#Chicago Indie Critics

[awardswatcherik]

2022 Chicago Indie Critics (CIC) winners

2022 Chicago Indie Critics (CIC) winners

[thejewofkansas]

Awards Season 2023-24: Awards Round-Up 2/6

This is the last Awards Round-Up of the season. There are a few groups that haven’t gone, but at this point it’s the guilds we’re interested in. Those’ll really point the way to what wins the Oscar. Today we have eight groups, including my hometown crew: Black Reel Awards (BRA) Chicago Indie Critics (CIC) Houston Film Critics Society (HFCS) Iowa Film Critics Association (IFCA) Kansas City…

[utronabalcone]

crystal castles: "we predict a riot",  jun 17, 2008 

PART 2

crystal castles gained international attention after a uk record label discovered a rough recording of a mic check dubbed alice practice that the band put on myspace in 2005 and forgot about for six months. this led to a series of limited-edition 7-inches on various hip uk imprints that sold out immediately. suddenly, glass and kath were being courted by labels amidst a whirlwind of touring over the past two years.

“the bidding wars in some countries were pretty intense. they just kept throwing bigger numbers at us. i think it’s because they work so hard promoting bands and then no one cares. no one promoted us and everyone cares, so they all want a piece of that.” - kath 

though their strange success story may be credited to the power of the internet, don’t expect them to be spokes people for the demise of the record label. they want their fans to hear the music, and apparently the fans actually do still want to buy cds. their myspace page is flooded with messages from people trying to find their still-unreleased disc.

“people assume that because everyone talks about us, there’s a cd in the stores,” - kath says.

the label is so concerned that the album might get leaked online that it hasn’t released any preview copies, so we’ve been listening to the disc while we talk. nevertheless, a widely downloaded and reviewed version has been passed around the file-sharing sites, which will cause much confusion when the real album actually drops.

“i originally gave alice a cd of 24 songs to choose from back when we first started, and some kid took 16 of them and put them up on the Internet as the album, and people have been reviewing it. i’ve actually read some very positive reviews for the 2004 demos.” - kath

the real album is sort of a chronology of the band, starting with some recordings from 2005 and ending not long ago. if you only know them from the notorious mic check song alice practice or their klaxxons remix, you may be surprised at how many soft and melodic moments join the high-octane distorto-dance listeners associated them with. the last track, an atmospheric ballad based on an acoustic guitar and 40 layers of glass’s voice, sounds more like the work of a shoegazer band like slowdive than anything you’d hear in a hipster dance club. which brings us to the biggest crystal castles contradiction: they make music for dance clubs but don’t actually like dance music. they see themselves as a punk band that happens to use synths, but you’d swear some moments on the record are gritty underground house music from the early days of chicago. kath and glass hate it that journalists sometimes characterize them as an accident, but how else do you explain how two people who hate disco are so good at it? to add to the strangeness, crystal castles have had considerable critical success crafting dance remixes for other indie bands, the last thing you expect from a pair you’d have a hard time dragging to an actual dance club.

“we started doing remixes because bands were contacting me when we were in desperate need of money. it was just good timing. bloc party wanted to pay us to remix their song, so I just chopped their vocals up over a crystal castles song we weren’t using. the thing I like about doing remixes is that I can get our fans some more crystal castles songs, sneak them another taste, because i used all unreleased songs that were just sitting on my laptop. on the road we listen to sonic youth, the stooges, joy division, black metal bands like emperor, mutilation. we’re not going to be listening to dance music.” - kath 

glass and kath first decided to work together because they loved all the same bands: aids wolf, sick lipstick, femme fatale.

“we wanted to do something like that without copying it, so instead of distorted guitars we’d use fucked-up keyboard sounds. but at the same time, i love new order and joy division, and wanted to use those kinds of dance beats. that’s what we set out to do: aids wolf get into a fight with new order." - kath 

to approximate the brutal attack of noise bands, they needed keyboard sounds that weren’t your usual trance presets, which brings us to the whole nintendo-pop sound they swear has nothing to do with video games. journalists and bloggers love to classify them alongside that whole chip-tune scene, bands that use actual video game technology to make lo-fi electronic music. but arcade nostalgia is the last thing the castles want to reference. 

“we both hate video games. we were just breaking apart electronics and toys to get annoying sounds. aids wolf is going to annoy you with guitars; we’re going to annoy you with the insides of old electronics. it’s circuit-bending, basically. you can get sounds out of any electronic device by opening it up and poking around. you can open up your watch, if it makes a blip, you can sample it and then use it as a synth. a long time ago I collected a bunch of sounds. i just opened up everything I could and recorded it all. my favourite ‘instrument’ was a circuit board from the early 70s that was made to teach budding electricians. every time you fucked up a circuit, it’d make a blip, and that was my favourite." - kath 

even if the similarity was unintentional, you can’t help but associate that 8-bit sound with 80s arcade machines. the fact that crystal castles is also the name of a vintage video game doesn’t help, even if the band is actually named after the home of cartoon vixen she-ra, princess of power. understandably, they might not want their career described as a series of unlikely flukes and happy musical accidents. but as much as they claim they sound exactly as they planned, they’ve still “accidentally” managed to succeed in areas they care little about or were even unaware of. electro-house heavyweights justice and myspace brat-rapper uffie show up to see them in paris, which doesn’t quite make sense for a band that wants to be aids wolf beating up new order. then again, as alice’s absence clearly demonstrates, crystal castles don’t really give a shit what we think and probably love that the rest of us find it hard to make sense of their success.

by benjamin boles, nowtoronto

photo by irene barros

[randomvarious]

Now listening:

Newbuild by State 808 (1988)

Yeah, yeah, I know that they're actually called 808 State, but before they flipped the name they were State 808. Anyways, I'm about to kick off my own 808 State summer with this debut release of theirs, which was the only album they ever made with Gerald Simpson, aka A Guy Called Gerald, who'd later go on to have a big hit of his own with "Voodoo Ray" the same year that this was released.

