Thursday28
Black AngelsDawn of MidiFrankie Rose & the OutsPlanes Mistaken for StarsVaderVaselines
Friday29
BooksShakira
Saturday30
ChromeoDawn of Midi
Sunday31
Joost Buis, Edoardo Marraffa, Alberto BraidaLil B the Based GodMisfitsMonarch
Tuesday2
Wet Hair
Wednesday3
European Jazz Meets Chicago
DAWN OF MIDI Dawn of Midi didn’t record their remarkable debut, First (Accretions), until three years after they started playing together, and it shows. Indian bassist Aakaash Israni, Pakistani percussionist Qasim Naqvi, and Moroccan pianist Amino Belyamani were all students at CalArts when they formed the group in 2007, and they would meet in a windowless practice room late at night and play in pitch darkness—a habit that sharpened their ears and fostered their collective approach. Lots of musicians freely improvise these days, but it’s rare to find a group with such a strong ensemble identity—though protean in form and lacking a clear leader, Dawn of Midi is elegant, slithering, and melancholy in sound. Belyamani generally sticks to a tight range of notes in each piece, creating a dazzling variety of phrases from that limited vocabulary in a way that reminds me of Chris Abrahams of the Necks, except without Abrahams’s clear forward movement; rather than morphing from one shape to another, his oblique melodies emerge and dissolve like waves lapping at the shore. Naqvi and Israni keep up an exquisitely exploratory scrabbling that never veers into mayhem, and each member displays tightrope-walk sensitivity—they apparently developed some high-level intuition in those lightless rehearsals. This is the trio’s Chicago debut. See also Saturday. 10 PM, Elastic, 2830 N. Milwaukee, second floor, 773-772-3616, $10 suggested donation. —Peter Margasak
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PLANES MISTAKEN FOR STARS The late-90s output of Planes Mistaken for Stars might fairly have been called “emo,” but with their second album, 2001’s grungy, unflinching Fuck With Fire, this Denver-by-way-of-Peoria outfit shook off that epithet for good. Sinister, gravelly, and coated in sheets of sonic raunch, Fuck With Fire is planted firmly in the burgeoning early-aughts posthardcore scene, with one foot in the anthemic beard-rock of Hot Water Music, Small Brown Bike, and Against Me! and the other in the blistering metalcore of Converge and Botch. Planes Mistaken for Stars reached their evolutionary peak on 2004’s Up in Them Guts, a better-developed, more thought-out album; the strangled growl of vocalist-guitarist Gared O’Donnell helps keep the tension high on the handful of acoustic tunes and leads the charge on full-on brick-through-the-window numbers like “Glassing,” with its repeated group shout of “We’re all getting fucked now!” The band released one more album, 2006’s underwhelming Mercy, before calling it quits in 2008. PMFS have reunited to play the Fest 9 in Gainesville, Florida, on October 30 (they’re part of a 25th-anniversary showcase booked by No Idea Records, which released Fuck With Fire and Up in Them Guts), and this Chicago show is their only other date so far. Wolves Like Us, Big Science, and the Swan King open. 9 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, 773-278-6600 or 866-468-3401, $10. —Kevin Warwick
saturday30
sunday31
