Hello and welcome to another edition as Crow’s Nest. As always thank you for opening and reading this. Quick note: I’ve written probably the longest intro part I’ve ever done in one of these issues for this, so if you’re looking for the tunes you may wish to scroll down first then return for my thoughts on things below.
As I write this, Lollapalooza is happening approximately one commute to the office south of me. Roughly 100,000 people, ~80% of whom do not live in the immediate area (from what I’ve seen, whether that’s Chicago proper or the metro area) have gathered in the city for 4+ days of tunes, fun, and general excitement in what is and will probably be the largest festival occurring in the world this year right as the U.S., including Cook County specifically, sees a mitigation recommendation triggering surge in COVID case numbers fueled by the highly contagious Delta variant.
If you’ve been to Lolla before, you know the best case scenario is only a bunch of mostly young adults party too hard and (mostly temporarily) deal with those consequences afterward. And that’s with only the usual summer flu and other diseases circulating. A 20,000 person weekend fest in Utrecht, with somewhat more stringent testing requirements (and probably better overall safety), wound up with 5% of attendees testing positive for COVID afterwards. Cases appear to spiking even further in Florida following Rolling Loud Miami (though, admittedly, Florida has again been the nation's COVID epicenter recently). As Chicago Reader columnist Leor Galil put it best, Mayor Lori Lightfoot, LiveNation and their enablers’ insistence on putting on this event at this stage in the pandemic is irresponsible at best, immoral at worst, and primed to further fuel the surge nationwide as new cases incubate and spread back out from Grant Park across the country, potentially devastating local institutions just now getting back on their feet.
I place the blame for this directly at Lighfoot’s feet. It’s a bit complicated (more below), but I don’t blame the attendees themselves for going and what happens afterwards. If the past year and a half has demonstrated anything, it’s that many social ills and issues in our society can be significantly influenced through policy decisions, and the appropriate plugs can be pulled to inhibit deleterious behavior. The economic impacts can be debated, but Lollapalooza did not need to happen. The fact that it wasn’t cancelled again this year is a good enough argument of its safety for many to buy $400+ tickets and spend hundreds more otherwise to go, especially when the pleasures of such an experience have been denied for so long.
Throughout the pandemic, Mayor Lightfoot has obviously demonstrated that she cares far more about the money of other people who visit and don’t live here, and desperately seeks the approval of those who will never give it to her. Both of these come at the expense of the majority of the constituents to whom she is responsible for governing. Earlier today she held a press conference encouraging the largely black and brown populations of the city, whose vaccination rates lag relative to more affluent and white areas of the city, to get vaccinated and take other precautionary measures. These are the groups, as Chicago repeatedly demonstrates, who will bear the brunt of any carnage, while the mostly white and out of town crowd has a fun weekend and few consequences of their own. It’s enough to make this raised-Catholic agnostic believe in hell again, if only to hope that some punishment eventually occurs over such insanity.
Admittedly, I’m not fully innocent here: last night I went to an aftershow at a midsize venue in the city, and I did enable a family member’s attendance at Lolla when I could have put my foot down and tried for a different outcome. From talking with them, despite the doomscrolling effect of mass crowding and other documented, somewhat isolated incidents of pure recklessness, it is apparently ‘reasonably fine’ at the fest with respect to disease mitigation, whatever that means. Sports stadiums have also been packing people in without being an obvious driver of COVID cases too. I’m not majorly influential with influencing public opinion, and consequently I don’t necessarily need to concern myself with the ‘big picture’ as much. As much as I may not want to admit it, the phrase “personal responsibility” comes to mind regarding how I can approach this fest.