This album was also made before 808 State received a new infusion of youth with the addition of members Andy Barker and Darren Partington too, who were both much younger than the other two guys in the group, Graham Massey and Martin Price.

Newbuild is often hailed as a seminal album for acid house; a new direction that finds this Chicago-born dance music with a purely nutty, new, experimental, and avantgardist spin put on it that was doubtlessly inspired by nights spent at the New Order-run Hacienda club in Manchester, England, the city from which 808 State themselves hailed that also gave the world the wild Madchester scene as well, which saw bands like the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays pairing their alt and indie psychedelic rock sound with dance beats.

In '99, Aphex Twin re-released this album on his own Rephlex label, making it far more accessible than it ever had been before. Critic Paul Cooper referred to it as The Velvet Underground & Nico of acid house in a write-up for Pitchfork—almost no one listened to it when it originally came out, but for those who did, it had quite a profound effect on them.

So let's see if I end up digging this much beloved and critically acclaimed album 🤔.

Not on Spotify, but here's the full thing in a single YouTube video:

[lboogie1906]

Natalie Leota Henderson Hinderas (June 15, 1927 – July 22, 1987) was a pianist, composer, and professor at Temple University.

She began playing at the age of three, with formal lessons (piano and violin) beginning at six years of age. A child prodigy, she gave her first full-length recital at eight years old.

She received her BS in Music from Oberlin Conservatory. Assuming the name Natalie Hinderas, she did her post-graduate work at the Juilliard School of Music and the Philadelphia Conservatory. She made her Town Hall debut, receiving critical acclaim. She toured America, Europe, and the West Indies; with two tours of Africa and Asia sponsored by the State Department.

She signed a contract with NBC to perform in their owned and operated stations around the US playing recitals, concertos, and variety shows. She was the first African American to perform a subscription concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra after which, many other concerts followed. Some of the other venues where she played are the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, the Cleveland, Atlanta, New York, San Francisco, and Chicago Symphony Orchestras. Her performances included the Schumann Piano Concerto, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and Rachmaninoff’s Concerto #2.

She promoted and recorded works by African American performers and composers, among them R. Nathaniel Dett, William Grant Still, John W. Work, and George Walker. She received several awards and degrees including the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fellowship and an honorary doctorate from Swarthmore College. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence

[thoughtportal]

Emma Silvers May 23, 2018

Liz Phair is getting into character. She’s practicing her moves. She’s doing vocal exercises every night.

“You make these sounds for a really long time, like a monk, to try to get that lower register open,” she says, demonstrating a long, low hum. “Because my range has gotten way higher as I’ve gotten older.”

She’s calling from Los Angeles, a week after her 51st birthday. And the character for whom she’s in training is a 25-year-old version of Liz Phair, the one that released “Exile in Guyville” in 1993, the album that subsequently thrust her into the national spotlight — despite the fact that she had only played a handful of live shows.

“It was a disaster,” she recalls. “That’s not how you do it! I was already famous before I’d ever played live.”

But Phair needs to channel that person to properly perform that album, she says — which she plans to do for Bay Area fans Friday, June 1, at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco, as she tours intimate venues in support of the 25th anniversary reissue of “Girly-Sound to Guyville” (Matador), a seven-LP or three-CD box set complete with essays, interviews and remastered rarities. (The first half of the title refers to early Phair demo tapes that were, before now, mostly message board fodder for die-hard fans. This tour marks the first time she’ll perform the tracks live.)

“Exile” was a revelation when it hit the radio in 1993: sensitive and blunt, angry and funny, honest about sex and the alienation of being a creative girl in a guy’s scene. Framed as a wry response to the Rolling Stones’ “Exile on Main Street,” it stood in stark contrast to the bro-dominated grunge acts of the era, and quickly landed on critics’ best-of-the-year lists. Meanwhile Phair, a Chicago native and recent Oberlin College grad who had written most of her songs in her bedroom at her parents’ house, became an indie darling overnight.

It was in that spotlight that Phair was taken to task for her lyrics, whose sexual frankness (“I want to be your blowjob queen,” from the sing-songy track “Flower,” was among the most-quoted) barely moves the needle by today’s pop music standards. But in the ’90s, says Phair, “You were still judged according to the Slut-O-Meter.”

“I wanted it to be so outrageous and over the top that you had to talk about whether I could say it or not,” says Phair, whose penchant for performance art comes across in early interviews. “I wanted men and I wanted to have sex. I had those feelings, and I had those thoughts, so it was really about what you were allowed to exhibit. What you’re given ownership over, even in the real estate of your own inner life.”

In the 25 years since “Exile,” Phair has released five full-length albums, some to acclaim, and some — like her 2003 self-titled foray into slicker, more radio-friendly pop — to critical derision and cries of “sellout.” She also dabbles in other art forms: after finishing a double album with Ryan Adams recently (release date still to be announced), she turned her attention to a different kind of writing, inking a two-book deal with Random House in 2017. A memoir called “Horror Stories” will be published first; the second, she says, is tentatively organized around the theme of fairy tales.

Regardless of her medium, Phair’s impact and influence have grown more obvious with each passing year, especially as younger generations of feminists discover her landmark debut.

“Dude, I was ahead of my time. What can I say?” she says with a laugh, when asked about how well “Exile” has aged.

It’s 2018, and Beyoncé, whose brand is seeped in sexuality, just gave the performance of her life at age 36 — the same age Phair was when a New York Times review of her self-titled record painted her as a desperate, over-the-hill soccer mom for daring to still be sexual. Does our cultural landscape have more room for women as three-dimensional beings than it did in 1993?

