friday22

Friday22

Blonde RedheadCallersDeerhunterGories, Gentleman John BattlesLegendary Pink Dots

Saturday23

Jeff ChanGoriesSuffocation

Sunday24

The Seasons Project

Tuesday26

Gary Numan

Wednesday27

Bobby “Slim” James

CALLERS Sara Lucas, singer of the Brooklyn trio Callers, has the kind of voice that overthrows my better judgment. She can be irritatingly fussy, she wantonly shows off her sizable range, and she ornaments her melodies with breathless curlicues, acrobatic swoops, and elasticized, quasi-jazzy phrasing—she’s like a Phoebe Snow for the post-Ani DiFranco generation or something. But despite all that, her skill, precision, and power have got me hooked. It also helps that the band’s new second album, Life of Love (Western Vinyl), keeps surprising me even after half a dozen spins—Lucas and her resourceful bandmates, guitarist Ryan Seaton and drummer Don Godwin, borrow from ethereal folk-rock, Brill Building pop, blue-eyed soul, and art-rock, sometimes all in the same tune. The songs are warmly lyrical, and the dynamic arrangements—which create as much variety within a single track as there is across the whole nine-track album—give Lucas plenty of scenery to chew on. Whether turning a cover of Wire’s austere “Heartbeat” into an emotional rollercoaster or combining a romantic 50s pop vibe with the ambience of an underwater alien city on “How You Hold Your Arms,” Callers are never predictable—and better yet, that’s only part of their appeal. Rollin Hunt headlines; Callers, Rock Falls, and the Spend open. 8 PM, Ronny’s, 2101 N. California, myspace.com/ ronnysbar, $7. —Peter Margasak

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »

DEERHUNTER Deerhunter‘s seemingly inexhaustible talent for coming up with catchy tunes has made them arguably the best indie-pop band currently working, but it’s the complications they put between their listeners and their hooks that make them the most interesting one. Their recent fourth album, Halcyon Digest (4AD), opens with “Earthquake,” five minutes of slo-mo lo-fi drum machine and guitar, hissy atmospherics, and narcotized vocals—it probably would’ve been catchy as hell if the band had played it twice as fast. Even the record’s snappier, punchier cuts, like “Don’t Cry” and “Memory Boy,” tend to wander off into abstraction, staking out their own spot in a territory unique to the band where garage rock, twee, and swoony, floppy-haired Britpop somehow overlap. As far as I can tell the only thing really wrong with Halcyon Digest is the frequent use of what sounds like a pickup-equipped acoustic guitar plugged straight into the recording deck—the tone that produces has ruined a number of otherwise great songs, including most of Bob Mould’s catalog. Real Estate and Casino vs. Japan open. 9 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, 773-549-0203, $19, 18+. —Miles Raymer

It’s refreshing to see a true believer and rock ‘n’ roll lifer like GENTLEMAN JOHN BATTLES on the bill of a big show like this. One of Chicago’s more obsessive raconteurs on the subject of music, as well as a Chic-a-Go-Go mainstay and Roctober magazine illustrator and writer, Battles isn’t the kind of person to treat garage rock as a soundtrack to barfing Sailor Jerry all over a Scion. For him it’s a way of life, not a lifestyle to be purchased, and you can’t deny that the cat’s worship of the comic-book/B-movie/wild-sounds aesthetic is sincere. With nothing but his croon and a blazing call-and-response stun guitar, he gives it his all whether the audiences are there or not—for a fine example, look up the YouTube clip of Battles’s frenetic cover of the Dave Dudley trucker-on-speed classic “Six Days on the Road.” You get the feeling the music is simply another way for him to proselytize about the trash culture he loves.

saturday23

SUFFOCATION Seven years and three albums after Long Island death-metal band Suffocation clawed their way out of the mass grave marked “indefinite hiatus” (the reunited lineup includes three members from their full-length debut—not bad), they still haven’t produced anything with the potential to be as influential as their first three records, 1991’s Effigy of the Forgotten, 1993’s Breeding the Spawn, and 1995’s Pierced From Within. Then again, that would be a tall order. Those albums were down-and-dirty monsters of strobe-light seizure metal—you could easily swallow your own tongue imitating Frank Mullen’s vocals (think werewolf with a sucking chest wound) or give yourself an aneurysm trying to keep up with Mike Smith’s blastbeats. (And Mullen’s “death-metal spirit fingers” belong in the pantheon of rock gestures alongside Pete Townshend’s windmills.) If last year’s Blood Oath (Nuclear Blast) suffers from anything, it’s muscle memory—Suffocation have certainly hit their stride again, but that might be what’s keeping them from trying much new. Either that or they just don’t feel obligated to redefine their genre twice. The songs are straightforward at their core, despite the sudden tempo changes and unpredictable lurching from half-time to double-time—like all the great technical death metal that Suffocation inspired, they yoke the fiendishly complex to the bluntly primitive to make an arrhythmia-inducing nongroove feel like a brutal bludgeoning. The Faceless, Through the Eyes of the Dead, Decrepit Birth, and Fleshgod Apocalypse open. 2:30 PM, Clearwater Theater, 96 W. Main, West Dundee, 847-836-8820, $20. —Monica Kendrick

tuesday26