Best of Chicago 2013: Music & Nightlife

on June 20, 2013 at 4:00AM

Best Hyped Youngsters Who Can't Play Your Neighborhood Bar

Twin Peaks

by Kevin Warwick on June 19, 2013 at 2:45PM

Maybe you could persuade a pushover promoter or bar owner to let your band play a 21-and-up spot if only one member is underage, provided the youngster has a guardian around and vacates the premises immediately after the set. But everyone in Twin Peaks is a teenager—on a couple occasions they've showed up at venues with their gear and gotten bounced at the door.

Best Rock Band

The Cairo Gang

by Peter Margasak on June 19, 2013 at 2:45PM

Guitarist Emmett Kelly was recognized as a wunderkind not long after moving to Chicago in 2004, but until recently the best showcase for his talents was his role as crucial creative foil for Will Oldham (aka Bonnie "Prince" Billy); his own work, under the Cairo Gang name, often felt malnourished and tentative. That's all changed.

Best Band With a Front Woman Who Looks Hot Even in a Monster Mask

Toupee

by Steve Krakow on June 19, 2013 at 2:45PM

Toupee are one of Chicago's most interesting bands, both visually and sonically, and they put on a live show you won't soon forget. Everybody swaps instruments unrelentingly, so that Nick Hagen (guitar, some bass), Mark Ragassi (bass, some drums), Scott Frigo (guitar, some drums), and front woman Whitney Allen (guitar, bass, or just singing) never stay in the same configuration for long.

Best Gonzo Drum Kit

Joe Schaeffer of Bones

by Philip Montoro on June 19, 2013 at 2:45PM

Joe Schaeffer's tortuously complicated drum kit looks like something you'd find in a medieval dungeon. It's got five rack toms and a floor tom, ten cymbals (including four splashes), a hi-hat, a snare, and a battery of four Octobans—the only act of restraint in its construction appears to have been the employment of a single kick drum with a double pedal, not two drums with a pedal apiece.

Best Band Revived by Reissues

Shoes

by Peter Margasak on June 19, 2013 at 2:45PM

Zion power-pop pioneers Shoes seemed moribund a couple years ago, but a spate of reissues and a fantastic new studio album, all released in 2012, have revived them in a major way. They performed at South by Southwest this spring, and in May at FitzGerald's they gave their first local show in five years.

Best Subversive DJ Who Plays Top 40 Pop

Teen Witch

by Miles Raymer on June 19, 2013 at 1:50PM

Chicago is a major center for artsy twenty­somethings reinventing underground club culture by recombining 90s signifiers (club kids, riot grrrl, hyper-Photoshopped pop stars) in ways informed by social-media platforms (especially Tumblr). Zain Curtis, aka Teen Witch, has contributed as much or more than anyone in town, thanks largely to a long-running night at Berlin called CULT that until January provided this Internet-­based tribe a physical home.

Best Sound That's Big in Japan

Juke and footwork

by Leor Galil on June 19, 2013 at 2:45PM

During an April interview on WNUR's Streetbeat, local producer DJ Earl described the juke and footwork scenes in Japan as "blowing up." Those strange, hectic-­sounding subgenres of ghetto house were born in Chicago in the late 90s, and despite considerable interest from Internet tastemakers they remain largely underground phenomena at home.

Best Record by a Tortoise Spin-Off

Brokeback, Brokeback & the Black Rock (Thrill Jockey)

by Peter Margasak on June 19, 2013 at 2:45PM

The members of Chicago institution Tortoise keep busy during the group's long periods of inactivity: percussionist John McEntire works tirelessly as a recording engineer and producer at his studio, Soma, and guitarist Jeff Parker plays in countless jazz combos, both established and ad hoc, here and in his adopted home of Los Angeles (on Thu 8/8 at Pritzker Pavilion, he and Wilco guitarist Nels Cline will play the classic Paul Bley-John Gilmore album The Turning Point). But within the past year, the best record by one of Tortoise's numerous spin-offs has come from bassist Douglas McCombs, also a longtime member of Eleventh Dream Day and recent substitute in the Sea and Cake.

Best Singer-Songwriter Who Appeals to People Who Don't Like Singer-Songwriters

Angel Olsen

by Miles Raymer on June 19, 2013 at 2:45PM

As a category of artist, the singer-­songwriter has earned a really bad reputation in the half century since Dylan made it a fixture in the pop world. And for the most part it's deserved—the singer-songwriter approach seems custom-made for egotistic mediocrities with pseudoprofound ideas and a keen desire to sponge up every drop of an audience's admiration all by themselves.

Best Candidate to Be the Next Angel Olsen

Emily Cross of Cross Record

by Kevin Warwick on June 19, 2013 at 2:45PM

I discovered Cross Record too late. I say this mainly because singer-songwriter Emily Cross, the heart of the band, plans to move to Austin in August with her fiance, Dan Duszynski.

