WLUW Hints Part 1

Living under a rock does have it its advantages...

1) You get more time to yourself
2) Nobody will judge that 6" beard after you keep telling yourself you'll get around to it
3) You can appreciate Lady Gaga two years later after The Fame since you just got it

Trends have flown past tending not to knock on their way through town. Fortunately, your radio that interprets frequency modulated air waves have given you a cracked-open window view of the music world. Enter WLUW, Loyola University's radio station. It's rare to hear the same song twice during any given month of listenership, so the opportunities to write down picks is on par with a grizzly bear catching horny salmon.

Enter White Mystery.


This is the kind of band that I want to see in my brother's basement, the Ice Factory, or the Mopery. (Oops, those are all gone.) Gruff, sweaty, and on Whistler Records, this pair are like a garage band for your next beach party: gleefully serrated. Alex White's sweet voice balances out the over-the-top drums of her brother Francis and is a perfect complement to her bad axe (do people still call it that? and bad = good, duh). Try their single on for size:



White Mystery - Powerglove

See them at Pancho's on April 20th or at the Abbey on May 7th.

So Much

There is a small barrage of random events that are going on. For one, I just experienced Baconfest for the second time. From 12 vendors to 60 influential Chicago restaurants, this thing has grown like crazy. Bacon bloody mary's (bacon encrusted rim, bacon vodka, strip of bacon), chocolate bacon topped smoke-flavored ice cream with salted caramel at the bottom tip of the waffle cone, and souvee'd pork-belly over polenta with blue cheese sauce are some of the items that caused me to buckle over after about 30min (pace yourself!). Oh and this isn't just Chicago apparently, it's nationwide per google. I had a hummus/sprout sandwich for dinner.

Next a recent find via Lincoln Hall is their Chicago Rock Stars tour where they go visit various musically important sites with respect to Chicago between 1980 and ~2000. Wilco, the Smashing Pumpkins, Ministry, and Liz Phair. Amongst the Untouchables gangster tour, the haunted tour, and architecture tours this is a welcome addition.

Also at Lincoln Hall on 5May, they are going to have Del Rey (local, modern psych-rock) do the instrumentals to Fantastic Planet, a 1972 Cannes-winning animated film allegory of humanity. What I've seen so far of the original has been well done (think Monty Python for animation). You can watch it in all 8 parts starting with...


Finally, this guy popped in firefox via my friend Mike. Thanks.

When is this album going to leak already?

I went to Buenos Aires my buddy Larry to visit our buddy Timmy, and if we weren't in a parrilla, he was searching for the new Strokes album. The obsession became most evident when I went to check my mail on Tim's computer and all the tabs in firefox were:
"angles leak"
"strokes angles early release"
"strokes angles forum mp3"
"strokes angles advance copy"
He would shuffle around our rental apartment after eating breakfast, then finally leave, exiting with "I'm going to go upstairs and listen to the album"... which was the 30sec snippet version of each track on youtube.

I even played my hand at it and called a couple of people since, after all, I agreed with Tim: how can a major cd release be under wraps for so long? Have the record companies figured it out? Was no human used in the manufacture and storage of these pieces of plastic?

After all that, a couple of tracks did peek out and we would sit around staring at various objects while Maccu Picchu would blast around us. Why is this so important? Simple: We want it to be the new 'Is This It?'. We want to be a stallion in college jumping up and down at a sweaty show in our sunglasses around beautiful friends and future friends... again. For a group whose public image smiles less than Thom Yorke, the Strokes are the reincarnation of the leather jacket, copious hair, converse, and the singular pair of jeans that only get washed once a month. They do everything rock and roll except elect a cab rather than chopper.

As for the album, they've chosen against the muted/distorted vocals that was (thankfully) everywhere in 'Is This It?' and picked the polished sound of First Impressions. (In contrast to Angles, First Impressions sounds a little like a modern day Scorpions but without the ballads.) Angles wins on well-placed subtleties where necessary and muted vigor elsewhere: Macchu Picchu is golden. But right now, listening to "Two Kinds of Happiness", the verses belong in Bright Lights Big City (that's a compliment), but the chorus needs to be turned down a little in favor of the rest of the album.

So til Tuesday, before you go to Twist and Shout or Reckless, you can listen to Angles here on the Strokes site.


from NME

"The best artists are the ones that work the hardest, and if you work hard enough, you'll eventually experience the happy accidents that are art. I learned that from my stepfather." - Julian Casablancas