“I do think we’re much further along,” says Phair. “But especially in the last couple years, with the Trump administration, it’s also shocking and deeply disturbing to realize how much further there still is to go.”

Which has, in turn, lit a fire under Phair in other ways.

“I have felt a definite need to be present, vocal and accounted for, because I need to be as strong and loud as these voices that are so horrifying to me,” she says. “We all do. The America that I believe we live in just needs to turn up its volume.”

In the meantime, those who caught Phair live circa 1993 can expect a much more technically skilled performance of “Exile” songs than the last time around. That said, Phair’s biggest strength remains the same: “It’s a testament to people’s appreciation of songwriting,” that fans stuck with her 25 years ago, she says, as she learned to play shows in real time.

“But I think that’s what I do better than other people. I don’t sing better or play better, but I have a kind of authorship. A voice.”

Emma Silvers is a Bay Area freelance writer.

[disappointingyet]

This is my now traditional list of favourite movies of the year. These are all films that – as far as I can tell – were first commercially available either in cinemas or on streaming in the UK this year. So it doesn’t include eg, Hit Man or The Holdovers. Other than that, these are solely being judged on: did I like them?

As I did last year, I’ve also written about other stuff I have seen that you might be interested in – which this time turned out to be so long I split it into two: Broadly Mainstream & Documentaries and Arthouse & Indie.

2023, then, the year of Barbenheimer (I saw Barbie, didn’t see Oppenheimer). And the year of the great superhero box office crash. Meanwhile, there were two austere French courtroom dramas critics loved, two films about young women born in Korea but raised elsewhere trying to make sense of their identities that also got excited reviews plus an avalanche of movies featuring cast members of Chicago restaurant TV drama The Bear.

I saw plenty of films, and there weren’t many I think I missed out on. Ridley Scott’s Napoleon felt like a film to watch with friends but we couldn’t sort out a time. Eileen and Dream Scenario sounded interesting but non-essential, but BlackBerry I very much did want to see but couldn’t get round to.  Saltburn generated a fair amount of debate, but by most accounts is precisely Ripley x Brideshead set in 2006 with tunes by Flo Rida and MGMT by the director of Promising Young Woman, and that’s a film I don’t need to see. 

Some near misses from this list: The Innocent, Alcarrás and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. Oh, yeah, and maybe the most fun I had in a cinema for what was officially a 2023 release was seeing the 4K etc restoration of Stop Making Sense, but a bit of a scrub-up does not equal an actual new movie. And on that note, here’s the list:

1. Kuolleet Lehdet (Fallen Leaves)

This is recommended cautiously – there are other films on this list I would steer most people towards before this one. But it is a movie I absolutely loved. I think it’s the 18th feature film made by director Aki Kaurismäki in a 40-year career, and easily in his five best. If you’ve never seen a Kaurismäki film, the easiest way to describe them is like Jim Jarmusch movies but Finnish. And if you haven’t even seen a Jarmusch film? Well, his movies are slow (but crucially short!). Most of the characters dress like they are living in the late 1950s or early ’60s and drink in bars that seem to come from that time too, but the films are set in the present day. The characters are usually somewhat on the margins of society and often somewhat lonely. There’s not a lot of dialogue. And, this is very important, they are funny as well as melancholy. In short, this is a very distinctive world that you’re likely to find either very appealing or pretty baffling.

Fallen Leaves is a simple story about a woman and a man who meet and have a series of misconnections while other stuff is happening in their lives. It’s very lovely but if you lose patience within the first 10 minutes, I get it, I really do. But I think it’s great. 

Full review here

2. Past Lives

We open with someone speculating about the two men and a woman drinking together in a New York bar at 4am – who are they to each other? Then we are whisked back to Seoul a couple of decades earlier, and gradually make our way to that late night and learn who Na Young/Nora (Greta Lee), Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and Arthur (John Magaro) are. Céline Song’s drama is about friendship and love but also very much about the trauma of (bourgeois) emigration – the sense that not only did you leave a place and its people behind, you left a version of yourself there.

It’s an elegant, restrained yet emotionally raw film. I was going to say it feels in places like a three-hander but would be to forget Hae Sung’s drinking buddies, who provide welcome comic relief. And when your quibbles are as nit-picky as ‘maybe one too many magic-hour shots’, then you’re talking a seriously good movie.

3. Rye Lane

Delightful romantic comedy that manages to both play by the rules of the genre and feel fresh. Girl meets boy at an art show and they spend a day and evening wandering around together and getting into low-stakes misadventures. Set and very tangibly filmed in places I know extremely well* and does so without triggering my ageing South Londoner’s prickly defensiveness.  (*In my review, I say that the geography is all plausible. Recently I had dinner with friends who live locally and have seen the film, and they were not buying into the idea that you would buy hot food at Brixton Market and eat it in Brockwell Park – approx 15 minutes walk away. Which I guess makes them even more South London than me...)

Full review here

(Disney +)

4. Fremont

Afghan interpreter for the US military tries to get to grips with life in California. Gruelling social realist drama about trauma and exile? Uplifting/flag-waving account of the power of living free? Broad culture-clash comedy? No? How about ultra low-key indie, filmed in lovely black & white, in which Donya (Anaita Wali Zada) shuffles between her job making fortune cookies and her sessions with an eccentric psychiatrist (Gregg Turkington). The b&w, the gentle eccentricity of many of the characters, how little Donya says even though she is on-screen in almost every scene, have prompted comparisons with Jim Jarmusch, which I think are fair, although there’s much less of the fetish-of-cool stuff here (also, as it happens, in none of the Jarmusch films with a sole protagonist is that character female.) Very little happens, and I really liked it.

