Results tagged “theemptybottle”

In recent years many New Year's Eve bills have sold extremely slowly -- partially due to the economy and partially because there hasn't been much really inspiring --- but this year is shaping up to be different. The Empty Bottle has announced that their shows with Jens Lekman at The Bottle and Girl Talk at The Congress have both sold out. And we're told ticket sales at a number of other venues are also selling briskly. Don't worry though, we hear there are still plenty of tickets available for The Gin Blossoms at The InterContinental out by O'Hare.

Buzz has been heavy around 25 year old songstress Victoria Hesketh a.k.a. Little Boots, and while we've bemoaned the fact that her album has yet to be released Stateside, we're extremely excited that she's playing The Empty Bottle this Thursday. We've said she writes tunes that are electro-pop gems set to steam up clubs and compel rollerskate divas to rub up all over skinny tied boys, and that enough would get us into the club to see her.

A collaborative product of Kenyan and American musicians, Extra Golden inhabits a musical place that truly values each part of its sound, often by enmeshing the strident runs of warm, hey-is-that-the-sun guitar work with rhythms borne from funk, American indie rock, and the vestiges of disco. After two well-received records for Thrill Jockey, as well as an appearance at last year's Pitchfork Festival, the group is playing The Empty Bottle tonight in support of its newest, Thank You Very Quickly.

MP3: Holy Fuck "Jungle"

Dark Meat comes to us from Athens, Georgia, but the first time we heard them we were pretty sure they actually clawed their way out of another dimension to spread their riveting gospel across the land. If we're gonna play the "they sound like" game, we'd have to say Dark Meat resembles The Polyphonic Spree ... if The Spree's dark undercurrent exploded, shredding robes and ears for miles around as it blotted out the sun.

Remember Adorable? If you do you're probably old like us, so let's go for a slightly more culturally relevant (read: Sofia Coppola approved) touchstone and namedrop My Bloody Valentine. Hell, we could check any number of Britpoppers with huge guitar rigs.

Less than 15 people want to attend the virtual U of I. A spokesman says, ""It is important for people not to focus on the doggone numbers for these initial enrollments. The key is that it exists now." Aim high guys!

Clayton Hauck, Chicago's everywhere-at-once nightlife photographer, has released the results of a reader's poll he ran to discern which clubs, DJs, promoters, and bands are at the top of The People's list. It's hardly a scientific poll, and Hauck even admits that when it came to the promoter results there was probably more than a little ballot box stuffing, but we find it interesting as it functions as a good peek into the indie-rock dance micro-scene. And this is the scene, one could argue, driving the majority of the musically related social activity in our fair city these days, so we also find it interesting as an indicator of where things might be heading.

Hey, don't forget we're running a contest to win some cool Thrill Jockey swag through tomorrow. Have you entered yet?

The Empty Bottle just announced that Black Kids will be playing the club's New Year's Eve show this year. The band walked away from this year's CMJ as the clear winner of the "Most Breathlessly Admired by Bloggers and Mainstream Press Alike." However there's still no word on whether Black Kids will be this year's Arcade Fire (massive!), Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (petered out!), or Voxtrot (fizzled before anyone actually saw them!).

Yup, it's Halloween night. And, assuming you're not completely incapacitated from celebrating this holiday for the last week, you're probably blinded by the flurry of options on how to spend tonight. Allow us to make a few suggestions. We talked to Jesse Thorn a couple days ago about his The Sound Of Young America show. Well tonight is the live 8 p.m. taping at Second City's e.t.c. stage. Thorn will be interviewing engineer and Shellac-man...

Scotland Yard Gospel Choir releases their self-titled sophomore full-length on Bloodshot Records today. It's always nice to see a local label with some real clout helping out a local band, and we're predicting that this is a team-up that will prove beneficial to both parties involved. Scotland Yard Gospel Choir's sound is more Belle And Sebastian, and less Old 97's, so it marks a sonic departure of sorts for the label. That isn't to...

Rocktober is truly upon us. Usually we would avoid such cutesy phrasing for fear of falling into obvious cliché, but this year truly holds some outstanding live music coming through Chicago in the month of October. Here's a sampling of what to expect this week. Honestly, we’re beginning that suspect that both Matt & Kim and Dan Deacon secretly have apartments in Chicago, because it feels like they’re playing here every other week. If that’s...

The Empty Bottle, in conjunction with Britain's The Wire magazine, will host this weekend's fifth annual Adventures in Modern Music festival, a self-described "celebration of 'outsider sounds.'" The festival promises to pack 'em into the Bottle for sets by groundbreaking artists both new and historic. Daily lineups, with highlights: TONIGHT (Wednesday): White Magic, Badawi, Holy Fuck, and Graveyards & Zac Davis Drag City's White Magic is fronted by the smoky-voiced Mira Bilotte, who channels a...

