MUSIC

continued from p. 39 from one of my favorite Chicago albums of the year.

—LEOR GALIL

The Silver Room Sound System Block Party See Pick of the Week, page 38, and also Sat 7/29. The second day of the final installment of this beloved festival includes performances across three stages by Rich Medina, EvietheCool, Adam x Avehre, Boo Williams, Tony Humphries, Mick Jenkins, Freddie Old Soul, Lady D, and many more. Noon-10 PM, Oakwood Beach, 39th Street (aka Pershing/Oakwood) and Lake Michigan, $60 per day, $95 two-day pass, free for children 13 and under. b

Telekinetic Yeti, Stinking Lizaveta

Rifflord and Shrineburner open. 7:30 PM, Reggies Rock Club, 2105 S. State, $20. 17+

Telekinetic Yeti ’s 2017 debut album, Abominable , hit like a fat slab of bloody blubber dropped hard enough on a snow-covered mountainside to cause an avalanche. The Iowa duo’s music stood out for its superheavy stoner-doom riffs as well as for the whimsy and tongue-in-cheek humor in its lyrics (on tracks such as “Stoned and Feathered” and “Electronaut”). The rapport between vocalistguitarist Alex Baumann and drummer Anthony Dreyer could make it sound like the band was twice its size, but in 2019 they had a falling-out and split up. For a while two separate acts were operating as Telekinetic Yeti, but these days Dreyer’s group calls itself Twin Wizard while Baumann soldiers on under the original name with new drummer Rockwel Heim. Telekinetic Yeti’s delightful 2022 full-length, Primordial (Tee Pee), is as light-footed as Abominable in its heaviness—the band negotiates sludgy, spacey stomps and pulpy themes with palpable glee. Philadelphia band Stinking Lizaveta, named a er a pitiful but powerful character in Dostoevsky’s The

Brothers Karamazov , have carved out such a distinct sound that their instrumental music—informed by punk, jazz, metal, progressive rock, space rock, and whatever else happens to pop into their minds— feels like a genre unto itself. The trio formed in the mid-1990s with drummer Cheshire Augusta and two brothers, guitarist Yanni Papadopoulos and upright electric bassist Alexi Papadopoulos, and their lineup has remained intact ever since. Though their sound has evolved, the interplay among the instruments creates the sense that the music is primarily in dialogue with itself—even as it invites you to follow its sonic dialectic across multiple lines of argument and several planes of existence. Earlier this year, Stinking Lizaveta released their ninth album, Anthems and Phantoms (SRA). Crisp, crunchy, and playful, it shimmers with the joy of a cicada climbing out of its last nymphal skin with a fully developed set of wings and a repertoire of prismatic bug song that doesn’t need words to make itself understood. As Yanni recently told the blog Queen City Sounds and Art, “ Anthems feels like an emergence from the dark, a movement into light from uncertainty. There are more major chords.”

—MONICA KENDRICK

Tuesday1

Xylouris White See also Wed 8/2. Helen Money opens. 8:30 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $18, $30 two-night pass. 21+

Xylouris White’s fi h and latest LP, April’s The Forest in Me (Drag City), stands apart from everything else in the duo’s discography. Cretan folk musician George Xylouris—who contributes laouto (lute), lyra (upright fiddle), and vocals—and Australian MVP (most valuable percussionist) Jim White have typically recorded music that feels a lot like their live performances. Their concerts are usually exhilarating whirlwinds of ardent singing, mad strumming, and busy drumming that encompasses the hurtling momentum of a waterfall and the counterflow of the eddies at its foot. But when COVID shut things down, the two musicians and their producer, Guy Picciotto, found themselves separated by thousands of miles. Recording remotely, they developed a dozen brief, introspective instrumentals that eschew folkloric sources and song forms in order to evoke the stillness and distance of that moment in time. The insistent beats and keening bowed melody of “Night Club” reverberate as if across an unbridgeable distance, and the rustling brushwork and unhurried string harmonics of “Witnessed by Angels” sounds like music quietly willing itself into existence. When I saw Xylouris White this spring at the prestigious Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, the new material had a paradoxically galvanizing effect: its subdued tempo and volume made the rave-ups feel like even more of a release.

—BILL MEYER

Wednesday2

Xylouris White See Tue 8/1. Matchess opens. 8:30 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $18, $30 for two-night pass. 21+

Monday7

Uniflora Fruitleather and Plant Matter open. 7:30 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $13. b

Until this summer, I’d have struggled to think of a trio of rising high school sophomores who’d landed a slot at West Fest just a few months after forming their band—but then Chicago postpunks Uniflora went ahead and did it. Drummer Ruby O’Brien and bassist Theo Williams have been friends since kindergarten, and guitarist-vocalist Quinn Dugan attends Whitney Young with Wil- liams. They launched Uniflora in March, a er they all played together in two groups with larger lineups and shorter life spans—beginning in fall 2022, they’d been part of Cinnamon Sticks, a “surf-rock Christmas band” that played a single show in a guitar shop, and an outfit called Final Say that lasted just two weeks. By early 2023, only the three members of Uniflora remained interested in pursuing music together. In May, they self-released Francium, a scruff y, energetic EP whose austere rhythms and brittle guitars blur together minimal postpunk and trippy psychedelic rock. Quinn’s father, veteran Chicago drummer John Dugan (best known from recently reunited mod-punk trio Chisel), recorded the three songs on Francium, and Ruby’s father, Johnny O’Brien, is a musician too—he played bass in Slings & Arrows. But as important as parental support has been to Uniflora, their biggest allies in the scene have been kids their own age, including the bands Neptune’s Core and Lifeguard. Kai Slater (of Lifeguard and Sharp Pins) has been particularly helpful ever since he booked Uniflora for the all-ages Hallogallo Fest 2.5 at Color Club in June. “We played Color Club, and we got to meet a lot of people there and make new connections,” Ruby says. The bustling teen scene surrounding the Hallogallo collective is growing fast enough that Uniflora could book two groups of scenemates with vegetation-related names (Fruitleather and Plant Matter) to open their first headlining date at Schubas. —LEOR GALIL

