Show preview: Julie Meckler, 4/15 at The Whistler

By Gene Wagendorf III  

If you're the kind of person that uses their non-football-season-Sundays for resting your 5 Hour Energy and whiskey riddled soul, The Whistler has a show that ought to be right up your alley. WCR readers might know Julie Meckler as the one pretty thing about local junkyard rockers Rambos, but that band's horror-tinged garage stylings are a far cry from Meckler's solo work. The French-turned-Chicagoan chanteuse lives closer to Mazzy Star than to the morgue, drifting through travel-weary ballads with a haunting lilt and somber charm. Songs like "Mexico" are vaguely reminiscent of The Children's Hour, a magnetic combination of fragile guitar work and eidolic swooning. What makes Meckler's music captivating is the deliberate delivery of her words. Even in moments of romantic lament there isn't a syllable lost in excess or hyperbole- or to paraphrase Phillip Lamantia, there is never "a spoken word caught in its own meat saying nothing." If that doesn't have you interested enough to check out this free show, here's the video for "Manhattan."

Interview: Fall Fox

Posted by Sasha

Fall Fox's debut EP is a rarity among first steps into the DIY music scene. Its low-fi folk is strewn with lyrical oddities and playful turns, simultaneously mellow and fiercely alive. It occupies an odd space in both the old and new, mixing fables with the present day and letting Martins and Korgs occupy the same air. It all comes out of one Christian Keck, who's been performing in Chicago for years but has only recently taken on the name Fall Fox for his projects. He talked with us about his influences, the DIY and low-fi ethics in music, and his secret vaults of experimental electronica songs. We also talked about trees and feelings.

The self-titled EP is available as a free download or as part of a $1.75 package that includes a handmade hemp bracelet. Listen to and download it here. Fall Fox will also be playing a free show with Mark Trecka on Monday, December 27th at the Whistler.

Check out the interview after the jump.

Show review: Fall Fox, Daniel Lutz, Hope & Therapy, Brother George at Subterranean, 10/21

Posted by Sasha

Brother George

These days especially, it's hard to make retro sound fresh. Everyone's doing it; all the fads of the past century are now in flux. While last Thursday's lineup at Subterranean was full of backwards-compatible tunes, I didn't detect a second of straight mimicry. The evening was headed by Fall Fox and his playful breed of occasionally synth-tipped folk. He switched out guitars between each song, wielding an arsenal of four acoustics, each in a different tuning. Capping off his set with a 19th century Irish folk tune, Fall Fox led perfectly into the ethereal fingerpicked folk of Daniel Lutz, another solo songwriter who could have just stepped out of the '60s scene.

Somewhere between prog and neo-soul, Hope & Therapy played like a power trio from a future with no need for guitars. Dan Deck cranked some incredible tones out of his Kramer under the powerful vocal melodies and keys of Hope Gaines. Their sound felt removed from time, simultaneously weighted with classic influence and careening off toward the unknown.

Brother George, conversely, seem to know exactly their place in time. Sporting some gorgeous vintage gear, they played like the harbingers of classic rock for the digital age. I felt like I was watching a fresher, more current version of The Band in their heyday, with a good deal of humor in their persona. Brother George didn't just wear the classic vibe; they mastered the sound from the inside. The viola bass, Telecaster, and vintage hollowbody rang out like they used to before the dawn of the humbucker. The tone on the hollowbody was so good that at the start of one solo, I swore there was a fourth human voice squealing out of the stacks. It blew my mind. While it's easy to fall into cliche when drawing so much on rock's early days, Brother George proved that even the most tired genres can be reinvigorated with the right energy. 

Check out more photos from the show after the jump.

EP review: Fall Fox

Posted by Sasha

Sometimes amid the masses of bandwidth-choking MySpaces laden with bedroom demos and debut EPs uploaded for anyone to hear, you come across something special. At first, Fall Fox sounds like another guy with a guitar playing open chords into a four-track. And while that may technically be he case, it's the content of those tracks that sets Fall Fox apart in their first foray into digital distribution.

Fall Fox spins their folk-rock with a masterful voice, caught in both the strange and the innocent, teasing the line between songs of yore and songs of not-quite-yet. The debut EP builds a compact and fascinating world, an old diorama in a wooden box housing a scene initially familiar but where things don't play out quite as expected. There's a playfulness embodied in these tracks, something strongly reminiscent of folk tunes for children, but it doesn't give the EP the juvenile or saccharine sound that usually arises when songwriters try to inject their childhood into their work. Mixed with masterfully surreal lyrics, the youngness of these songs feels more like what childhood really was—strange, occasionally frightening, and full of wonder.

“And I'll be your analyst with the morningtime/and I'll be your alchemist when the evening glows,” begins “I Know Thee Well”, a song nostalgic for the antiquated from its title all the way through its string of animal metaphors. It's an upbeat charmer, a song of friendly affection expertly structured with some fantastic lyrical turns. One could easily imagine it on the soundtrack of the latest teen indie flick alongside Kimya Dawson et al, but let's hope it doesn't have to meet that fate quite yet.

The EP slows it down in its middle two tracks. "The River, Moon, and Sparrow" begins with a brief self-amused, Dylan-toned soliloquy before settling into a gentler tale of classic longing. On “Feelings” we hear more than guitar for the first time as Fall Fox underlines their vocals with synth trills and birdsong, creating a digital forest for us to float through. Too often digital intervention with a lo-fi acoustic song can sound icy, the synth harshly cutting in against guitar and vocals, but here the digital glitters perfectly alongside the organic. I couldn't tell you where Fall Fox found this loop. I can only imagine they went into the woods with their four-track and recorded the sunlight wafting through the leaves directly onto tape.

Closer “Raptors”, hilariously listed as both “Live in my bedroom” and as a bonus track (four out of four), starts off slow, surreal and entirely earnest. “When my hands turn to paws, I'll be coming home soon,” the lyrics go. The yearning for the primordial, the return to nature as an animal, becomes as palpable as any human desire, and perhaps more compelling in its strangeness. The song fakes an ending halfway through before picking up the tempo and finishing fast. Maybe the bonus track label wasn't intended as a joke, but the song rounds out the EP so well I find it difficult to believe it was tacked on as an afterthought. And if it was, Fall Fox should continue to trust in their afterthoughts.

While a softness and a sense of wonder are present in these songs, Fall Fox lacks the same gentleness as many of their indie-folk compatriot—and refreshingly so. There's a certain spunk to their spirit, something more akin to acoustic punks Ghost Mice than say, Iron & Wine. Some easy comparisons could be made to the Mountain Goats before they went clean, but John Darnielle took several albums to reach the level of structure in these songs, singing his own breed of meandering, journalistic reflection in his early days. Fall Fox dabbles less in literal introspection and more in the fables of their genre's original pioneers. They weave magnificent tales, pushing the old to the edge in a fresh take on the folk genre. I can't wait to see what more they come up with.

Fall Fox's debut may be downloaded in its entirety for free from their Bandcamp. And for $1.75, you can buy a download package that includes a hemp bracelet hand-made by the band (which they will mail to you in the real world). You can also catch Fall Fox at Subterranean tonight, October 21st at 8 p.m. Daniel Lutz, Hope & Therapy and Brother George will also play.