RABID RABBIT
Many of the first recordings of the song sound better suited for a serenade scene in an early talkie than for a long bath with a razor, but in RR’s hands “Gloomy Sunday” is definitely miserable enough to push a potential suicide over the edge. Nearly 12 minutes long, it moves from sludge rock to an everything-is-melting psychedelic interlude and then into a vocal part where Lamont, Solotroff, and RR bassist and singer Andrea Jablonski sound like a gang of cenobites performing some sort of macabre musical theater. On the flip side the entire thing plays backward (the tape is actually a continuous loop), which is needless to say even creepier. It’s the best artifact yet to come out of the increasingly intimate and somewhat mystifying relationship between Chicago’s metal scene and its improvised-music community.
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Chicago has been slow to come around to dubstep, and I figure this is at least partly because dancehall hasn’t ever really taken off here either—if it had, local clubgoers wouldn’t still have such a hard time accepting beats they can’t juke to. A few DJs and producers are changing local attitudes toward dubstep both with their persistence—soldiering through midevening sets for crowds who obviously aren’t into its skittering, wobbling rhythms—and with their efforts to develop a more Chicago-friendly hybrid, inflected with house and hip-hop.
PAYPA
OUTER MINDS
CAMPFIRES/BENOIT PIOULARD
