All Smiles, Sea Wolf, Bronze
WHEN Sat 5/19, 10 PM WHERE Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western PRICE $10 INFO 773-276-3600 or 866-468-3401
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Meeting up at a tourist trap was my idea. Fairchild, 33, moved to Chicago just this past August, after his girlfriend, Natasha Wheat, was accepted into the School of the Art Institute. I thought he might like to see some sights, especially since he’s kept his head down for most of his time here. Throughout the winter he practically hibernated–he was born in California and calls the midwestern cold “awful”–and this spring he’s kept busy building out a storefront in Ukrainian Village into a living space. Music is all he does, and he’s mostly broke. He didn’t play his first show here till January, and even his monthlong Monday residency at Schubas in March was pretty low-key–at that point few people in Chicago were aware All Smiles existed or that it was related to Grandaddy, and his brand-new debut album, Ten Readings of a Warning (Dangerbird), was still more than a month from release.
Having a couple of drinks while looking out over the city, it turns out, is an experience not unlike listening to Fairchild’s record: laid-back and pleasant and from time to time absolutely breathtaking. Ten Readings is mostly quiet and, despite Fairchild’s abstract lyrics, almost shockingly intimate–it’s an old-school home recording, with a fragile, diaristic feel. He wrote and recorded most of the album in the summer of 2005, while he and Wheat were house-sitting in Portland, Oregon, and he says the eight-track tape machine he borrowed for the project was the same model Elliott Smith used for the similarly bedroomy Either/Or.
Most of the tunes on Ten Readings combine the modest pop grandeur of the Beatles’ White Album with Big Star’s mash-note sentimentality–in a lot of ways Fairchild takes after Elliott Smith, his friend and a former Grandaddy tourmate. (“I almost feel like somebody could almost devise an exact methodology to prove that he was the best of our generation,” he says.) He uses lots of long, complex chord progressions–sometimes they last the whole length of a verse, without repeating once–but his vocal melodies are simple and hooky, the kind you can find yourself trying to sing along with before you even know the words. Even on the disc you can sometimes hear a nervous catch in his throat, but he’s actually a decent singer, with the kind of ultramellow delivery that Californians have been perfecting for the past 40 years.
