Results tagged “thewrens”

             

The Wrens made a special trip to Chicago for a two-night sold-out stand at Schubas last weekend. We caught the Friday show and the set we saw that evening is easily in our top five, if not top two, of the year thus far. Their t-shirts read "The Wrens: Keeping folks waiting...since 1989," a self-deprecating dig at the long waits the group's fans endure for both live shows and new material from the band. The reason folks do wait? The payoff is intense, and last Friday's show found the group delivering a career-spanning set of such incredible energy we half-feared that the Schubas stage would collapse under the rock onslaught. Unforgettable.

We alluded to it earlier, but this is one hell of a weekend for music in our fair city. One of the upswings of the indiefication of America has been the steadily improving street festival bills, so we can at least enjoy good tunes with our processed meats and flat beer, and this weekend sees two of the best line-ups all summer unfortunately going head to head with each other. The inaugural Switchyard Festival is...

As the organizers of Lollapalooza struggle to dot their I’s, cross their T’s, and leave the bags of money behind the correct trees, Pitchfork does them one better by announcing they’ll be “curating” the first Annual Intonation Music Festival on July 16th and 17th at Pulaski Park. (Curating? Huh. So that’s what pretension smells like). But let’s leave our own sarcasm aside for a moment because Pitchfork has done something really crazy and released a...

If you haven't seen the Reader this week, there's an interesting cover story about a local college student, University of Chicago�s Loren Wilson, and his creation of a database that analyzes that Internet bastion of indie-rock coolness, Pitchfork. A Chicago-based website, Pitchfork is something of a guilty pleasure for Chicagoist. The site's staffers are pretentious, high-brow barometers of underground hype � the Rolling Stone of the indie world. (And they're just as easy to mock: Check out Popdork, indie label Sub Pop's hilarious parody of Pitchfork.) But their ability to write snarky reviews and expose readers to great unheard bands � their tireless cheerleading helped The Wrens, The Unicorns, and Broken Social Scene all achieve semi-fame over the past year � definitely appeals to our sensibilities.