Chicago Reader   The Music Section: Critics' Choice

February 28-
March 6


Crooked Fingers

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Ladytron
Friday 2/28, Metro (Armstrong)
Crooked Fingers
Thursday 3/6, Schubas (Matos)
Murs
Friday 2/28, Bottom Lounge (Matos)
Paul Burch
Saturday 3/1, FitzGerald's (Whiteis)
Dror Feiler
Saturday 3/1, 6Odum (Margasak)
Kazem Al Saher
Sunday 3/2, Chicago Theatre (Margasak)
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  LADYTRON
Friday 2/28, Metro
Ladytron has a pretty high ick factor: the members are jet-setting technophiles who generally wear either all white or all black, speak several languages, and have skin as perfect as their short black hair. But the music makes up for the image: they temper their Sprockets-y electropop with baroque goth organ and ambient noise, and their moodiness hovers like a single wisp of cloud on a sunny day. And the foreign tongues come in handy when they strike up a dull ditty--anything sounds hot when it's sung in French by some throaty babe. A few songs on their debut full-length, 604 (Emperor Norton), were so good I listened to them too many times in a row; now I never want to hear them again. That hasn't happened to me with their latest, Light & Magic (also on Emperor Norton), because this album's like the eighth hour of a road trip--let yourself sink into the lush environmental rhythm and suddenly the landscape's full of startling, beautiful mirages. So what if all the band's new songs cruise without getting anywhere? What really matters on any dance track is the sense of motion, and Light & Magic's got plenty of bump. They get props for keeping the tunes right around three minutes--just long enough to fall into the groove, just short enough to keep the repetition from getting tedious--but thumbs-down for their petty thefts: "True Mathematics" sounds an awful lot like the electro anthem "Warm Leatherette," and "Flicking Your Switch" is just a hipster update of Londonbeat's "I've Been Thinking About You." Friday, February 28, 10 PM, Metro, 3730 North Clark; 773-549-0203. --LIZ ARMSTRONG
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  CROOKED FINGERS
Thursday 3/6, Schubas
On Eric Bachmann's third release as Crooked Fingers, Red Devil Dawn (Merge), the former Archers of Loaf front man abandons the morose, creaky feel of earlier efforts for a baroque 60s-pop sound marked by warm violin, cello, and trumpets: the fanfare on "You Threw a Spark" recalls Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire," while "Sweet Marie" is driven by a sweep of romantic strings. This is easily the most lush music Bachmann has ever recorded, and the overall effect is lightly melancholy. Even on the songs that hark back to the sparer Fingers style--"Carrion Doves," "Don't Say a Word," and "Bad Man Coming"--Bachmann's voice, which has sounded shot to hell since the last couple Archers albums, gains some sweetness. But something is lost as well. Bachmann's songs for Crooked Fingers have always sounded more like character sketches than like bouts of self-expression; until now, though, he seemed to identify enough with his wayward drunks and uncertain souls to get under their skins. The album's honeyed sound makes the southern-gothic tales feel less enacted than narrated. But Bachmann's always been a resourceful showman, so it should be interesting to see how he renders the new material onstage. Thursday, March 6, 9 PM, Schubas, 3159 North Southport; 773-525-2508. --MICHAELANGELO MATOS
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  MURS
Friday 2/28, Bottom Lounge
Upstaging a microphone fiend as charismatic as Atmosphere's Slug is no easy task. But on "The Two," the wittiest piece of metacommentary indie hip-hop has yet produced, Murs (of LA rap clique Living Legends) effortlessly steals the spotlight from his Minneapolis collaborator. That song, the highlight of the recent Murs and Slug Present Felt: A Tribute to Christina Ricci (Access Hip Hop/Rhymesayers Entertainment), is a comic narrative in which the duo rescues the world from mainstream-rap supervillains, only to end up back at their old record-store jobs, broke. "We saved the world, brought joy to the masses / But we couldn't save ourselves from the government and taxes," Murs raps, sounding less self-pitying than simply resigned to his fate as an underappreciated talent. That fate may not be inevitable, though--The End of the Beginning, his first album for the celebrated New York label Definitive Jux, seems likely to earn Murs more national attention. He can rhyme as fast as just about anyone, but even when he's rat-a-tatting like a tommy gun on the supercompressed verses of "The Dance," his flow never feels as rushed as, say, Talib Kweli's. And though "Last Night" (whose title phrase is finished by "I almost got shot on my block") underscores his disdain for hip-hop's glorification of violence, he knows how to lighten up--in the goofy "Risky Business" Murs throws a freaky party while his parents are away on vacation, and Digital Underground's Shock-G and Humpty Hump are invited. Friday, February 28, 6 PM, Bottom Lounge, 3206 North Wilton; 773-975-0505. --MICHAELANGELO MATOS
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  PAUL BURCH
Saturday 3/1, FitzGerald's
