Results tagged “sxsw”

The return of Monday means another entry into the Chicagoist Podcast Series - this week, in Stereo! This week:

     

Hope we're not cramming too much BBQ-stained, Texas-sized coverage up your asses, but damn that was a good time. I tried to take in a little bit of everything -- day parties, night showcases, indie rock, electronica, etc. -- and in the end, I feel like I saw more than in any of my five previous SXSW trips. This is the one instance in which we all can praise the nasty economy - it kept the spring breakers away.

             

[Ed. note: Lizz was our eyes and ears at this year's SXSW ... here's our last peek at what she saw.]

               

[Ed. note: Lizz is our eyes and ears at this year's SXSW ... here's a peek at what she's seeing.]

SXSW is more than just music. Granted, Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot [Ed. note: and, ahem, Lizz Kannenberg] are probably having the time of their lives traipsing across the 1,800 odd bands scattered amongst Austin, Texas, but you’ll have just as much fun reading NPR’s All Songs Considered twitter feeds, right?

          

[Ed. note: Lizz is our eyes and ears at this year's SXSW ... here's a peek at what she's seeing.]

Time to lock and load this week's list of hometown shows, SXSW style.

http://seattlest.com/2008/02/28/foo_fighters_da.php">announced his presidential bid.

It's a Bottle edition of Local Options to reduce, reuse, and recycle this week.

SXSW just released their full band list and the number of Chicago bands is really encouraging as far as supporting the national impact of our little scene. It's also a good indicator of just how genre-less Chicago is, since the bands range from punk, hip-hop, pop, math-rock, metal, and good ol' fashioned "college rock." It could haave easily been predicted that bands like OFFICE, The Redwalls, Sybris, and The 1900s were in, but big ups to local metal crew Bible Of The Devil and the overlooked and uncategorizable Tub Ring for being selected. And Yakuza? They picked the punk-jazz-metal of Yakuza? Awesome.We're shocked but pleased to see see Naked Raygun will be making a trek down to Austin, but we're really surprised to see Joan Of Arc heading South. Who knew they were still active?

The addition of soul crushing songwriter Bon Iver makes tomorrow's TNK show a must see for Chicagoist.

All week, Chicagoist will be breaking down the Schubas Tomorrow Never Knows Festival by day to take a look at the sometimes raw, always promising talent that's creating some of most deafening buzz on the independent music horizon.

Photo Credit: Malingering

Girl Talk, aka one Greg Gillis, has been wowing audiences from the Empty Bottle to the Pitchfork Music Festival with his wildly popular brand of mash-up wizardry. Just try to hold a stoic cool-kid pose when Gillis brings his one-man jammin' train through town in January, with newly minted prince of the hipster dance party Dan Deacon in tow. Metro, January 26, 7:30 p.m. (all ages) and 11:30 p.m. (18+), $16. On sale Saturday....

Marnie Stern may look like a bookstore clerk or a Starbucks barista, but this Brooklyn guitar virtuoso has little else to do with lit or lattes. She's a metalhead through and through, having mastered such thrash-god techniques as finger-tapping, shuddering time-signature shifts, and balls-to-the-wall shredding that would make Eddie Van Halen blush. So what's this obvious shred-head doing on venerable punk rock shock shop Kill Rock Stars Records? She's carefully bridging the gap between the colorful, technical, and often posturing world of metal, and the guttural vocals, minimalist production, and eff you attitude that "punk" has come to inspire. It's a tenuous position, given that punk set out to destroy all the egotistical excess and arrogance of the metal scene, but maybe the old adage is right -- it just takes a woman's touch.

Every year at SXSW, we check out at least one band based on their wacky name alone. In this manner, we've discovered some great acts (I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness, Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly) and some bizarre ones (Here Come Old Vodka Tits, My! Gay! Husband!). Locals Casiotone For The Painfully Alone fall far closer to the former category than the latter, and the vulnerable songcraft that has garnered them national attention this past year will be on display tonight at Schubas with Papercuts and Bowerbirds.

We got the privilege of attending last weekend's Blogher conference, and in an ironic twist of fate, our two computers went on the fritz. However, it was an experience we still wanted to share with you. Blogher is a conference geared directly toward women bloggers. It was filled with lots of interesting and useful sessions aimed at helping women in the blogosphere. Whether you hadn't yet started a blog or you were looking to really...

