Clear Skies

The Reputation, Low Skies
Schubas, Chicago
Saturday, January 7, 2006

Update: Due to an onset of bronchitis, Low Skies have cancelled their appearance. The Reputation and 8th Grade will still perform.

Low Skies‘ second album, anxiously waiting for a calendar flip to February, confirms what their debut, The Bed, did in 2003: these guys know how to set the scene. It’s hard to remember a Chicago band that has ever created moods like the disquieting All The Love I Could Find (Flameshovel), which is akin to waiting — half drunk — for a lover to come home and surprise them with their own infidelity.

Through their brief existence, Jeff Buckley’s name gets attached to Low Skies’ sound, though Christopher Salveter‘s voice never approaches those freakish operettas. More awkwardly, Low Skies are a sexually repressed marriage of The Afghan Whigs and Laughing Stock-mode Talk Talk sung by Nicolai Dunger, lurking with bated breath and knives drawn. Love could be a potentially fatal album for Low Skies if newcomers seek more action, because it waits and flails (“Sweet Young Girls”) and even flutters (“You Can’t Help Those People”). But like its album cover — a painstaking pieced-together collage of the word “love” cut from usage in a single edition of the Chicago Tribune — it’s both sweet and disturbed, past infatuation and speeding toward danger.

Less renowned for their subtlety is headliner The Reputation, whose arrows are routinely pulled from their quiver. Frontwoman Elizabeth Elmore was always viewed as Chicago’s bitchy slut to Liz Phair’s indie queen, but with 2004’s To Force A Fate (Lookout!) showed a less caustic side (“Some Senseless Day”) and veered away from sexual politics (“Bone-Tired,” “Bottle Rocket Battles”). Expected to unveil more on Saturday from a forthcoming disc — due around time for South By Southwest in mid-March — it’s becoming harder to say her Reputation precedes her.

8th Grade opens.

— Steve Forstneger

Click here to download “Face It” by The Reputation.

Click here to download “Ready To Be Done” by Low Skies.

Category: Stage Buzz, Weekly