose perpetrator awaits trial), is nothing short of a miracle. It’s a turnaround that’s as surprising to Matthew as anyone, and he says the album’s creation was “one of those situations where you have to be totally flexible and prepared for when the sort of inspirational iron strikes. And, that happened to strike so hard and in such an overabundance that, we were all so filled with an emotional intensity, and enduring and surviving something that has been, really, the pinnacle of our challenges of life to date. So, to try to schedule or plan things under the circumstances we were dealing with last summer was impossible. I was beyond fortunate enough to get myself to a point where I was able and capable of doing it, just while Nathan was being able to translate everything we were enduring into the lyrical sentiment that he wanted. So, as soon as I was ready to do it, we were in there doing it to the best of what my energy would allow and everything else.”

Not surprisingly, the record serves as therapy.

“People talk about when they’re making music it’s sort of this cathartic purging for them,” he says, “and, yes, it was cathartic in that sense. Almost beyond any sort of measurable degree. It became, obviously, the most personal and important record we’d ever done. So we decided at that point that all we cared about was this record seeing the light of day.”

Indeed, WWIII is a highly personal listen, as evident in the anthemic and unsettled “Across 5 Oceans,” which offers a chorus of “Now that it’s over/I’m moving on/I got a life of mine to live.” While the lyrics are a response to Nathan’s lost love, they could just as well have been written to reflect Matthew’s situation, even having been penned prior to the attack. It’s a parallel the bassist sees, as well.

“Nathan’s lyrics have always had this weird, sort of prophetic element to them,” he confirms. “To where, at the time, for whatever purpose he’s writing them, they always wind up having this grave significance to events that would happen later. When I listen to that song, I barely even remember the intent with which he wrote them, but I am able to internalize them and see them for the sort of big picture.”

Yet nowhere is the record more vulnerable and a brother’s pain laid more bare than on the deceptively poppy “We Got This,” the emotional centerpiece that recounts how Nathan learned of his twin’s assault. If you find lines like, “I missed two calls and when we talk/you ask me why you’re in an ambulance,” particularly gut-wrenching, you’re not alone.

“I heard the lyrics one time, and, that was the last time that I would ever hear those,” Matthew admits. “When I was recording my parts to it, I had them mute the vocal track because I could not even get through the song while hearing those.

“When I was writing my bassline,” he continues, his voice cracking at the thought of the track, “it was probably one of the most simplistic on the album, because that was really me just trying to survive and get through it, knowing what that song meant. It’s just too powerful for me to deal with.”

Not every song on WWIII bears such weight. The especially crunchy and riff-laden “Imagineer” is the result of a collaboration with Billy Corgan. The pairing came after Smashing Pumpkins headlined a benefit for Matthew at Metro in July 2010. At the time, Corgan had never met them.

“[Billy] began to investigate who I was and who we were,” he says. “And then, fortunately, the people he asked, the [Metro owner] Joe Shanahans and the [ex-Filter/SP drummer] Matt Walkers of the world, who we do know, they told him a little bit about me, and sort of the spirit that I’ve had throughout my relationship with them, and that sold him on doing the show. So, after I got to a point where I was coherent and comfortable enough, about a year later, I wrote an e-mail thanking him. And, of course, the three or four people I showed it to, including the person who was going to pass the message on to him, they’re like, ‘Look, this is a little obscure, it’s a little out there. Are you sure you want me to send this?’ and, I said, ‘Yeah. Because it’s honest, and it’s a little bit eccentric, and that’s who I am. So just send it.’ So, against their better judgement, they did. And, as luck would have it, it resonated with Billy Corgan, and he wrote me back just such a profound, beautiful, powerful e-mail that it blew my mind. And that set off a correspondence between him and myself, that ultimately led to him inviting us to Sedona [Arizona, where Corgan has been recording new Pumpkins material] to write a song. And, I was going to go out there to do a final phase of my healing, to try to get ready to tour, ’cause that’s such a perfect place to do that. So, Nathan and I went out there and he welcomed us into his world, we spent five days in the studio with him while he was working on Pumpkins stuff, and then, on day six, he said, ‘Well, let’s work on a Madina song.’ And, there we had it.”

The last chapter in a narrative running through their catalog, the band’s real-world tragedies played right into World War III’s themes, and vice-versa.

