Music

If nails on a chalkboard are closer to music in your ears than any heartfelt love ballad ever could be, last Saturday’s show at Beat Kitchen in Chicago, featuring FT(The Shadow Government), Racebannon and TODD, would have been a little piece of heaven on Earth. If that’s not a seal of approval, I don’t know what is.

The Party is back, gracing us with another disc full of Gypsy marching tunes interspersed with hellacious solos and tightly harmonized sequences.

Never have there been so many death metal T-shirts at a folk performance until William Elliott Whitmore hit the road, and it is doubtful that many similarly styled artists could capture both the hearts and ears of the hard-rock crowd (unless their last names are Cash).

After waiting nearly five years for producer/rapper extraordinaire El-P to release a follow-up to 2002’s Fantastic Damage, fans now have available a sophomore effort that doesn’t disappoint. I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead, with its heavily layered, dark, atmospheric, gritty, and synth-saturated sound, feels like a hip-hop soundtrack to a science fiction film.

I’m talking to Big Business drummer Coady Willis just prior to the band’s New Years Eve show in their hometown of Seattle. He tells me that Big Business had Queen in mind as the production template for their new album.

Hillstomp is a duo out of Portland, Oregon making raw, passionate, exuberant music. They’ve been known to cover songs by Muddy Waters, R. L. Burnside, and Rainey Burnette; their slide-guitar and homemade percussion certainly betray a debt to past masters from Mississippi, Texas, and Chicago.

Why Bother? (Thrill Jockey) is reminiscent of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, in which Catherine Deneuve’s quick trip from ennui to psychosis is documented to dreary-yet-exhilarating effect. Adam Lee Miller and Nicola Kuperus, otherwise known as Adult., festoon their new CD with horror’s trappings.

“I just let it all puke out of me,” says the thick-accented, New York-based rock veteran Jesse Malin on his songwriting procedure for his latest release, Glitter In The Gutter (Adeline/EastWest).

In 1995, a growing indie record label from Wilmington, Delaware released Lifetime’s second record, Hello Bastards. The record quickly rose to iconic stature.