5. Anatomie d’un chute (Anatomy Of A Fall)

Bloke falls to his death out of the window of his house up in the snowy French mountains – question is: accident, suicide, murder? If murder, the only suspect seems to be his widow (Sandra Hüller), a writer who doesn’t much like living in France, especially not in the mountains, and also doesn’t feel confident expressing herself in French (the bulk of her dialogue is in English), attitudes that doesn’t seem likely to endear her to the local media or legal system. Because, yes, this is a courtroom drama, if very much not one in the manner of John Grisham. It’s an intense, relentless film, one almost without a score (what music there is – and it’s important to the plot and the film – is mostly diegetic, but there is a little cheating on that). Hüller is very good as the protagonist we’re not meant to be sure whether to root for (although I’m inherently sympathetic to anyone who would rather be in London than stuck up a mountain, however beautiful that mountain is). A few side thoughts: the kid made me think of The Omen, the prosecutor of reality TV  judge Rob Rinder and I would have sworn blind that the defence lawyer was in some band that had an EP out on Creation Records in 1988, only the actor is about 15 years too young for that. 

(It’s a very good film.)

6. Asteroid City

Wes Anderson’s latest comes with multiple levels of story within story that felt unnecessary the first time I saw it – on rewatch they made more sense. But the main narrative – of parents and their children fetched up in a sun-baked nowhere town in the 1950s – I found effective and very moving both times. Anderson’s films always have at least an undertone of sadness, but this is probably his most directly mournful picture since Moonrise Kingdom. As usual with Anderson, the cast is ridiculously stacked – Tom Hanks fits in surprisingly well – and there are actors (Ed Norton, Adrien Brody) who are vastly better in his films than they generally are in anyone else’s. I laughed, I cried – no, I really did, and I think this was the only film this year that made me do both.

7. Killers Of The Flower Moon

Is Killers Of The Flower Moon a masterful piece of film-making, a supreme example of Martin Scorsese’s novelistic ability to guide a camera to the details that bring a culture to life, featuring a luminous performance from Lily Gladstone and telling an important story? Yes. Is it a sadistically long* movie that runs you through the same incidents three and sometimes four times, one that inflicts on us many scenes of Bob De Niro and Leo DiCaprio doing that terrible Method-bore jutting lip/downturned mouth thing at each other? Yes, that too. 

It tells an ugly tale from American history – we’re in the 1920s and oil is discovered on Osage land in Oklahoma, making that nation’s members all very rich. Inevitably, tragically, a lot of white folk aren’t having that, and start scheming about how they will get their hands on the wealth. What I wasn’t expecting is that along with the murder the film’s title previews, the plot involved lots of white guys marrying Osage women. It’s fascinating and horrible and Scorsese tells it with great images and some humour and there’s great casting. But it’s still unnecessarily long (think of the span of time covered in GoodFellas – and that came in at a respectable 2hrs 26mins).

*In the debate about whether there should be intermissions in this movie, some people were saying. ‘Who are you to presume to know more about films than Scorsese and his legendary editor Thelma Schoonmaker?’ Seems like a fair point… except: these are people who seemed to have thought Polar Expressing De Niro in The Irishman looked OK, so I’m saying their judgement isn’t what it was. 

8. Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse

By and large, the critical response to Across The Spider-Verse was split between those who felt it was even better than Into The Spider-Verse and those who thought it was good but lacked the ‘blimey, look at everything they are managing to do and oh my god it makes so much more sense to do superhero movies as animation than clunky CGI’ shock-of-the-new of the first film. The latter is basically my position: this is a very good film but Into The Spider-Verse was a near-instant classic.* ATSV is not as funny, and suffers (for me) from the fact that much of it happens at a larger scale and there’s more multiverse stuff to get your head around etc, and it ends on a cliffhanger (boo!) But it’s still easily the best big budget/action film of the year for my money.

(*Although somehow only 7th on my films of 2018 list! In retrospect, I’d move it up, but still only to maybe 3rd – 2018 turns out to have been a great year for films I like.)

9. Reality

If you are phobic to excruciating small talk, you should probably avoid this film. The dialogue comes entirely from an FBI transcript, and the agents spend a very long time trying to put their suspect at ease before finally getting to the questions about what she allegedly did. So many awkward attempted bits of connection about pet ownership and going to the gym…

It starts with Reality Winner (yes, that is the name of a real person), played by Sydney Sweeney, driving home. Before she’s out of the car, two FBI agents have come up to her window. Almost all of film is them and her standing outside her bungalow doing the prelims for the questioning and then finally going inside to interrogate her. It feels like real time but it’s not quite that. The look of the film is quite raw, there’s no score, it feels very plain although there are a couple of welcome weird touches. 

It’s an uncomfortable watch, but if you can stay with it, it’s an impressive and rewarding film.

10. All The Beauty And The Bloodshed

This documentary wants to tell you two important stories. One is about the campaign to get artistic institutions to distance themselves from the Sackler family, the generous donors who (alas) made their money from Valium and Oxycontin. The second is a history of assorted art movements and bohemian scenes of the late 20th-century US. The person whose life connects all this is the photographer Nan Goldin (the art world’s most influential figure, apparently). Goldin’s pictures are also a key part of this film’s visual appeal, and the director Laura Poitras is well of aware of that, and happy to give them the space they deserve. Quite a brutal watch, but worth it. 

Full review here

11. Wham!

The angle this documentary takes gives us the story of Andrew Ridgeley and George Michael as a benign version of Single White Female with a touch of All About Eve crossed with Pygmalion. Here, the person who has had their look and career appropriated turns out to have been coaching the impersonator and at the end wishes them well as they soar off into superstardom. 

That’s how I’ve long understood the Wham! story but this fills in the details and adds some ambiguity: Ridgeley enjoyed songwriting and being tagged the ‘talentless one’ clearly hurt him. The image choices that led some to assume George Michael was gay (many years before he came/was forced out) were actually made by his busily straight bandmate – we were right for the wrong reasons, which is to say wrong. But what I found fascinating is that once George* – who had been strong-armed by Andrew into a music career – started to understand how good he could be, he developed a Michael Jordan-esque competitive fury.

