Everclear is back. That’s what Art Alexakis shouted anyway, to the crowd at House of Blues Chicago on the night of Wednesday, January 27, 2010. With the fiery performance the group put on you’d have to believe them, too, and maybe even start to wonder if they ever really went away in the first place.

 The Bowerbirds headlined Saturday, January 16^th, at Lincoln Hall as part of the Tomorrow Never Knows festival. The Bowerbirds are an indie folk band consisting of Phil Moore on guitar and lead vocals, Beth Tacular on accordion, keyboards and vocals, and Dan “Yan” Westerlund on drums, keyboards and vocals.

You can tell when a folk musician’s getting up in years, and it’s painfully obvious when a rock band is well past their prime, but there’s something about certain soul and funk musicians that seems to defy the laws of age and time. They can prompt us to look at their faces, but the years are hardly showing. Enter Aaron Neville at the Venue in the Horseshoe Casino this past Thursday: the man looks the same and the man sounds the same. One is almost led to believe that the man feels exactly the same as he did in 1966, when he released his biggest hit, a Number One single on the Billboard R&B charts, Tell It Like It Is.

Aaron Neville’s quintet, featuring big brother and saxophonist Charles Neville of the Neville Brothers, started out the night amidst a border of done-up Christmas trees and lighted presents on either side of the stage. This was clearly going to be a serious holiday celebration. After the drummer and backup vocalist introduced the quintet, Mr. Aaron Neville himself ran onto the stage and started into “It’s All Right,” written by Curtis Mayfield and made famous by The Impressions. With five stellar musicians backing him up, the real star of the song and the rest of the night was Aaron’s bizarre, saintly, unlike-anything-else-you’ve-ever-heard vocal cords. They’re just one more reason to make you think that this man doesn’t age, and they’re still strong enough to stand up alone or lead a Tabernacle Choir.

Musicians with one or two hits (and sometimes more) on the oldies stations almost always feel compelled to cover other peoples’ songs from the same era, and to some this is expected and encouraged, while to others it’s inexcusable. I fall somewhere in the middle of these two groups, because it’s always songs that I like which are covered, and I like a little bit of cheese on my sandwich, but I respect musicians for their own contributions to musical evolution and would have preferred to hear some of the more obscure New Orleans funk that Mr. Neville is also loved for. That said, the next song of the night was “Don’t Know Much”, from 1989 – which hit the Adult Contemporary charts and not any soul or funk charts, but it was an original all the same, and it tasted good. The band played music from several genres during the set, from doo wop to country, and all that seemed to tie them together was that they were having so much fun on stage and that these were obviously the songs that gave them the most pleasure to perform. Around the middle of the set, Aaron sang a touching version of “A Change Is Gonna Come,” a song a lot of people have very high standards for. It’s a difficult song to live up to, and after setting the original and untouchable version by Sam Cooke aside, for me nothing reaches the heights of the Otis Redding and Baby Huey versions. Aaron’s live version did, however, move me and the rest of the audience with its conviction, and really showcased his voice and the emotional heights it’s capable of reaching.

As the decorated stage and name of the tour made clear, this was a holiday show, but Aaron only played a handful of Christmas songs over the course of the two hour set, including “Bells will be Ringing” and “Merry Christmas Baby”, most famously covered by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. As someone who’s never fully understood what is so great about Christmas music, I found myself enjoying most of the Christmas songs, partly because the classics were so pretty with Aaron singing lead, and partly because the rest of the songs borrowed a little more heavily from R&B and funk influences. It was, strangely enough, a Christmas song that brought my attention to just how musically capable Aaron’s quintet was. For a drummer to be able to drive Christmas songs with such a funky groove is quite impressive. Aaron joked that the backup vocals of his drummer and bassist were his own personal Tabernacle Choir, and he wasn’t too far off. When they weren’t doo-wopping and goofing around on stage, they provided clean and clear harmonies as a bottom layer for Aaron’s voice to soar octaves above. His brother, Charles Neville, led a few songs on sax while Aaron took short breaks off the stage, and his lung power made him seem not a day older than his more famous younger sibling.