Paul Burch plays drums in the ungainly Nashville pop band Lambchop, which is often reductively categorized as alternative country, but it's as the leader of the hard-country quintet WPA Ballclub and on his own that he's made his greatest contributions to the Music City's C & W roots revival. His most recent release, which isn't terribly recent, is Last of My Kind (Merge), an ambitious solo disc on which he adapts a series of scenes from Tony Earley's novel Jim the Boy; throughout, Burch's guitar strums and forceful harmonica invoke the one-step dance cadences and gospel-tinged music of the white rural south. There's a fatalist undercurrent here, but unlike some latter-day roots revisionists Burch doesn't pour on the noir--his melodies are jaunty and his voice sounds optimistic, even as he allows threatening shadows to gather in the background. On "Up on the Mountain," his sweet vibrato is well suited to the naive and hopeful country-boy narrator, but the tough realism of his lyrics ("Up on the mountain my papa's so mean / They say his name like a blasphemy") roils the joyful surface. "Mama Shoo'd the Blackbirds" starts out as an ode to family and childhood, but soon the youthful protagonist contemplates pegging a bird with a slingshot to "see what it looks like when it falls / So I know how to fall," and mama ends up shooing the blackbirds because "they're singin' too sweet for the pain in this world." And on the shuffling "Harvey Hartsell's Farm," a plantation owner slaughters all of his animals to pay off gambling debts. Burch's characters tell their tales with offhanded ease and then simply go on with their lives, but his tunes hint at the existential dread that lurks beneath that old country stoicism. Saturday, March 1, 10 PM, FitzGerald's, 6615 Roosevelt, Berwyn; 708-788-2118. --DAVID WHITEIS
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  DROR FEILER
Saturday 3/1, 6Odum
In most free improvisation, familiar tricks and phrases generally reappear no matter how gifted the performer, but Dror Feiler seems determined to leap into the void every time he steps onstage. The Israeli-born composer, improviser, and reedist, who's lived in Sweden since 1973, has repeatedly written that chaos and disruptiveness are essential to his work; he strives to create a space where both performer and listener aren't sure what's happening or what will happen next. In each of his settings--the frenetic free improv of his trio Lokomotiv Konkret, the industrial clanging of his Too Much Too Soon Orchestra (with parts for power tools), and his terse solo performances (where saxophone clashes with harsh electronics)--abrasive noise intersects with or flat-out bulldozes more conventional elements. It's not the mere act of disruption that drives Feiler, however, but the desire to discover what results that disruption can create. "The more unplanned applications my music and words get the more it pleases me," he wrote in the liner notes to Sounds 99 (Blue Tower, 1999), a compilation of progressive Swedish improvised and experimental music. On his newest album, The Return of the Real (Tochnit-Aleph), his horn lines are treated electronically to create a crushing din worthy of the most extreme Japanese noise artists--but the blast is richly detailed and kinetic. For his Chicago debut Feiler will present a mix of solo improvisations played on various saxophones--sopranino, tenor, and the unwieldy contrabass (which has a bell large enough to swallow a tenor whole)--as well as those more violent and noisy works that mix saxophone and electronics. Saturday, March 1, 9 PM, 6Odum, 2116 West Chicago; 312-666-0795 or 773-227-3617. --PETER MARGASAK
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  KAZEM AL SAHER
Sunday 3/2, Chicago Theatre
American brands like Coke and McDonald's may be as ubiquitous in the Arab world as they are here, but when it comes to insipid pop heartthrobs, the Egyptians, Lebanese, and Saudis have more than enough of their own. Iraqi singer Kazem Al Saher stands out from the meticulously coiffed pretty boys turned out by Cairo's hit factories. Now 41, he's maintained his stardom for a decade and a half, and though, like the competition, he rarely sings about anything other than love, he has stretched out some musically. He's consistently made an effort to preserve elements of classical Arabic music, touring the Middle East with a 35-piece orchestra. Some of his songs employ lesser-known maqam (the microtonal scales that make Arabic music sound so melancholy to Western ears), and in the 90s he collaborated with Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, who once wrote for the legendary singer Umm Kalthoum. Al Saher, who left his homeland for good in 1997 and now splits his time between Toronto, Paris, Dubai, and Cairo, is no traditionalist--he'd made concessions to contemporary tastes by jacking things up with electronic beats and the occasional screaming electric guitar solo even before releasing an album in the U.S. (on Mondo Melodia, a label owned by former Police manager Miles Copeland that's been making a huge effort to bring in Arabic pop). He's also got a weakness for one-world bromides: he's performed for American politicians and recorded a special tribute to the pope. "The War Is Over," his recent duet with New Age chanteuse Sarah Brightman, feels like a flower stuck in the barrel of a gun, considering that by the time his short U.S. tour is over we'll probably be bombing his homeland. But he's at his best on the new Qusat Habebain (Rotana/EMI), where his gorgeous, sorrowful voice rides over a mix of bouncy Cairo beats and stately strings with authority and determination. Arabic pop is usually presented in hotel ballrooms out near O'Hare, but for this performance, with a 15-piece orchestra, Al Saher seems to be making a bid for a broader audience. Sunday, March 2, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 North State; 312-443-1130 or 312-902-1500. Al Saher also performs at 2 PM at Borders Books & Music, 830 North Michigan; 312-573-0564. --PETER MARGASAK
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