thursday24
Thursday24
Chants
Robert Glasper Trio
Xray Eyeballs
Friday25
Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr.
Robert Glasper Trio
Greenhornes
Nicolas Jaar
Thollem McDonas
Saturday26
Dawnbringer
Godspeed You! Black Emperor
Francois K
Sunday27
Agalloch
Monday28
Steve Coleman & Five Elements
Wednesday30
Danielson
XRAY EYEBALLS The world needs more bands willing to write a “crystal meth breakup song,” and Brooklyn’s Xray Eyeballs are here to help. A five-piece featuring three members of Golden Triangle (whose Double Jointer LP was one of my favorites of 2010), Xray Eyeballs released their debut seven-inch on HoZac this month, and it’d make a fine soundtrack to late-night leering and frothing in the downtown-at-dawn dropout discos Richard Hell once sang about. The first song, “Crystal,” is like some kind of new-wave coupleskate for terminal fuckups—a cavernous, effects-heavy sway-and-lurch with arty pop hooks anchored by traditional garage rhythms. On the B side, “Broken Beds” and “Kam Sing Nights” have Golden Triangle’s orgiastic paroxysms of reverbed-out boom-chick, but the tracks are shorter and the guitars have more of an insecticidal vibrato. Xray Eyeballs’ first LP, Not Nothing, comes out April 19 on Kanine; this is definitely a band to watch in 2011. Paul Cary and Nones open. 9 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, 773-525-2508, $10, $8 in advance. —Brian Costello
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NICOLAS JAAR Nicolas Jaar is a precocious one. Barely into his 20s, he’s already the proprietor of a tastemaking boutique electronic label, Clown and Sunset, as well as its best-known act. Like the other artists on his imprint, Jaar uses a vocabulary of modern electronic sounds drawn from house and techno to create abstract, largely beatless music that’s heavily indebted to avant-garde classical and jazz musicians. The results sometimes verge on ambient or new age, but the spirit of unconventional composers like Erik Satie—Jaar describes being “haunted” by Satie in his SoundCloud bio—shines through in the tone of Jaar’s work. Judging by his recordings, including his new debut LP, Space Is Only Noise (Circus Company), his Smart Bar set could give the venue’s normally hedonistic crowd an opportunity for contemplative chin-stroking. Orchard Lounge opens. 10 PM, Smart Bar, 3730 N. Clark, 773-549-4140, $15, $10 in advance, $12 before midnight. —Miles Raymer
GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR The run-up to the second invasion of Iraq threw the zeitgeist a curveball. While a generation of songwriters fumbled to find the contemporary voice of youth outrage and a gaggle of electroclash DJs and producers worked—perhaps more successfully—to find novel ways to distract the same crowd from the world’s problems, Godspeed You! Black Emperor took a different path. The Montreal-born art-rock orchestra simply (or so it seemed) sat down and recorded an album that perfectly captured the atmosphere of paranoid, starry-eyed bloodthirstiness wafting up from their neighbors to the south. Released in 2002, Yanqui U.X.O. still delivers the intensity promised by its cover—a photograph of falling bombs suspended over a rural landscape—as the band piles up layers of strings, guitars, and percussion into increasingly unstable structures, then lets it all collapse into an expanse of noise. If anything, its snapshot of free-floating confusion metastasizing into rage appears more crisply focused with the passage time. Ironically the type of sweeping, orchestral rock Godspeed helped popularize has since become a favorite of ad creatives scoring car commercials. These Chicago dates are part of the first U.S. tour the group has taken since going on hiatus in 2003. Eric Chenaux opens; see also Sunday and Monday. 9 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, 773-549-0203, sold out, 18+. —Miles Raymer
GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR See Saturday. 8 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, 773-549-0203, sold out, 18+.
DANIELSON Now we have Sufjan and David Bazan, but first there was Daniel Smith, aka Danielson, the OG Christian indie-rock dude it was OK—cool, even—to like. He was a pioneer—he did it in the 90s! Beginning in the middle of that decade, Smith and his ensemble the Danielson Famile released a long string of endearingly weird albums, which border on earnestly wacky and often veer toward the precious; after 2006’s Ships, though, the group scattered and Smith took five years off to be a daddy. His new full-length, Best of Gloucester County (Sounds Familyre), is a rebirth of sorts, a reinvention of the Daniel Smith we once knew. Gloucester County is a twinkly (but not cute) meditation that hovers weightlessly, even directionlessly. The chamber-pop elements have become terse and intense, and the arrangements are heaped-up and claustrophobic, with carefully arranged layers of static sound—indie songcraft turned ramblin’ raga. It’s a more subtle, grown-up version of Danielson to be sure, though there are still some signs of the ol’ familiar guy lingering: “People’s Partay,” for instance, is about a celebration with “party pizzas” and “a nature walk for seniors,” and it sounds like the lyrics were written with lots of exclamation points. Sonoi and Miracle Condition open. 9 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, 773-525-2508, $12, 18+. —Jessica Hopper