Best New Venue

Constellation

by Bill Meyer on June 19, 2013 at 10:20AM

Constellation is off to a fantastic start—though I don't know that anyone expected otherwise of a partnership between venerable performing-arts facility Links Hall and Pitchfork Music Festival producer Mike Reed, who's also longtime coprogrammer of the Hungry Brain's Sunday Transmission series. Since opening its doors in April the venue has hosted a superb array of cutting-­edge jazz, experimental, pop, and contemporary classical music (Reader writer Peter Margasak programs some of the latter), as well as adventurous dancers and performers such as Ayako Kato and Going Dutch.

Best Place to Hear a Melody Played Out of a PVC Pipe

Improvised/Experimental Music Series at Myopic Books

by Shannon Nico Shreibak on June 19, 2013 at 2:45PM

This weekly event is one of the few places in Chicago to meet a guy who's programmed his pedal board with the almost delightful snoring of his cat or a band who build their songs around whatever disquieting wheezes they can coax out of Home Depot's finest PVC pipes. Every Monday at 7:30 PM, Myopic Books hosts experimental musicians on its meager second-floor "stage," where they try out their best (and weirdest) material.

Best Fallout From a Breakup

The many bands involving members of Coughs

by Philip Montoro on June 19, 2013 at 2:45PM

Nobody has ever whipped up such satisfying blurts and rumbles of demented, filthy noise as Coughs using so few notes and so many soup pots—and I'm not just saying that because they named themselves in joking homage to my old band Lozenge. (Lozenge, Coughs, get it?)

Best Old-School Soul Singer Singing New-School Soul-Blues

Stan Mosley

by David Whiteis on June 19, 2013 at 2:45PM

Not too many vocalists these days specialize in 60s- and 70s-style deep soul. Even on the southern soul-blues circuit, where veterans such as the late Johnnie Taylor forged new careers for themselves in the 80s and 90s, the emphasis isn't on that coarse, gospel-influenced style—instead there's a premium on youthful-sounding voices, supple yet strong enough to stand up to synthesized beats and backing tracks.

Best Reimagining of the Work of Gospel Singer Washington Phillips

Advance Base, The World Is in a Bad Fix Everywhere (Orindal)

by Leor Galil on June 19, 2013 at 2:45PM

Washington Phillips is the kind of oddball musician listeners love to romanticize. A preacher from Texas who recorded a scant 18 gospel songs in the late 1920s, he played a strange-sounding zither of some kind that he may have built himself—but because his life and career are barely documented, no answers are likely to be forthcoming about what he thought he was doing.

Best Outcall Soundman

Elliot Dicks of Elliotsound

by Philip Montoro on June 19, 2013 at 2:45PM

When Elliot Dicks, 44, moved to Chicago from Columbus in 1989, he was already a touring soundman. He's been doing sound in local venues since installing his gear at Czar Bar in 1991; a couple years later he moved to the Fireside Bowl, and in 2002 he set up shop at the Empty Bottle, where he remains to this day.

Best Kid Guitarist Who Sounds Like Davey Graham

Ryley Walker

by Bill Meyer on June 19, 2013 at 2:45PM

You can't really pin Ryley Walker down to a single style. With the combo Heat Death, the guitarist whips up a skronkfest that will scorch your ears and scour the walls; on his instrumental cassette The Evidence of Things Unseen, he's a consummate practitioner of the American Primitive acoustic style.

Best Freak Folker Who Makes Soap and Writes Books of Erotic Poetry

The Humminbird

by Steve Krakow on June 19, 2013 at 2:45PM

thehumminbird.com For a few years now, Muyassar Kurdi has been performing as the Humminbird.

Best Supplemental Reading by an Avant-Pop Artist

Jimmy Whispers's Summer in Pain zine

by Leor Galil on June 19, 2013 at 2:45PM

Former Light Pollution main man James Cicero has hit upon something special with his new solo project, Jimmy Whispers. He sings sincere songs about love and loss with just a chintzy organ recorded straight to an iPhone, and what the music lacks in fidelity it more than makes up for in unself-conscious heart, blissful melodies, and enchanting hooks.

Best One-Man Musical Movement

MC Tree's "soul trap"

by Leor Galil on June 19, 2013 at 2:45PM

These days it feels like every new artist worth your time comes with a new genre tag attached. "Soul trap," coined by Chicago rapper and producer MC Tree (aka Tremaine Johnson), is a perfect name for his off-kilter but enticing style, which stacks wobbly, oddly edited soul samples atop lean, minimalist drums and the occasional simple synth pattern.

