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I first heard a couple of songs by Chicago’s Kaspar Hauser a few years ago, though I don’t remember exactly because they failed to make any impression on me. I’m pretty sure their dramatic improvment is part of the reason I’m mildly taken with their new album, Quixotic/Taxidermy (Backward Masking), though it’s good enough that I’d pay attention even if I’d never heard the band before. Named after the feral German teenager who captivated Germany in the early 19th century (later the subject of the Werner Herzog film Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle), the band was formed by experimental filmmaker and School of the Art Institute teacher Thomas Comerford in 1999, a year before he moved to Chicago from Iowa City. Through three singles and one album the line-up has been pretty fluid; the new record features musicians like Jonathan Crawford (William Elliott Whitmore, ex-Grey Ghost) and Kent Lambert (Roommate).