Tuesday8

Voice of Baceprot Above Snakes open. 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, $25. 17+

A few years back, an emerging metal trio named Voice of Baceprot became an Internet sensation with videos of themselves covering the likes of Slipknot and Rage Against the Machine. They went viral less for their choice of tunes and more for

FRI special guest Oso Oso who and where they were—vocalist and guitarist Firda Marsya Kurnia, bassist Widi Rahmawati, and drummer Euis Siti Aisyah were teenage girls from a conservative Muslim village in rural Indonesia, and they played in hijab. The bandmates (now in their early 20s) discovered metal in 2014 through middle school counselor Ahba Erza. Encouraged by their interest, Erza taught the girls the basics of their instruments on school equipment, and as they developed their chops as musicians and songwriters, he became their mentor and (for a time) their manager.

According to outdated stereotypes about who metal musicians are “supposed to be,” VoB are just a novelty, but the band’s musical prowess and politically charged lyrics (which mix English and their native Sundanese) loudly assert their bona fides. (“Baceprot” is a Sundanese word for “noisy.”)

Their first original single, 2018’s “School Revolution,” weighs freedom and individualism against dogmatic teachings. And “[Not] Public Property,” the first track they wrote without Erza’s assistance, champions bodily autonomy and denounces violence against women.

VoB’s growing fan base includes heavyweights such as Tom Morello and Slash, and they’ve landed slots at major festivals, including Wacken Open Air in 2022. But every success has been hard-won. Though metal is relatively mainstream in Indonesia—in 2014 the country elected the world’s first self-proclaimed metalhead president, Joko Widodo—VoB have faced sexism in their scene, and the very existence of the band is considered radical by some conservative Muslims. In a 2022 profile on Red Bull’s the Red Bulletin, the members joked that they had “no friends” and spoke of villagers back home literally turning their backs on them. They also say they’ve received death threats. When they’ve traveled abroad, their experiences have been peppered with prejudice and Islamophobia: the Red Bulletin article also detailed a conversation with a French woman journalist who fixated on their hijabs and asked if they were oppressed.

In response, VoB have grown bolder. Their new debut full-length, Retas , which compiles early material with previously unreleased tracks, kicks off with “What’s the Holy (Nobel) Today?,” a ferocious anti-war banger in the spirit of RATM. The record also features their most cutting song to date, “The Enemy of Earth Is You,” where they take direct aim at the bullshit of political leaders, war profiteers, wealthy ecotourists, and others who are worsening the climate crisis (Indonesia is particularly vulnerable to flooding, sea level rise, and other impacts of climate change). VoB are already opening minds and changing lives, one metalhead at a time, and this is only their first U.S. tour—next time around, I doubt they’ll play anywhere quite as intimate as Beat Kitchen. —JAMIE

LUDWIG

WEDNESDAY9

Tropa Magica 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $15. 21+

Tropa Magica’s psychedelic cumbia contains some of the happiest, most upbeat grooves I’ve heard in years. The four-piece emerged from East Los Angeles’s magical musical cauldron in 2017, evolving out of a band called Thee Commons, who combined cumbia with elements of metal and surf rock. The brothers behind Tropa Magica, guitarist and vocalist David Pacheco and drummer Rene Pacheco, were motivated to launch the new group by their shared desire to deepen their exploration of their Mexican heritage through a fresh combination of nostalgic and modern influences. The self-described “chunsters” riff on northern Mexico’s chúntaro music—an urban style that combines cumbia and norteño with Colombia’s accordion-based vallenato—and add rock, punk, and west-coast psychedelic and tropical touches.

The Pacheco brothers’ affection for all things chúntaro comes through loud and clear on “Chunti Party,” which came out last year on Tropa Magica’s third album, III. As they explained in a 2019 interview with self-described “live music and culture label” Do It Ourselves, the term “chunti” (a variation of “chúntaro”) can be either endearing or insulting, as it stereotypically refers to “someone who is chicano or Mexican that drives around a pick-up truck, blasting corrido music.” David went on to note that “chunti” is uncool, and that’s exactly why the band is drawn to it. “We love that word because we are like that. We see bands like Chicano Batman and they wear tuxedos on stage. They’re not trying to be cool,” he said. “That’s just their style and that’s our style, not trying too hard.”

At a chunti party, according to the song, everyone dances: “todos bailan.” So come to this show ready for a supreme disco-delic dance party reminiscent of the kind of 80s southern California barrio weekend when the sounds of Kumbia Kings, Selena, and tropical accordion star Rigo Tovar filled the air. The band’s warm, luminous music is perfect for carefree nights. “El mundo se acaba, pero la cumbia no,” they sing on “Cohen’s Cumbia”—the world is ending, but not the cumbia.

—CATALINA MARIA JOHNSON v

Music by: Zolita / BOOTS! (DJ SET)

Hole Kardashian (Putivuelta Bogotá) & More

SAT JUL

Neo Reunion 2023

with DJs Suzanne Shelton / Jeff Moyer Rob Kokot / Glenn Russell & More

A METRO 40 TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION

MICHAEL SHANNON & JASON NARDUCY AND FRIENDS PLAY MURMUR

Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of REM’s Murmur

FRI AUG 11 / 11:30PM / 21+

JOE FIORE PRESENTS