“We wound up with a record that really epitomizes everything that we were going through and went through,” Leone affirms. “And, as luck would have it, it sort of also played right into the third and final installment of that sort of over-ambitious, grandiose concept thing that we tried to do. What we had set out to postulate from day one,” he continues, “was we sort of noticed the collective shift in values to, I guess, people really sort of exploring themselves and their consciousness and their subconscious, from, wondering what this is all about, and wondering if we’re in this world or that world.”

Understandably, the trials and traumas of the last two years, from label trouble to the attack, have granted the band a whole new perspective. As such, Leone speaks of the band’s “dramatic shift in priority in that it no longer became about how many [records] are we gonna sell, are we going to be able to keep our deal, are we going to be able to sustain our life and career making music, how is it going to be perceived by press, blah blah blah. After everything happened, none of that mattered.”

He explains, “Before in our career, achievement was always something that we were trying to attain that looked different to us. Like, achievement was, ‘Is it affecting this many people, or making sure these people took it the right way and understood it?’ None of that matters. Achievement to us took on a whole new meaning, and that’s for the best. So we could drop a little bit of our obsessive neurosis about how many people were hearing it and whether they liked it or not. It turned into something that was already an achievement in our mind, the second we delivered it. So, we now just feel accomplished and grateful and overjoyed that it is a record that is out there. This one was for us. This is like our selfish sort of desire to just get this out and let it be cathartic to us and that’s fine. We weren’t attached to any outcome, and we’re still not.”

For the members of Madina Lake, being here today is enough.

– Jaime de’Medici

The whole point of this exercise was to find who in pop music was most consistently mindful of Halloween. And if you didn’t know where it was going, well, if you don’t know now you know.

Where would this list be without Helloween? The German trailblazers have a pumpkin in their logo, wrote the best 13-plus minute song about Halloween ever, and, oh, their name is Helloween. More than 20 years after the classic Keeper Of The Seven Keys releases, Helloween continue to be one of the best power metal bands in the world, too. It’s Halloweeeeeeeeeen!

Click the October issue’s cover to read the full feature, or follow the tabs to Monthly –> Features for the previous entries.

Everyday Is Halloween wraps on Monday, and cruelly the calendar forces us to rush through our 4-3-2-1 but dumping a weekend at a crucial point. Lux wouldn’t have wanted it that way.

Pyschobilly – for better or worse – exists because The Cramps willed it. Only New York could produce a golden-age/surf-rock hybrid, and naturally it would concern itself with werewolves, zombies, and a compulsively topless frontman named Lux Interior. The secret weapon was the contagious guitarwork of Poison Ivy, whose endless supply of reverbed chords could only have been a gift from below.

Goth seemed a strange place for The Damned to end up because, despite their name, their debut album (the first British punk classic) looked like the aftermath of a cake fight and rocked at warp speed. The Cure got simply too popular and, unlike Gene Simmons, once (most of) Robert Smith’s makeup came off it stayed off. In that regard, goth will always be the purview of Peter Murphy and Bauhaus, whose incorruptible search for meaning in the darkness made for equally compelling theater. Sorry, theatre. Peter Murphy plays Metro on November 26th.

October 30th
It’s Halloween tradition for someone to get ambushed by bigger kids with eggs or shaving cream, who might also steal your loot and make your parents suffer having a child who’s a perennial target for teepeeing. Such should be the fate of mascara-lined Twilight-saga pop-punks My Chemical Romance and AFI, whose shadowy affectations should include less Chris Kattan and more Bela Lugosi.

Click the October issue’s cover to read the full feature, or follow the tabs to Monthly –> Features for the previous entries.

This Everyday Is Halloween’s for ghoulish cover images everywhere, though no one’s ever successfully recreated the most Halloween of all: a front lawn covered in cotton spiderwebs.

Oh, the perils of buying albums for their cover art. Thousands of metal fans raced home to put their styluses on Only Theatre Of Pain, only to learn that Christian Death were a pouty, moaning, post-punk mess. Draped in campy Satanic imagery and enthralled by candles, incense, roses, and corny backmasking, if you squint enough you could imagine Bob Mould making racket like this had he understood he was gay waaaay earlier. And also a vampire.

Click the October issue’s cover to read the full feature, or follow the tabs to Monthly –> Features for the previous entries.