Man, if ever there was an evening to get your groove on, this evening is that evening. Daniel Ash has a long, storied career manning the axe in not one, but three, groundbreaking bands — Bauhaus, Tones On Tail, and Love And Rockets. Whilst those past acts are known for their atmospherics, said atmospherics owing a pretty huge debt to Ash's guitar work, the man's DJ sets are a world apart. Which is why we...

With a Kevin Shields-inspired, Lost In Translation-worthy intro track, Airiel's debut sets its agenda and keeps true to its promise. This band loves the wall-o-sound shoegaze of the late-'80s and early-'90s, and we love the fact they do that sound justice without resorting to sentimental trickery. Many bands have tried to tread the same path, building up walls of feedback, fuzz, and reverb to simulate the guitar crunching glories of those hazy days. Most fail, forgetting the whole concept of wrapping those raging sounds around an actual melody, and end up delivering a soupy mess that bludgeons when it should hypnotize.

Each morning we're going to highlight five bands playing at Lollapalooza that we think are worth seeing. Some will be popular, some less known, but we believe they're all worth your time. And for those not making it to the festival itself, we'll round it out with an additional show going on after the grounds close down for the evening. The Switches We are sure we'll be cursing this band from England throughout the day....

Pitchfork has announced that the super-affordable three-day passes for their festival, along with tickets to Friday night's bill (featuring one band we're really excited to see), are already sold-out. Tickets for Saturday and Sunday are still available. But believe us when we say that with a line-up including (and this is just a teensy sampling) Cat Power, Girl Talk, Oxford Collapse, The New Pornographers, Stephen Malkmus, De La Soul, Klaxons, and The Ponys, we're sure...

Same story, different magazine. The July issue of Paste Magazine contains a list of what readers have deemed the country's best music venues. When Playboy had their say back in January, the editorial powers-that-be decided The Empty Bottle was in the top 10 best venues in the entire country. However, the readers of Paste beg to differ and have chosen Schubas as one of the best music venues in the Midwest. The list, which is...

Last year when Chicagoist spoke with the ladies from Girls Rock! Chicago, the camp was in its first year and had been mildly successful, even though they were finding the camp difficult to publicize. This year they are in full force months ahead of the week-long workshop in August, and they'll be holding their second fundraiser of the year at The Empty Bottle on Saturday. The bill is full of bands that include strong female...

Birds Of Avalon's debut, Bazaar Bazaar, hits so many sonic reference points it can tend to be an exhilerating and dizzying experience at first. It sounds like Sloan gone psych. No, it sounds like Led Zeppelin gone pop. No, that's not quite it either. Black Sabbath meets The Beatles?

At least since Warhol began displaying boxes of soup cans and Brillo pads in gallery settings, the concept of the “found” object as art has been a primary component of our culture. In other words, there’s a very good reason why “America’s Funniest Home Videos” has been on the air since 1989 (hint: it’s not Bob Saget). We’ve become a voyeuristic culture, with an appetite for spying-as-entertainment as an antidote to the increasingly formulamatic output...

You can't throw a stone amongst a bunch of hipsters in the Wicker Park / Humboldt area without a decent chance of accidentally hitting Plastic Crimewave's carefully managed — and now more tightly clipped — 'fro. Long a staple of the local psych rock scene, at least as a prodigious historian and record-keeper with a killer collection (some of which saw airtime on a recent Market Frenzy podcast), Crimewave is assembling what he calls his...

Hm, mid-February means two things: it's starting to warm up a titch outside, and the city is beginning to simmer in expectation of all those gazillions of bands that will be sweeping through town leading into and out of this year's SXSW next month. This week has a few groups matching that migration pattern as well as some locals (and local labels) just releasing new material for public consumption. Honestly, we've always been slightly suspicious...

We have reviewed every Bobby Conn release, and with the exception of his debut and that one EP, we have hailed each as the work of modern genius. His early work had a tendency to test the listener, teasing with snippets of joyous funk or mammoth stadium choruses delivered via basement recording studio. Each subsequent album has built up a more dependable mix of accessible tunes within which Conn delivers scathing commentary on the society, and political worldviews of those in power, that dominates our daily lives and provide an ever deepening concern for our collective future.

The brothers (literally, brothers, as in the brother O'Malley; Frankie, Michael O'Malley, and Patrick) in The Safes have somehow, inexplicably, flown been under our radar until now. Goddamn if we aren't so frickin' happy we've been introduced to them though.

It figures, as the number of shows each week ramps up, the mercury in the thermometer drops down causing us to risk frostbite whilst waiting for the bus, or drop way too much dough on cabs. Here are a few things that makes either of the above options palatable.

We were just going to keep our traps shut about this, but the ensuing talk we keep overhearing on street corners and other blogs has induced us to share our opinion on the latest idiocy displayed by a national magazine trying to display their knowledge of local markets.

A short work week would usually get us super-excited for all sorts of live music goodness since it should, theoretically, give us more time to catch some kick-ass concerts. Unfortunately, when that four-day weekend is triggered by Thanksgiving that means not only do we generally lose Thursday, most of the week is given up for lost in face of the biggest amateur night of the year. However, if you look closely enough, there is plenty...