Shortly before the encore, the band finally broke into “Tell It Like It Is”, which prompted several members of the audience to stand up and start dancing. Everyone had wanted to do this all along, but had felt too hindered in the somewhat stodgy venue of the casino to leave their seats. The old hit even moved one woman to find her way up to the stage and throw her hands up towards Aaron with a drunken fever in her eyes before being politely moved out of the way by a security guard. This woman couldn’t help it, though. She understood what this night was all about: It was a funky holiday celebration, and it was just a little bit sensitive, too. She did just what we all wanted to do – she touched that music, and she opened those shiny presents under the tree. 

Toronto instrumental rock group Do Make Say Think played at Lincoln Hall last Saturday, December 5^th, following a show at sister venue Schubas Tavern the night before.

Opening for the band were several songs from the Happiness Project, an experimental undertaking by Charles Spearin of DMST and contributing member of Canadian indie rock band Broken Social Scene. The songs in the Happiness Project begin with recordings of Spearin’s neighbors talking about happiness and what it means to them. The project focuses on the different inflections and rhythms that naturally sound when people speak.  Using strings, horns, vocals and the talent lent by members of DMST, Spearin turned each person’s narratives of happy memories into different live, experimental jazz songs. The project is interesting as both a musical and a social test, and should be checked out by anyone interested in human interactions and sounds.

Do Make Say Think began shortly after the Happiness Project ended. Four more people joined the musicians from the Happiness Project, said, “Now we’re Do Make Say Think”, and began to play.

A common complaint about experimental bands is that the songs all blend together and start to sound the same. The combination of this fear and the initial repetitive lullaby sounds from the stage immediately threatened to calm me to sleep after a long night, but the shrieking jazz collision in the next movement of the same song helped to snap me into consciousness for at least the next hour of melodies. Perhaps not full consciousness, but that’s part of the appeal of Do Make Say Think: it’s easy to get lost in a song, prompting you to think about what’s going on in your own head and heightening the feelings you’re already having, much in the way certain drugs are known to do. Listening in a half dreamlike state, the songs played out as a personal soundtrack to my mind’s events. The band’s layered sounds seemed to have the same effect on most of the audience members, who swayed slowly in front of the stage and watched quietly from the balcony. The songs did have the tendency to blend together at times, but that just made for one really long, fascinating song with several components to it.

One of the main differences between Do Make Say Think and other post rock and experimental bands I’ve seen live is how natural the band members of DMST seem on stage, and how organic and comfortably the sounds escape from their instruments. They have climactic parts to their songs, and they enjoy them and move with the music, but they don’t make a production out of it, and they’re comfortable without trying to be too grandiose. They let the music speak for itself however it will, without using their body language to portray to the audience how important the music is.

Shortly before the encore, one of the band members asked if we wanted to hear “more Canadian fucking space fucking rock,” which is an excellent way to describe the kind of music the band plays. They played three of the four songs off of their latest album, Other Truths, which has just a touch of a western twang to it, and they seemed to have an increased level of positive energy and enthusiasm for their newer work. The nine musicians in the band all played to and fed off of each other, supporting each person and sound on stage, and not competing for anything. It wasn’t until 1:30 in the morning, after more than an hour and a half of playing, that the band sang for the first time in the night. After two hours they closed the night, fittingly, with the final track from Other Truths, Think, and sent us home to do just that.

Rosemont Theatre hosted Canadian folk legend Leonard Cohen and band on October 29^th, 2009. Cohen began playing at 8pm sharp and went strong for three and a half hours...

Coloradan bluegrass-jam group, Yonder Mountain String Band, played to sold out crowds two nights in a row, October 23^rd and 24^th, at the House of Blues in Chicago. Joining the band were special guests Darol Anger on fiddle and Danny Barnes on banjo.

The Fleet Foxes have changed. Last summer they were good live, but they were timid and withdrawn. Saturday night at the Metro was a different band playing the same songs and a few more. A year on the road has taught the Foxes how to have confidence, and that folk songs can rock.

Opening for the Fleet Foxes was Dungen from Sweden, a psychedelic-folk-rock band who seemed surprised by the overwhelmingly positive response from the audience. They said, “You guys are here to see the Fleet Foxes, right?” before beginning their encore.