Not everyday of Everyday Is Halloween has to be an artist. It could be many artists, driven by the same ghoulish cause. (Or money. You never can tell.)

The ’90s movie-soundtrack boom provided some wonderful mixtapes as cassettes faded away, but none so breathlessly captured a movie’s look through music as The Crow’s did. Opening with The Cure, it stalked along a tracklist that on paper (Stone Temple Pilots, Pantera, My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult) looks like a disaster but meshes seamlessly. Henry Rollins bellowing Suicide’s “Ghostrider” like drunken, Danzig karaoke may have been a bridge too far, but Nine Inch Nails‘ cover of “Dead Souls” turned kids on to Joy Division years before anyone would arrive via Interpol. Brandon Lee got 14 bands for his funeral.

Click the October issue’s cover to read the full feature, or follow the tabs to Monthly –> Features for the previous entries.

Nothing’s shocking? After a flabby victory-lap tour with Slayer, Marilyn Manson looks to rebuild his mojo with a big budget and a set of needles to promote Born Villain.

Equal parts self-loathing industrial nihilism and Jim Rose Circus, Marilyn Manson couldn’t be (have been?) more transparently manufactured yet delightfully entertaining. Were it not for a sleazy Eurythmics cover, we might not have gotten past step one, much less toward the speculation that he was really Paul from “The Wonder Years,” or the reckless accusations that he was somehow responsible for the Columbine tragedy.

Click the October issue’s cover to read the full feature, or follow the tabs to Monthly –> Features for the previous entries.

Everyday Is Halloween dusts the weekend off its shoulders and returns for the 24th. We’ve only got a week left of these babies!

“The skulls . . . the bodies . . . you give it all such a glow! I don’t know if it’s art, but I like it!” The Joker would have given this flattering assessment to the collective work of Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle, and Einsturzende Neubauten. Too abrasive for avant-garde jazz and too brutal for progressive rock, this is music to blast on Halloween when you care less about hooking up and more about giving your kids bad dreams to go with their upset stomachs.

Click the October issue’s cover to read the full feature, or follow the tabs to Monthly –> Features for the previous entries.

Any chumballone can throw on a Slayer record to soundtrack his Halloween party. Sometimes your guests call for something far more eclectic. Like Mercyful Fate. Just kidding. Terrence Flamm cooked up his ideal mix.

Bohemia “Hydrogenic” – This punk masterpiece from the ’80s Chicago band takes aim at the perils of nuclear energy with satiric girl-meets-mutant lyrics like, “Momma says you’re different with your long green hair/You’ve got webs between your fingers, but I don’t even care.” The high-speed arrangement is built on guitars, keyboards, and lead singer Carla Evonne’s inspired vocals.

The B-52’s “Planet Claire” – Fred Schneider’s hilariously overwrought vocals certainly add to the Halloween-party ambience of this sci-fi nonsense about a headless visitor who travels from a distant galaxy in a Plymouth Satellite. But it’s the eerie synthesizers that make everyone wanna dance.

Lene Lovich “Bird Song” – In a dark twist on the expression “a little bird told me,” Lovich delivers the gothic tale of losing her man to a scheming feathered creature, with a Norma Desmond-style intensity. Her high-pitched warbling and a male choir complement the ominous goth/new wave atmosphere.

David Bowie “Cat People Theme (Putting Out Fire)” – Set to a haunting synth and guitar backdrop by Giorgio Moroder, Bowie’s lyrics depict the doomed feline characters from Paul Schrader’s flick. When he emerges from the tribal intro singing, “See these eyes so green/I can stare for a 1,000 years,” it’s impossible not to believe him.

Hoodoo Gurus “Dig It Up” – Using a galloping beat and twanging guitars that raise the spirit of The Cramps, this darkly funny song depicts a guy who won’t let death separate him from his sweetheart. Lead vocalist Dave Faulkner howls tormented lines like, “My girlfriend lives in the ground,” and, “You can’t bury love, you gotta dig it up.”

Blue Oyster Cult “Don’t Fear The Reaper” – The hard-rock band seductively sells a Romeo & Juliet concept of suicide as the ultimate expression of love through a strong melody and intricate harmony vocals. The song ends with a happily departed couple looking back on the living.

