MUSIC

Most music outlets have already published their listicles spotlighting the best albums of the first half of the year. As usual, I’m not even thinking about picking my favorites from among every album released anywhere—I’m overwhelmed just by the volume of quality Chicago music that I haven’t gotten to write about yet. This felt like a good time to catch up, partly because big music festivals take up so much oxygen in the summer—if you’re not looking for coverage of smaller local artists, you could easily get the impression that the only musicians doing anything worth paying attention to are traveling under the banners of mega-promoters Live Nation and AEG. (In case you haven’t heard, AEG is attached to the Congress Theater renovation, which received $27 million in TIF funding last week.)

I review recent albums by nine local artists below, and none of those artists has been booked for any of the marquee local festivals. Gia Margaret’s Romantic Piano has attracted the most media attention, though I’m sure Valee’s collaboration with Harry Fraud will make a big splash—I wrote this before it dropped on July 21. The Reader has already mentioned two of these albums in passing (Particle of Organs in a recent Chicagoans of Note, Lamb Leaves Pasture in Gossip Wolf), but I felt they both deserved more love. In no way do I imagine I can be definitive or exhaustive, even about just the previous three months of Chicago releases, but I hope to give you a more nourishing sense of the scope and variety of the music we can call ours.

BUGGIN

CoNcReTe CoWbOyS

By LEOR GALIL

Flatspot. Flatspot has been kicking around for a couple decades and amassed considerable influence: in 2012, for example, it issued the first in its Extermination series of compilations, which featured an early recording from present-day hardcore heartthrobs Turnstile. The fourth Extermination, which dropped in January, includes the Buggin track “Attitude,” which runs through three distinct moods and speeds in its 51 seconds. In June, Flatspot issued the band’s debut full-length, Concrete Cowboys, and it demonstrates perfectly what’s drawing so many kids to a new generation of hardcore: in the right hands, this shit is fun. Buggin play mostly at blink-and-you’ll-missit speeds (the album’s longest track lasts two minutes and 17 seconds), but spend enough time with Concrete Cowboys and you can start to feel the rhythm section shift a song’s center of gravity with a palpable swing. Front person Bryanna Bennett sings in a stinging bark or a hoarse holler, but it’s worth making the e ort to marinate in their lyrics. They praise the joys of junk food (“Snack Run”) and rail against the marginalization of women and nonbinary musicians in hardcore (“Not Yours”), bringing the same controlled, focused force to every subject. Strong words are the language of hardcore, so I’ll say this plainly: Buggin kick ass.

Deerest Friends

LaMb LeAvEs PaStUrE

all-ages show, Hallogallo Fest 2.5, on June 1 at Color Club. This small but mighty scene now includes enough bands to warrant two days of celebration, and the Color Club concert doubled as an uno cial record release for Lamb Leaves Pasture, the debut album from Deerest Friends, one of the newer Hallogallo-a liated projects. This five-piece includes Will Hu man of folky lo-fi group Post O ce Winter as well as Francis Brazas and Desi Kaercher from gloriously shambolic indie-rock outfit Dwaal Troupe, and Deerest Friends’ rough-hewn sound incorporates the styles of those groups. Quasi-symphonic touches (strings, xylophone, accordion, horns, piano) bring a shaggy sort of sophistication that complements the music’s charmingly unraveled edges. Most of the players in Deerest Friends also sing, usually in plaintive half-whispers (I’d be shocked if they’re not all Phil Elverum fans), and when they join together in harmony, it can evoke the collective catharsis of punk-rock gang vocals. Lamb Leaves Pasture has a lot in common with the Hallogallo scene as a whole: young people banding together have made something big and ambitious that’s still comfortable enough with its own imperfections to feel welcoming to everyone.

The Legendary Traxster

Wright, better known as G Herbo). Within a few years, he helped break Chicago nationally, in no small part because he produced most of Do or Die’s 1996 debut album, Picture This. All of this is to say that Traxster is a big deal—when he set out to find rappers to be part of his sprawling new double album, Chicago, he didn’t need to dig deep in his Rolodex. A great array of rappers show up—including Lupe Fiasco, Twista, King Louie, Rhymefest, Belo Zero of Do or Die, and L.E.P. Bogus Boys veteran G Count—but what gives the album its power is Traxster’s ability to mold his svelte productions to so many clashing personalities. I particularly like the switcheroo he pulls on “Just Dance”—the instrumental stops and changes to a brandnew arrangement partway through the song, and both halves fit the shrapnel-scu ed voice and mischievous personality of Vic Spencer. If I had to pick a favorite track, though, it’d the 33-second trunk-thumping funk of “So Cold,” with its swaggering performance from Crucial Conflict’s Coldhard. If you need a quick lesson on the breadth and shape of Chicago’s hip-hop history, this is a great place to start.