If over the past couple months you’ve frequented certain bars and cafes in Wicker Park, the Ukrainian Village, or Logan Square—the Hideout, Atomix, Rodan, the Empty Bottle—you may have noticed in each of them a small square of clear glass with the words frontier returns 09.04.10 screen-printed on it in silver ink. There’s nothing else to the message, so newcomers to Chicago could be forgiven for not realizing it’s about a local band—especially since it’s a band that hasn’t played a show in nearly eight years.
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Even if you had all those discs, though, you still might not recognize Frontier on the street: onstage they were shrouded in dry-ice fog. According to drummer Mike Tsoulos, the sole member of the final trio lineup who still lives in Chicago (these days he tends bar at the Burlington, the Rainbo, and the Flat Iron and drums for Rabid Rabbit), the band’s stage show made its members practically anonymous. “For years, even after we stopped, people had no idea who was in the band because of the lights and the smoke,” he says. And they never took any traditional promo photos to help clear things up—part of a general reluctance to jump through the hoops rock bands are supposed to.
The fans Frontier did have, though, were often very well placed. Empty Bottle owner Bruce Finkelman put out Heater and the live album on his Tug-o-War label. Teacher, author, and jazz promoter John Corbett wrote a Critic’s Choice on Frontier for the Reader in 1996, shortly after he began cocurating the Bottle’s improvised-music series, praising the band’s “synaesthetic” live shows and connecting its MO to “acts as diverse as Tortoise, Brise-Glace, Flying Saucer Attack, Main, Jesus and Mary Chain, and This Heat.” And Steve Krakow, aka Plastic Crimewave, whose taste in music is so well respected that Drag City gave him his own imprint, discovered Frontier shortly after moving to Chicago in 1995. “I think ‘psychedelic’ was still kind of a dirty word,” he says. “I was desperately trying to find bands in town that suited that sort of thing, and as far as I know they were one of the only ones going. Frontier was definitely pushing it and going for a derangement-of-the-senses kind of vibe.”
“Twenty Three,” the first track from California Wives‘ new self-released EP, Affair, has an electronic tinge—a blippy synth that sounds something like an 80s-era Casio approximating a harpsichord—but otherwise it’s a lightweight but structurally sound indie-pop tune that’s about as breezy, chilled-out, and effortless-sounding as they come. You’d never guess the group arose out of its members’ shared taste for booming electro.
For the EP, California Wives ended up recording at Gravity Studios and mixing at Engine, working with Michel’s former roommate Brett Mohr. The blend the band came up with is significantly subtler than just throwing keyboards or glitchy electronics in with some guitars—the ratio of organic to synthetic changes from song to song, and the simple, clever arrangements thoroughly blend the scrappy feel of indie pop with the propulsive rhythms and glossy flash of disco. “Twenty Three” and opener “Blood Red Youth” have some of the easy charm of Phoenix, but the band’s not a one-trick pony. In among the frothy cuts are relatively moody songs like “Purple,” where they indulge their love of shoegaze and come off sounding like a fizzier My Bloody Valentine.
California Wives, Panda Riot, Color Radio, Gemini Club Fri 9/3, 10 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, 773-525-2508, $5, free with wristband or stub from North Coast, 18+.
