thursday1
Thursday1
Box EldersSpoon
Friday2
Dillinger Escape PlanGilberto GilHigh on Fire
Saturday3
TobaccoXiu Xiu
Monday5
Small Black, Washed Out
Tuesday6
Love Is AllOrquestra Contemporanea de Olinda
Wednesday7
Little WomenTitus Andronicus
SPOON Though I like Transference (Merge), Spoon‘s seventh and latest album, it’s the first where they seem to be treading water. Sometimes they try to jostle their sound into a new configuration—the openings of “Before Destruction” and “Trouble Comes Running,” for instance, are calculatedly lo-fi, in contrast to the top-shelf production elsewhere—but those efforts mostly just draw attention to themselves. Though the arrangements behind Britt Daniel’s austere melodies remain taut, elegant, and minimal—as though they were made by paring down instead of building up—the fleeting guitar and keyboard licks that have always popped in and out of the band’s music now seem to arrive according to a schedule. All that said, sometimes the Spoon formula is still irresistible: on “Written in Reverse” Daniel’s voice circles carefully around a seesawing groove, his constantly shifting rhythms playing off the razor-sharp backbeat. I just wish I noticed the songs more than the formula. Deerhunter and Micachu & the Shapes open. 6 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 1106 W. Lawrence, 773-561-9500 or 312-559-1212, $27.50. —Peter Margasak
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DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN Yeah, I get why you don’t like the Dillinger Escape Plan: the new Option Paralysis (Party Smasher Inc./Season of Mist) is like a hardcore version of the DSM-IV, a mishmash of schizophrenic metal riffage and maniacal syncopation. But what frustrates critics of these Jersey mathcore dudes is exactly what I find so magnetizing—an inventive and unrelenting ferocity, both on album and onstage. Since their benchmark 1999 debut, Calculating Infinity, DEP have shuffled through two vocalists, three guitarists, and three drummers—no easy feat for such a technically outrageous band—all the while sustaining this almost unfathomable tenacity. And though they’re gripping the reins a bit tighter on their blastbeat-laced shitstorms and making broader use of Greg Puciato’s surprising vocal range (for instance on “Gold Teeth on a Bum” and “Widower”), apocalyptic clamor is still their bread and butter. Oh, and live? Well, I’ve seen microphones smashed into faces, light fixtures scaled, and fire breathed, just for starters. Animals as Leaders, Iwrestledabearonce, and Darkest Hour open. 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 2109 S. State, 312-949-0121 or 866-468-3401, $18, $16 in advance. —Kevin Warwick
GILBERTO GIL To judge by the records Gilberto Gil has made with a full band over the past three decades, the Brazilian legend has lost his edge—too many of them are frothy crowd pleasers whose slick, swiftly dated arrangements obscure the intelligence of his songcraft. But stripped-down recordings like the solo album Gil Luminoso (released in Brazil in 1999 and in the U.S. by DRG in ’07) and the recent live disc Banda Dois (Warner Music Brasil), where he’s joined only by his son Bem on second guitar and percussion, prove that his music can still be intimate and intricate. Gil can get a little carried away, crossing the line between exuberance and showing off, but alone or with only the sketchiest of accompaniment he sounds way better than on his latest studio effort, the overwrought Banda Larga Cordel. His guitar playing, steeped in the seductive rhythms of samba and bossa nova, isn’t overwhelmed by an electric band, and his rich falsetto, now well worn and occasionally unsteady, shapes his melodies with astonishing beauty and warmth. Tonight’s concert is a trio performance: Gil and Bem will be joined by cellist Jaques Morelenbaum, a top-notch arranger who worked on many of Caetano Veloso’s best 90s albums. 8 PM, Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan, 312-294-3000, $15-$50. —Peter Margasak
Tobacco The members of Black Moth Super Rainbow claim to be from Pittsburgh, but this is obviously just cover for the fact that they’re aliens from a distant planet made out of synthesizers and drugs. The group’s front man, Tobacco, has recently taken his explorations of psychedelic electronic pop solo, and on his second album, Maniac Meat (due in late May on Anticon), he meanders through some outre new territory, right on the border of art-school weird and genuine-brain-problems weird. The musical references to vintage hip-hop and electro-funk might bring to mind Midnite Vultures—especially since Beck shows up on two songs—if they didn’t twitch around in such an unsexy way, or if they weren’t slathered in greasy, no-fi distortion and rife with squealing, klaxon-like synth peals. The Hood Internet and Daniel Francis Doyle open. 10 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, 773-276-3600 or 866-468-3401, $10. —Miles Raymer
c SMALL BLACK, WASHED OUT Be prepared to hear the word chillwave tossed around a lot in the coming months, in reference to a loose coalition of projects (some bands, lots of solo performers) that meld mid-90s tape-saturated indie pop with the electronic sounds that ruled popular music a decade prior to that. Jon Pareles of the New York Times blogged from SXSW, which was a hotbed of chillwave, that the music is “a hedged, hipster imitation of the pop they’re not brash enough to make,” but that sort of misses the point. SMALL BLACK‘s upcoming self-titled EP (Jagjaguwar) succeeds largely because of the bedroom-recording intimacy conjured up by their palpable unsureness and the washes of tape noise they hide behind. We already have a lot of bands brashly making 80s/90s retro pop, and they’re called every shitty fake Weezer in the world. —Miles Raymer
LOVE IS ALL On their third album, Two Thousand and Ten Injuries (Polyvinyl), Sweden’s Love Is All are still playing their own version of early British postpunk—brittle guitars, bouncy pogo-ready rhythms, James Ausfahrt’s post-James Chance saxophone, Josephine Olausson’s squeaky, cheeky shout—but this time they’ve softened the music’s jittery edge. The melodies are more sophisticated and accessible, and the arrangements get a new warmth from additions like serene keyboard lines and sweet backing vocals (the soft-focus baah ba-da-bup baah chorus that opens “Kungen” even reminds me a bit of the Turtles). “False Pretense” has the clunky, reggae-fied lilt of the Slits and “Early Warnings” has the sing-song simplicity of Kleenex, but I’ll take that kind of neo-80s action over dreary synth-pop worship any day. Tyvek and Nodzzz open. 9:30 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, 773-276-3600 or 866-468-3401, $12, $10 in advance. —Peter Margasak