Best Synthesizer Geek/One-Man Black-Metal Band

Surachai

by Miles Raymer on June 19, 2013 at 2:45PM

The stereotype of black-metal musicians as murderous, church-burning, white-­supremacist pagans in corpsepaint was out of date ten years ago—by now the style has worked its way into almost every corner of the underground, and you can find just about as many kinds of black metallers as you can metal­heads in general. However, it's still unusual to encounter one who spends just as much time obsessing over arcane modular synthesizers and ancient analog drum machines as he does practicing tremolo picking and blastbeats.

Best Label Strategy for Staying on Top of the Changing Record Industry

Thrill Jockey Adding Quantity to Quality

by Peter Margasak on June 19, 2013 at 2:45PM

The digital marketplace has helped the record biz recover a little from the past decade's tanking sales, but things still look pretty bleak. So it's heartening to see venerable Chicago independent label Thrill Jockey adapting to the near collapse of the industry by doubling down: for years it's been increasing its output and growing more adventurous.

Best New Label With a Fixation on Charmingly Absurd Formats

Notes & Bolts

by Leor Galil on June 19, 2013 at 2:45PM

www.notesandbolts.net The welcome resurgence of vinyl and cassettes hasn't been without its side effects: hideously overpriced LPs engineered to provoke collectors' lust, record flippers trying to make a fortune on Discogs and eBay, and of course dumb trend pieces.

Best Metal Bookings

Reggie's Rock Club

by Philip Montoro on June 19, 2013 at 2:45PM

I've seen great metal in plenty of Chicago venues, but over the past couple years I've found myself at Reggie's more often than any other—and given how frustrating the club's sound can be, varying from barely tolerable to great depending on where you stand in the room, that says a lot about the quality of the bookings. Reggie's owes its metal heart to the combined efforts of in-house talent buyer Elle Quintana (who favors old-school thrash and speed metal such as Exciter and Onslaught), MP Shows (which books at Township and Ultra Lounge as well), and Shane Merrill of Empire Productions (who also does some business at Cobra Lounge and was responsible for the Bolt Thrower shows at Reggie's this month—their first Chicago dates in 22 years).

Best Sign That People Are Still Buying Records

Bric-a-Brac Records

by Luca Cimarusti on June 19, 2013 at 2:45PM

We keep hearing about the bad place the record industry is in: people are buying less music than ever, the new generation wants to download records for free, labels are folding left and right. But Bric-a-Brac, a record store that just opened on the border of Logan Square and Avondale, is a hopeful sign that people may still want to pay for their music, at least in Chicago, and that given the chance they'll do it in person—with any luck there are enough such people to support a bit of growth in the brick-and-mortar record business.

Best Forward-Looking New-Music Group

Ensemble dal Niente

by Peter Margasak on June 19, 2013 at 2:45PM

Chicago has produced a wealth of adventurous, technically excellent contemporary-classical ensembles in recent years, but for my money nobody pushes the envelope as fearlessly and relentlessly as Ensemble dal Niente, a large, adaptable collective whose organization follows the model of the International Contemporary Ensemble. In February it presented the Chicago debut of the Georg Friedrich Haas masterpiece In Vain—probably my most powerful concertgoing experience of 2013—and its entire season has been filled with similarly bold music, including work by Chaya Czernowin, Stefan Prins, Lee Hyla, and Marcos Balter.

Best Opera Company Doing Puccini in a Church

American Chamber Opera

by Deanna Isaacs on June 19, 2013 at 2:45PM

Chicago's famous storefront-theater scene has an opera counterpart—a cluster of scrappy little companies mounting shoestring productions that showcase the city's abundant local talent in whatever space they can find. American Chamber Opera does classic opera repertoire in snappy English translations with live accompaniment (usually string ensemble and piano) at the University of Chicago's International House and at the historic Chicago Temple in the Loop.

Best Album Featuring the Work of a Chicago-Based Composer

Lee Hyla, My Life on the Plains (Tzadik)

by Peter Margasak on June 19, 2013 at 2:45PM

Lee Hyla has been the Harry and Ruth Wyatt Professor of Theory and Composition at Northwestern's Bienen School of Music since 2007, and in that capacity he's helped nurture the ongoing bloom of fierce, forward-looking contemporary-classical ensembles in Chicago. But he also writes gripping music of his own, something he makes vibrantly clear on the recent My Life on the Plains.

Best Music School for Graduating Contemporary Jazz Greats

DePaul University

by Peter Margasak on June 19, 2013 at 2:45PM

DePaul's music department has long been one of the strongest in the Chicago area, and in recent years a remarkable number of musicians who've spent time in its jazz program have ascended to the national stage. Not everyone on this list graduated, but there's no disputing the talent and vision of the players who've been touched by DePaul's faculty: saxophonists Jon Irabagon, Matana Roberts, Rudresh Mahanthappa, and Nate Lepine, vibist Jason Adasiewicz, trumpeter Amir ElSaffar, trombonist Nick Broste, guitarist Jon Lundbom, and cellist Tomeka Reid, to say nothing of experimental types such as Jim O'Rourke and Greg Davis.