R.E.M. Pretty much everything on Chronic Town and Murmur – The album covers for R.E.M.’s debut EP and LP depict a gargoyle and a threatening field of kudzu respectively. That signals a journey into garbled vocals and dark but melodic songs. The jangling “Wolves, Lower” and “Pilgrimage” in particular suggested something sinister going on, while the ballad “Perfect Circle” could have served as a soundtrack for a séance.

Queen “White Queen” – An almost Shakespearean tale of unrequited love that mixes traditional English folk and hard rock. A secretive swain keeping a nightly vigil for his dream maiden, declares, “The White Queen walks and the night grows pale.” There’s an underlying feel that the sad-eyed damsel needs to be rescued from tragic fate.

Crosby, Stills & Nash “Guinnevere” – This seafaring yarn with incredible harmonies proves Hitchcock’s theory that suggesting horror is sometimes scarier than actually showing it. The title character mysteriously vanished while experimenting with the supernatural in a tropical paradise, and a second woman seems to be following in her footsteps.

– Terrence Flamm

With only 10 days left in our Halloween sales event, we’re giving away three entries at a time. This weekend only!

October 21st
One of the greatest deadpan lines in an IE interview came from Gwar overlord Oderus: “You humans are all about appearances.” For several years, the band’s intergalactic battles annually engaged Chicago on or around Halloween, so it’s an honor that their graces have chosen the night of to celebrate with us in 2011. “It absolutely pains me to think about how pitiful and miserable everyone else is,” he told us. “But it actually brings me joy.” Gwar appear at House Of Blues on October 31st.

October 22nd
The scariest thing about Slipknot isn’t the costumes or psychotically ferocious aggro/nu-metal, but their legions of Maggot fanatics who personify America’s imminent demise.

October 23rd
Even if he hadn’t recorded (and subsequently distanced himself from) the song that gives our issue its title, Al Jourgensen and Ministry (and Revolting Cocks and 1,000 Homo DJs, and Buck Satan, and . . . ) would have found their way here. Psalm 69 might be the ultimate Halloween album to please both goths and metalheads, and as for Jourgensen – well, just look at him. Rob Zombie and Trent Reznor have both surpassed him commercially, but that doesn’t mean they both don’t want to still be Al. Ministry appear June 28th & 29th at Vic Theatre.

Click the October issue’s cover to read the full feature, or follow the tabs to Monthly –> Features for the previous entries.

I don’t wanna grow up, I’m an Australian kid!

Feminists and parents hammered the likes of Britney Spears for perpetuating the pedophiliac school-girl look, yet each year Angus Young skates off scott-free. Like his brother Malcolm’s riffs, the AC/DC icon hasn’t changed his laddish style once. Though while the look guarantees that a man in a similar costume won’t get called “slut,” it makes certain that person would never be troubled by lustful eyes ever again.

Click the October issue’s cover to read the full feature, or follow the tabs to Monthly –> Features for the previous entries.

In our October 18th edition of Everyday Is Halloween, we turn to one of the longest running spooky music traditions in Chicago — year ’round.

In a twist on the Ministry song that gives our issue its name, DJ Scary Lady Sarah decided any day could be Halloween when she began her Nocturna nights 23-years ago. With Neo stubbornly holding the goth/industrial line in Lincoln Park, Sarah moved Nocturna across the street from Wrigley to Smart Bar, while her American Gothic Productions and Chicago Goth Meetups ensure that her trademark style continues to reach the darkest corners. The annual Nocturna All Hallow’s Eve Ball is the 29th at Bottom Lounge.

Click the October issue’s cover to read the full feature, or follow the tabs to Monthly –> Features for the previous entries.

No one has embraced Halloween and horror’s cliches like this man, yet turned them into something so idiosyncratic and identifiable.

Rob Zombie gives few interviews because they feel like work to him – the lazy bastard would rather fritter his time away making sure every miniscule detail in his music and movies meets the specifications of his beloved, B-movie horror favorites. As a sign of which format he’s come to prefer since “Beavis & Butthead” handed him a lifeline, he cleaned up his image for 2006’s Educated Horses, and then indulged the malodorous Tinseltown custom of crafting an inferior sequel to an outstanding original.

Click the October issue’s cover to read the full feature, or follow the tabs to Monthly –> Features for the previous entries.