The voices of the two Wham! members provide the bulk of the narrative, added to by lots of excellent archive. The short span of Wham!’s career is a huge plus for a pop documentary - it avoids the usual problem of what to do about the later stuff only the subjects of the film care about. Just like the band, the documentary knows how to stop when the going is good.

*I can’t treat ‘Michael’ as a surname in this context.

(Netflix)

[dustedmagazine]

Coventry — Our Lady of Perpetual Health (Septic Jukebox)

Our Lady Of Perpetual Health by Coventry

Coventry is a Chicago-based jangly folk-pop duo, made up of Mike Fox and Jon Massey. Both principals have been in bands before, Massey in Silo’s Choice, Animal Mother and Upstairs and Fox in Arthhur and Flesh of the Stars, but neither has made much of a splash. With so many bands vying for attention, you might wonder how their charming debut, Our Lady of Perpetual Health, entered our critical field of view. The answer is simple: they asked.

Of course, it’s not really that clear-cut. Lots of bands ask for a spin. Few get our collective ears, and fewer still become the subject of reviews. Not to be too full of ourselves. We all understand how insignificant Dusted is in the greater scheme of things, but we still get a fuck ton of promos.

Success depends a lot on when you ask, which is hard to time. You want to show up in the inbox when the writer isn’t completely buried, burnt out and this close to never reviewing another record. That’s hard to time, but deep summer is as good a guess as any. It also depends on how good you are. Here, the bar is high but not insurmountable. We all like finding something wonderful, especially if no one else is listening.

So about the record: it is damned good.  

Let’s start with the sunny sting of “Chain Wallet,” with its bubbly lilt and bittersweet haze of nostalgia, its slippery little guitar riff that cascades over a series of notes like the self-effacing protagonist of this song clearing his throat. Here I am. Love me. But no, he’s stopped up the toilet and broken the girl’s bathroom scale, and all the jaunty, indie rock jangle, all the tight harmonies are likely not much use. It’s an imperfect world, nice guys lose all the time, so why not make a song about it? There’s that riff again in scat format: diddle-diddle-doo, diddle-diddle-doo.

“Seneca” is even more endearing, with its hard-strummed guitars and soft, near-falsetto choruses, its gleeful hooks and rueful lyrics. “I see you bobbing on the ocean/I see your hand above the waves,” they croon giddily, and whether they’re seeing a swimmer or a drowner, it’s hard to say.

I do not love the soft, white boy funk of “Ottawa,” which puts me in mind of the Spin Doctors, and I think, overall, the best stuff comes in the album’s first half. However, the piano and organ-laced “Sprouts” has the rueful 1970s pop resonance of Eric Carmen, the stylized articulate drama of certain Destroyer songs.

Indeed, Our Lady of Perpetual Health seems like the sort of sunny but shadowed, catchy guitar pop album that used to arrive more regularly in our post boxes and email accounts. But maybe they have been and just got lost there? Very possible. Glad to have caught this one.

Jennifer Kelly

[stonefox-soph]

It’s been 10 years since LUCKI released his debut album ‘Alternative Trap’ and he’s been on a serious incline since.

10 years ago on the 26th of July, LUCKI released his debut body of work ‘Alternative Trap’ under the moniker LUCKI ECK$. We were greeted with a misty, surrealist production style, which in retrospect was reminiscent of the indie vogue that was beginning to dominate our radios at the time yet, dissimilar all the same. With LUCKI’s sound there was a jarring dissonance of subject matter, where he delicately boasted on the trivialities and truth of being a dealer, taking drugs and women, illustrating an imagery of a frenzied tempestuousness masked behind a gentle, hazy landscape; a young Mephistopheles in the garden of Eden. The rapper was only 17 and he spoke with a sophistication that we recognise with more established figures in the game, lulling us into an abstract fantasy that was simply a chronicle of his reality at the time.

10 years on from then his reality is completely different. We’ve listened to his music travel over several mixtapes and albums carrying callow yet profound motifs that were dictating his lifestyle, shaping the direction of the work. We listened to him in active addiction in ‘X’ (2015), then we listened to him conquer addiction in ‘Watch My Back’ (2017) - we listened to him find fame in ‘Almost There’ (2020), then we listened to him embrace fame in ‘s*x m*ney dr*gs’ (2023). A true artist that steadily germinated an organic adulation of fans that were rabid for his haunting poetry, we realised LUCKI’s music is at its core a portal into his psyche, enveloping us into his planet of vice, trauma and money; a respected personality within the Soundcloud community it was only inevitable for him to be dubbed the ‘Underground King’ and materialise into the overground.

At first glance LUCKI can be perceived as a misfit to the rap genre, twisting himself into a sound that is simultaneously dizzying and euthanizing, decorated with synths and reverbs to formulate a specific blend that vividly animates the taboo tales he casually recounts for us - both mystifying and revealing. Though it is that raw honesty which is the heart of the genre, offering a relatability to listeners that seems missing from what we tend to see outside, and it’s what draws us to him as he invites us into his vision which makes me believe he is anything but. Which makes sense as he told Complex in 2018 “everytime I drop a project, I reach a different fan base because I’m making a different type of music”. We realise he is a lamb in a lone wolf’s clothing. We’ve watched this Chicago juvenile transform into a bull as he’s now reached international critical and commercial acclaim, and fathered many sons that now emulate his music even so unknowingly - 10 years on it seems like he's seen it all. We can only wonder what is left for LUCKI to unlock.

Written by $tone Fox

[bubblesandgutz]

Every Record I Own - Day 764: Liz Phair Girly Sound to Guyville

I was 15-years-old when Exile in Guyville came out. At that age, I was in a phase where I was fixated on loud, angry punk music and didn’t have much of an appreciation for contemporary singer-songwriters. Furthermore, my knowledge of indie rock was limited to the late ‘80s SST roster. So while I was aware of Liz Phair and her debut album, it didn’t seem pertinent to my interests. And somehow, I managed to go nearly 27 years without ever hearing a note of it. 

