Results tagged “elliottsmith”

Happy first weekend of September - and happy Labor Day weekend, too, for our American cities! Let's take a look at what's been happening around the Ist-a-verse. The deaths of two firefighters shook Bostonist this week. Boston's firefighters bent over backwards all week long - first, they fought flames pouring from the Boston Tea Party museum, and then a restaurant fire killed two and injured many more. Their efforts make everything else - like Tom...

Earlimart's newest disc Mentor Tormentor has been getting a lot of play in the Chicagoist offices. In truth, we admit that we've strong-armed a few of the newer writers out of their turn when the time came to make their own selection on the office hi-fi, just so we could hear the disc one more time. If you're newer to the band, the simplest reference points one needs to get a grip on the group's sound is to imagine Grandaddy fronted by the melodic smarts and emotional delivery of Elliott Smith. And if those musical reference points are meaningless to you, then instead we ask you to imagine a band whose lush style is filled with contradictory delivery methods honed to perfection in the studio. And if that still comes off as gobbledygook, then let's just describe them as being pretty kick-ass.

Every once in a while a band rolls across Chicagoist’s desk with just the right combination of reverence for their influences and clarity of vision for their own work. Erie Choir is the recording name for Eric Roehrig, a Chapel Hill, NC, native with a crisp indie-folk sensibility and a lot of patience. Roehrig spent five years writing and recording Slighter Awake, a tight, classically constructed 38 minutes of lovely, embellished pop recorded for...