White Rabbits are doing something right, because the Brooklyn sextet has gone from a band we checked out at SXSW because they are friends with a friend of ours to one of the buzziest bands in the blogosphere. No surprise, really – these kids can bring the good times rocknroll, and an 8.1 album rating from Pitchfork didn’t hurt either.

If we were one of the poor souls to pay a couple hundred bucks for a ticket to last night's Amy Winehouse show, we imagine we would be pretty fucking pissed off right now. It's never a good sign when a performer's pre-show prep includes stumbling in the street in search of non-existent paparazzi, dinner at Subway, and a trip to Walgreens for sweets (that you will later use to pad your set as giveaways...

Richard Swift is feeling low. "But Chicagoist, he is a singer-songwriter on an indie label." Point taken, but the real story here isn’t Swift’s state of mind or how many pages of palpable insecurities he can fill in one of those black-and-white spotted composition books – it’s the style and grace with which he yanks a real showstopper out of a sound that could easily teeter on the brink of cliché. His 2007 release,...

What Made Milwaukee Famous is the quirky kid with the dorky name in the back of the class whom no one notices until he gets his braces off, gets into MIT, and scores a summer internship with NASA. Kicking around the Austin scene since 2004, WMMF has put together a kind of indie-rock dream team: management through Fourth Floor, a division of powerhouse promoters Capitol Sports & Entertainment (Lollapalooza, Austin City Limits), booking through Monterey...

Chicagoist has a nice variety of friends who provide myriad viewpoints on myriad subjects, including new music. Our college friends, for instance, hit us up for tickets to the Daughtry show at the Double Door a few weeks back, while our snobby (geeky?) hipster pals were trying hard not to get caught enjoying themselves at Lily Allen in Austin during SXSW. Chicagoist’s good-times party-gal sister likes anything with a “fun beat,” from commercial country to...

Chicagoist still has the Mew sticker we were handed outside the Auditorium Theater after one of Radiohead’s epic sets there last June. Now, normally we’d greet this kind of obvious marketing machine swag with a swift hook shot into the nearest trash receptacle, but the stick figure drawings of cats were whimsical, and we were on a post-show high, so into the back pocket went the sticker. Turns out first impressions for rock bands are...

While the deluge of bands making their way through town after SXSW remains strong, we decided this week we would focus on some hometown heroes. All Smiles is Jim Fairchild, stepping into the spotlight after play guitar in the now defunct Grandaddy. Fairchild crafts just the sort of lush pop you would expect, given his pedigree, but it's missing his previous group's willful quirks. Fairchild adopts a more direct approach with earnestly pleasing results. We're...

It seems like, all across the network, folks were up to no good. Maybe it was all the green beer from last weekend... Gothamist spent the week writing about New Yorkers behaving badly: at the post office, at the Garden, and at the fertility clinic. Calvin Klein may not be misbehaving, but he's just a little dirty, and in a completely different way than some NYC kitchens. SFist had its share of misbehave-rs, too, like...

We're guessing most of you are hungover from St. Patrick's Day. We are too. But still, we're going to muddle on through our green haze and give you (drum roll please...) this Week In -ists. We start with SFist which broke the -ist record for comments with nearly 500 comments on a post about our Mayor's girlfriend. She responded back on charges that she's not a "girl's girl" and, whoo boy-- the floodgates? They...

Ah, SXSW. Yup, it's the time of year when industry flacks, up-and-coming bands, under-the-radar hopefuls, and drunken journalists all descend upon Austin, Texas, for a few days of shmoozing, boozing, and live-music grooving. Chicago bands are being well represented this year, and a few of them are even traveling in style after Hideout's fundraiser last weekend. (We were told that the event raised over $10,000 in donations to send the sixteen bands that participated down to Austin. That's a lot of Shiner Bock!) And of course there's the great day parties thrown by local venues down there like Metro, Schuba's and Bloodshot Records.

The jaunts will be short this week as most of us get out and enjoy the sunshine. We were walking around this morning and people just seem happier. Which is all the more reason to get out tonight for some good music. We plan on getting intimate with Ambulette and Maura Davis' intensely mesmerizing voice at Schubas, 3159 N. Southport. Davis splits her time between Richmond and Charlotte and comes to Chicago to rehearse with...

We weed through the week's live-music high points so you don't need to waste your time getting newsprint all over your fingers as you dig through the concert calendars found in your local newspaper. Plus, we give you room to pipe in with your own suggestions. Awesome, no? Knife of Simpson have long been local favorites of ours, and since they don't play that often we try to catch 'em any chance we get. They...