And then in the spring of 2020, a younger friend of mine posted something about it online and I found myself thinking “shit, if the younger generation is latching onto it, then I gotta get caught up.” So I pulled up Exile in Guyville on my phone while I was puttering around in my backyard and sure enough... I fell for its charms almost instantly. I think I’d always assumed it was more of a conventional pop record... a solo artist backed by hired gun studio musicians. The cover looked like a cross between a fashion ad and Madonna’s “Justify My Love” video. I knew it was a very “sexual” record, which only reinforced my assumption that it was targeted towards a mainstream audience.

But what I heard in 2020 was a scrappy young musician singing these unadulterated, unflinching, and resilient songs about being a woman in a male-dominated scene. Yes, it was an unapologetically sexual album. And yes, Phair had an eye for visual art, understood the allure of fashion photography, and shaped the aesthetics of her debut album to tap into that enticement. But this wasn’t Madonna. As one critic noted, Liz Phair had the appeal of a friend’s cool older sister---the one that smoked cigarettes, dated older guys, went to shows with a fake ID, played guitar, and let you rifle through her record collection.

The lore surrounding the album is too much to tackle here, but certainly a part of its appeal---the modeling of the track listing off of Exile on Main Street, the signing to Matador off the strength of her bedroom four-track Girly-Sounds tapes, the connections to the thriving early ‘90s Chicago scene, etc. The thing is, it’s a fantastic record even without that context. Songs like “Help Me Mary” and “Never Said” are just bangin’ ‘90s alt-rock pop anthems, even as they tackle the more localized issue of shit-talking and misogyny in the Chicago music community. Phair was obviously an untrained singer and musician, her vocal style being very matter-of-fact and the mechanics of her guitar playing being fairly simple. But when you hear a song like “Soap Star Joe” or “Explain It to Me,” those qualities elevate the power of the music. Like so many great folk songs, the simplicity of song structure and the relatability of the singer give the music its emotional weight. 

Ultimately, there has been no shortage of great writing on Exile in Guyville, and whatever I type out here will in no way match... say... what Gina Arnold accomplished with her entry in the 33 1/3 book series. But even if it’s a fun album to run through the lens of critical analysis or to examine as a reflection of a specific time and place, to me it will always be a great album that I immediately fell in love with in my backyard on an unseasonably warm spring day during an otherwise bleak time. 

It became my soundtrack to the happier moments of the lockdown era of COVID. I listened to it while I basked in the sun in my backyard. I listened to it while I grilled on my barbecue. I listened to it over and over again on two long road trips out to my grandparent’s cabin in western Colorado. It’s an album that feels like a beam of positivity projected out of the darkness, and it consequently felt like a perfect salve during those uncertain days of Spring 2020. It was an intimate, diaristic window into another person’s life at a time when we were cut off from other humans. It’s brash, fun, catchy, brutally honest, and timeless, and as the Northwest has gotten its first few sun breaks suggesting the upcoming arrival of Spring, it’s an album I’ve found creeping back into rotation in anticipation of warmer days.

[awardswatcherik]

Chicago Indie Critics (CIC) Awards: 'Oppenheimer' Wins 7

[thejewofkansas]

Awards Season 2022-23: BAFTA Winners and Awards Round-Up 2/20

A film I’d never heard of – but at least one awards group really loved it. The BAFTAs were today. And…they made things interesting. My breakdown of the nominees is here. Best Film: All Quiet on the Western Front Not entirely surprising. They threw nominations at this one wholesale. This certainly bodes well for the Oscars, although it’s missing key nominations – Director, Editing, or any…

[cursedflesh]

( SINQUA WALLS, MASCULINE AGENDER, HE/THEY ) — Look who it is! If you take a look at our database, you’ll find that TERRENCE WALKER is a THIRTY-TWO ( THIRTY-FIVE ) year old GRAVEDIGGER / EX-MUSICIAN that has been in Chicago for THREE YEARS. According to government files, they’re a MUTANT on LEVEL THREE with the power of NECROMUTANT PHYSIOLOGY. That must be why they’re DECISIVE and APATHETIC. If you ask me, they remind me of LONG, SLEEPLESS NIGHTS, DRUMMING FINGERS ON EVERY SURFACE, AND A WORLD IN SHADES OF GRAY. They are affiliated with NOBODY.​​

background.

( tw: death )

while originally born in london, terrence couldn’t tell anyone the first bit about it. their parents emigrated from england shortly after their birth, taking their family of three away from their homeland and off to america. in essence, they traded one large, bustling city for one of equal measure—san francisco. it was there that he, at the small age of three years old, met another child ( of similar circumstances ) that would change his life forever—ihsan kaplan. the pair took to each other like peas in a pod, completely inseparable almost from the moment they locked eyes. to terrence’s parents, it was a blessing. how many kids had struggled to find friends after moving such a long way?

there was only one, teeny problem—as puberty hit, terry developed a mutation. while it was incredibly minor and invisible to the naked eye ( quicker personal healing, so they thought ) their parents were terrified of the backlash they might get if it was revealed. he was instructed not to share it with anyone... not even with his closest friend, ihsan. but more trouble was brewing. only a few short years later, they were approached by him with fears surrounding a similar ( if more severe ) situation with alara. not wanting to betray their parents wishes but hoping that they could help, they admitted their own status as a mutant to him... pleading that he not let anyone else know. from then on, their duo became much more like a trio, with alara accompanying them more frequently.

