thursday22
Thursday22
Chicago Symphony Orchestra and ChorusGet Up KidsLake
Friday23
Chicago Symphony Orchestra and ChorusRoyal Bangs
Saturday24
David BazanChicago Symphony Orchestra and ChorusShorty Mack
Sunday25
Great ArchitectShorty MackSix Finger Satellite
Monday26
Broadcast
Tuesday27
Chicago Symphony Orchestra and ChorusKelly ClarksonNeon Indian
Wednesday28
Los CojolitesMum, Sin Fang Bous
GET UP KIDS There must be something in the air telling certain emo bands that it’s time to reunite—specifically bands the 90s hardcore scene found aesthetically and politically divisive who then saw later groups go multiplatinum by copying their formulas. Otherwise it’s just too weird that not even a month after Sunny Day Real Estate came through Chicago the Get Up Kids are touring in support of the tenth-anniversary reissue of Something to Write Home About (Vagrant). Like Sunny Day they can be seen as indirectly responsible for a lot of bad music—they were a big influence on Blink-182, who now loom strangely large over 90s alt-rock history—but despite their frustrating inconsistentency they made some serious jams. There’s a reason you can still find their 1997 album Four Minute Mile squirreled away in so many record collections otherwise dedicated to tough-guy hardcore. Kevin Devine and the Life and Times open. The same bill plays an all-ages show at 6:45 PM on Wednesday, October 21. 9 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, 773-549-0203, $26, $23 in advance, 18+. —Miles Raymer
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LAKE Ashley Eriksson and Eli Moore might be the contemporary indie-rock John and Christine McVie, a modest supercouple who serve as an axis for a band with a lot of talented folks in its fold. Except in Moore and Eriksson’s band, Lake, there is no Stevie Nicks and no Mick Fleetwood, unless you’re just talking about how different people dress. Let’s Build a Roof, produced by Karl Blau, is the Olympia-based sextet’s latest for K Records, and it’s sweet, plush, and ornate, with smushed-together post-Sufjan orchestral arrangements (Wurlitzer, marimbas, choral vocal parts, etc). What makes it sound west coast is the sense you get that everyone is just jamming along, feeling it, jazzin’ out, not sweating whether the trombone or the strings are exactly on point—it’s pleasantly unfussy, but Moore and Eriksson keep that looseness from sliding over into nouveau-hippie vandalism. Blau and Cains & Abels open. 9 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, 773-525-2508, $8. —Jessica Hopper
CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA AND CHORUS See Thursday. 8 PM, Orchestra Hall, Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan, 312-294-3000, $30-$199.
DAVID BAZAN I don’t think that in 2009 anyone’s going to write a more gloriously devastating song than “In Stitches,” the closing track of David Bazan‘s Curse Your Branches (Barsuk). It’s a breaking-up-with-God song, like the nine before it, spit with the sort of fuck-you indignation that only comes from having truly loved. It doesn’t shy away from its mournfulness and it makes no apologies for its bitterness. The lyrics are freighted with the eviscerating inverse of the blithe spiritual confidence in Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released”—Bazan has extinguished his own hope for a heavenly reward, after a long and painful struggle—and with the hopeless, wretched yearning of Van Morrison’s “Beside You.” Bazan ends by suggesting that God might’ve bitten off more than he could chew, but ironically, by tackling the loaded and intensely personal topic of his loss of faith and the fallout from it, he’s shown a different kind of faith—in music’s capacity to convey deep meaning and in our ability to understand it. This is his first full-band tour in more than four years. Say Hi opens. 10:30 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, 773-525-2501, $15, 18+. —Jessica Hopper
sunday25
