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On Friday singer-songwriter Sam Beam brings his Iron & Wine juggernaut to the Chicago Theatre, Allmann Brothers vet Dickey Betts brings his southern-fried choogle to the Copernicus Center, and the diabolical Biz Markie headlines an old-school hip-hop extravaganza at the Venue at the Horseshoe Casino. Saturday Billy Bragg wraps up a two-night stand at SPACE in Evanston, a Burger Records package tour invades Subterranean, and Birmingham doom-metal heavies Esoteric play Reggie’s Rock Club. If you’re still standing on Sunday, Buena Vista Social Club and its young firebrand pianist Roberto Fonseca play Symphony Center, erudite singer-songwriter country folkies Tim O’Brien and Darrell Scott perform at the Old Town School, and Claire Chase plays a free CD-release show at Constellation (full disclosure: I programmed the last).
Fri 9/27: Plague Bringer at Metro“Local duo Plague Bringer made a big splash around town with their 2006 debut LP, As the Ghosts Collect, the Corpses Rest, combining Agoraphobic Nosebleed’s frenzied cybergrind and Emperor’s epic black metal,” writes Luca Cimarusti in this week’s Soundboard. “But after their 2008 follow-up, Life Songs in a Land of Death, guitarist and drum programmer Greg Ratajczak and vocalist Josh Rosenthal gradually stopped doing much of anything as Plague Bringer.” Now, as he notes, they’re back. “Pretty much out of nowhere they released a new track in May, which seems to have been a warm-up for a full-blown resurgence: a double LP titled One in Two Parts is on the horizon, as are vinyl reissues of their first two LPs (by Gypsyblood Records, a new imprint run by Stavros Giannopoulos of the Atlas Moth). Onstage Plague Bringer blast their pummeling drum-machine beats through gigantic speaker cabinets at punishing volumes, and they make their live return this weekend.”