as the dust of their childhood hardships settled, as they grew, so too did their interests—in similar directions. music was a passion and an escape for them both, and something they had fast talent for, but ihsan’s creative vision was obvious and unparalleled. with two other musicians, hinging primarily off of his songwriting, they ended up forming a band. as with all things, the pickup was grueling. they played in run down bars during slow hours, putting every bit of their energy into something that, for the moment, nobody else seemed to care about.

it was one of ihsan’s best songs that finally had them take off, away from their small indie beginnings and into the mainstream... more or less. they were featured on the radio! it was beyond any one of their wildest dreams, and thanks to his best friend, they had finally made it into a reality. it didn’t last. as their careers grew, ihsan became to pull back from them, retreating into a solitude that they had never seen in him, before. when this weird behavior grew erratic enough to threaten their work ( their dreams! ) terrence finally had to step in and remove him from the band... and implore that he seek out help.

 they continued to dominate without their key visionary, but wilson red was changed forever. the sound, the writing—it was much more a collaborative effort between the remaining members ( and ihsan’s replacement ) of the band. but despite the heavy loss in their life, the hole drilled straight into their chest, things were going well... even perfect. once again, that didn’t last. a stage accident cut one of their tours short and ended with terrence’s critical injury, and later death—a death confirmed by every news outlet that could pump the story out fast enough.

and then... he woke up. only days later and in the process of an autopsy, long after the call had been made, he woke as if from a nightmare, insides splayed open for the two professionals ( the whole world, then ) to see. the incidents that took place after became a blur to them, but resulted in both people working on his bodily preparations deaths. something heavily covered up. suddenly, not only was he thrust back into the public stage, but he had no time at all to reconcile with anything that had happened. not his death, not his... mistakes, not the mutation he had clearly developed... it was somehow both as though he had never died at all, and all anyone could talk about. still, he was expected to return to his career.

but they couldn’t. everything was wrong, muted, and insignificant. only a month after his miraculous ( and terrifying ) return to the living, he silently quit his career and moved far, far away from anything he had ever known. if not to escape all those old expectations, then to give himself an opportunity to discover just what, exactly ailed him.

quick facts.

used to play in wilson red before dying and was a pretty significant celebrity because of it. fell immediately out of the public eye after their extremely publicized death situation.

still knows how to play the drums but he doesn’t actually play anymore. closest he gets is absentmindedly tapping on some surface. 

“lives” in the barest possible apartment. without the need to eat or drink or sleep and no passion for decoration... well, there’s not much they actually need.

bi... ;)

distantly related to leo. <3

possible connections.

other ex-bandmates: or anything having to do with the process... you get the picture.

old fans: don’t have to be crazy stans ( ideally not :elmo: ) but they were pretty popular for a while there! so even casual recognition is possible.

neighbors: they’re really the perfect one themselves. no noise, hardly ever home... i don’t know, there could be something here!

anything else: just love me please...

[randomvarious]

Today's compilation:

Animal Liberation 1987 Industrial / Post-Punk / Synthpop / New Wave

God, this thing is just so fucking on-brand for PETA, folks. Back in 1987, the oft-ridiculed animal rights activist org teamed up with Chicago heavyweight indie label Wax Trax! Records in order to release this benefit comp that saw its royalties go straight into PETA's own coffers. And, as you might expect, like clockwork, it was made up almost entirely of pure, unadulterated cringe 🥴.

Now, to be perfectly clear, I'm definitely not here to evaluate or criticize the merits of animal liberation as an ideology itself in this post, but people have to understand that if you're trying to convert others to your own way of thinking, you're not likely to get through to them with ridiculously over-the-top, preachy propaganda that, in true PETA fashion, will leave your target scratching their head and wondering if all of this is actually just some elaborate ruse or a silly bit. What I think would've been a far more effective tack to take during this era that saw the concept of the benefit comp really flourish would've been to include maybe a song or two about animal rights, and then have the rest of the comp filled out with a bunch of other non-topical goodies.

But obviously, PETA and Wax Trax! didn't end up doing that here. What they chose to do instead was load up this album with almost nothing but ridiculous songs about animal rights and animal liberation; songs that certainly reflect Wax Trax!'s own love of self-aware irony and detachment as a bastion of the intersection between industrial, synthpop and punk and post-punk music, but are not likely to translate into swaying anyone to alter their own consumer habits in order to help lessen the plight of animals themselves. It really feels like just about everyone on here knows that what they're doing is already too on the nose to be taken seriously, and so they're just deciding to act accordingly. Like, if you were to make fun of animal rights activists through the art of musical comedy, you would probably just release this album pretty much as it already is.

The only track on here that would've kept you from using this CD as a coaster is the final one, "Assault & Battery," by Howard Jones, who wasn't even ever a Wax Trax! artist in the first place! This song, like the rest of them, is about animal rights too, but it's a bit more poetic and compelling in how it deals with the subject, rather than the vast majority of this slate, which takes the route of being very lyrically dogmatic and deliberately straight-forward to the point of being exasperatingly eyeroll-inducing 🙄. But with "Assault & Battery," a song that had previously appeared on Jones' 1985 album, Dream Into Action, he pairs his trained piano background with some synthpop and ends up delivering what is, by far, the most captivating and enjoyable song on this album.

So, an exceedingly bad and torturous release that seems par for the course when it comes to PETA's history of overly lame attempts at being provocative rather than actually being thought-provoking, but there is still one very good tune on here; it's just that Wax Trax! had to go outside of their own catalogue in order to obtain it 😆.

Highlights:

Howard Jones - "Assault & Battery"

[brokentreeonline]

My Duduś from The New York Times on Vimeo.

During the summer of 2020, I returned home to Chicago during a break from my studies at the Łódź Film School in Poland. When I got there, my mother quietly walked me into a room where she gently pulled a strange, hairless creature out of a shoe box. It looked as if it had plummeted to earth from another planet.

“He’s sleeping,” she whispered as she opened the box. A tiny head peeked out from the mountain of towels, blankets and a homemade heating pad made out of a used white sock and rice. “What is that?” I asked. I squinted my eyes as I gently moved the blanket to expose the animal’s torso. “Is that a squirrel?” I looked over at her, and even though it was dark, her beaming smile lit up the room. “Yes,” she nodded.

My mother had found the baby squirrel abandoned in her yard. She contacted animal shelters nearby, but they were struggling to take in more animals during the Covid pandemic, so my mother began caring for him herself. My intuition told me to pick up a camera. I knew something special was happening. My mother, a Polish immigrant who had raised me by herself, had been dealing with her newly empty nest after I left for school, and I knew the joy that raising the squirrel would bring her.

After returning to Poland, I saw my mother raise him as she raised me — with meticulous love and care. But he was a wild animal, and eventually my mother had to do what all mothers do: let her child go out into the world. Here, I document their journey together.

- Director Tom Krawczyk 

A film by Tom Krawczyk Featuring Czesława Krawczyk-Miczejko, Duduś the Squirrel, Kazimierz Miczejko and Louie the Cat Produced by Nick J. Santore Cinematography by Tom Krawczyk Story & Edited by Colin Santangelo

OFFICIAL SELECTION: SXSW Film Festival Big Sky Documentary Film Festival — Best Mini-Doc Nomination Seattle International Film Festival Santa Barbara Film Festival SFFILM Festival Palm Springs International ShortFest Chicago Critics Film Festival — Audience Award The Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival Atlanta Docufest — Best Director Salute Your Shorts — Audience Award Sidewalk Film Festival Indie Street Film Festival Calgary International Film Festival — Honorable Mention Tallgrass Film Festival Charlotte Film Festival Drunken Film Fest Nashville Film Festival Hamptons International Film Festival DocsMX The Polish Film Festival Los Angeles Fresh Coast Film Festival Still Voices Film Festival

Learn more: coycoyote.com/My-Dudus nyti.ms/3gXkMBS

[atlasburdened]

#   𝐀𝐓𝐋𝐀𝐒𝐁𝐔𝐑𝐃𝐄𝐍𝐄𝐃   .          independent  ,  selective  ,  private             𝐌𝐔𝐋𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐔𝐒𝐄            featuring  muses  from  marvel  comics  ,  wednesday  ,  critical role  &  more            !           cherished  by  alexys      :   she  /  her  ;      30   .

𝐂𝐀𝐑𝐑𝐃  | 𝐏𝐈𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐄𝐒𝐓 | 𝐃𝐈𝐒𝐂𝐎 : 𝑎𝑣𝑎𝑖𝑙𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑒 𝑏𝑦 𝑟𝑒𝑞𝑢𝑒𝑠𝑡 .

𝐎𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐑 𝐁𝐋𝐎𝐆𝐒 :   princessofpranks | everlighted | baukitten

𝑟𝑢𝑙𝑒𝑠 & 𝑚𝑢𝑠𝑒𝑠 𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑟 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑐𝑢𝑡 !

rules ; 

one . indie selective multimuse roleplay blog. headcanon based and canon divergent. features muses from critical role , bridgerton, chicago fire , criminal minds & dc comics. cherished by alexys. two . this is a mutuals only & private multimuse blog. my portrayal can be & most likely will be canon divergent & headcanon based. triggering content may be present, whether i intend it or not. i will always tag something i believe might be triggering ( ex. # gore / ) but please let me know if i miss any or you have a person trigger that you need tagged and i will tag them right away. three . i am very open to shipping, canon or otherwise. this is a multiship blog, and all ships non-canon will be set in their own verse. ( & exclusivity in a ship will be discussed beforehand. ) that being said : not only do i need to plot a ship out extensively i would also rather ship with someone i am also comfortable with ooc. i have a tendency to be a little more than over anxious when it comes to shipping and by being in touch with someone ooc it makes it much easier for me when i know that the other person is invested. four . for my own comfort i will only be roleplaying with mutual followers, that being said i try not to discriminate when deciding who & who not to follow. that being said this blog is 18+ which means i will not be following/roleplaying with five . anti - jkr !!!

comic muses ; 

illyana rasputin / fc : anya taylor joy / 616 & hc based / primary mary jane watson / fc : samantha logan / 616 & tasm based / secondary 

literature muses ; 

calpurnia hartwell / fc : tamla kari / book based / secondary ginevra weasley / fc : kennedy mcmann / hc based , anti-jkr / secondary hermione granger / fc : antonia gentry / hc based , anti-jkr / primary lily evans-potter / fc : sophie skelton / hc based , anti-jkr / secondary penelope featherington / fc : nicola coughlan / book & show based / primary

television muses ; 

brienne of tarth / fc : gwendoline christie / canon divergent / secondary din djarin / fc : pedro pascal / canon compliant / secondary enid sinclair / fc : emma myers / canon compliant & hc based / primary grace ryder / fc : sierra mcclain / canon compliant / secondary lucy chen / fc : melissa o’neil / canon compliant & hc based / primary maddie buckley / fc : jennifer love hewitt / canon compliant & hc based / primary parker / fc : beth riesgraf / canon compliant / primary  rhaenyra targaryen / fc : emma d’arcy / canon divergent / secondary stella kidd / fc : miranda rae mayo / canon compliant / secondary temperance brennan / fc : emily deschanel / canon compliant & hc based / primary veronica mars / fc : kristen bell / canon divergent / secondary

ttrpg muses ; 

cassandra johanna klossowski de rolo / fc : crystal reed / secondary imogen temult / fc : meaghan rath / canon compliant & hc based / primary juniper shorthalt-trickfoot / fc : antonia gentry / hc based / secondary keyleth of the air ashari / fc : malese jow / stream based / secondary maya agrupnin / fc : n/a / canon compliant & hc based / tertiary