I don’t know. It’s complicated. Throughout the pandemic I feel I’ve done more than my part in preventing disease transmission through distancing measures and getting vaccinated as soon as I could. It’s come at a personal cost but I have “had it easy” throughout the pandemic, I guess (that's complicated). I’m not about to stop wearing masks in many risk-prone situations, nor do I believe my vaccination is a perfect panacea from COVID, but fuck, man, I sympathize with my vaccinated peers who did everything they could to ‘get back to normal’ and are being rewarded with a frustratingly dragged out half-recovery facilitated by those unable to find the guts to force a positive end to things. My frustration is aimed at those who refuse to take even simple precautionary measures (and, for those able to, get vaccinated) and insist on behaving recklessly and irresponsibly, especially when they facilitate that behavior for others. It drags out and worsens the situation for everyone else and, in many cases, the selfish get away with it too.
More than anything, I hope I’m wrong. I cannot believe my mind thought of this and is going “yeah, say this publicly”, but I hope Lightfoot et al. have some of Boris Johnson’s ridiculous luck and this weekend is not the mass casualty event many have predicted it to be. I don’t have compelling reasons to believe this, but I hope the claim that 90% of Lolla attendees are fully vaccinated is true, and such levels of immunity are enough for herd immunity to do what it’s supposed to. I hope the Times’s David Leonhardt, whose morning briefing columns’ insistence that the effects of COVID in youngsters is less than the harms of disrupted schooling I’ve long suspected is him trying to manifest the return of free childcare for kids he’s irritated with at home, is right that Delta surges elsewhere taper off quickly following the initial spike (and that gets repeated here). I also hope that breakthrough infections in the fully vaccinated, a very concerning emerging narrative, remains an anecdotal distortion to the statistical reality that such infections have only occurred in a small fraction of 1% of fully vaccinated Americans to date. I’m not yet about to dump upcoming concert tickets and major future plans, but at the same time it’s too early to chart the forthcoming course following the past year and a half.
Alright, lecture’s over. Time for … Lecture 2! But first here’s a picture from a recent walk to help break things up a little bit:
Many people’s relationships to sound and music have changed recently due to the pandemic, resulting in increased attention to their immediate environment and the sounds within. For me, this is also a result of (finally) purchasing quality speakers loud enough to yield noise complaints from my neighbors in my apartment building. This has made me more aware of the volume level I keep my music at, but I’ve also noticed a trend recently in recorded music where some of it does seem to be getting quieter. There are a few times where I’ve been listening to something and find myself increasing the volume beyond my self-regulating threshold solely to be sure I’m hearing everything at an appropriate level. I don’t believe this is because I’m going deaf either.
This is, to be clear, not confined to lo-fi or otherwise ‘quiet’ music; I noticed it in a release recently (blurbed below) from a dance music label presumably professional enough to upload the appropriate mix/file to online sources. The mix level sounds like an original master of pre-digital music compared to a loudness war CD/digital remaster. While changing the overall volume level is frequently an attempt to draw attention to one’s music, it’s not something I’d expect from this release. And as much as I might like more dynamics in music in the classical crescendo/decrescendo sense, I don’t think this release is making that case.
This is just my theory, but I suspect this might have something to do with the economics of recorded music. While streaming is now far and away the largest revenue source in recorded music, the individual payouts remain pitiful and many are organizing to increase these rates. While this is a worthwhile fight I wholeheartedly support, I’m aware other artists have largely written off the unlikely possibility of significant compensation from streaming and, if they put up their music online, use it primarily as a promotional vehicle to encourage more lucrative ticket/merch sales. In that case, when you’re not attempting to command constant attention in a digital space, why bother trying to compete and win at a game you’re not playing? Why not focus on a vinyl mix you feel matters more instead? This could be a gimmick to, yes, turn up the volume and pay more attention in hopes of ultimately paying more for the music. But it does appear to be a trend worth keeping an eye on (the volume level, that is). Or maybe I am losing my hearing.
Ok, that’s done. Tunes and those blurbs below. No tweets or readings since the latter haven’t been that good as of late for me and I don’t feel up to doing the former this time. I assume you’ll be fine without.
I’ve spent the past 3 weeks listening with this on repeat, usually at least once a day, trying to determine if it’s good or not. I suppose that activity answers that question. Bad band name, great record. This indie trio from Australia finds themselves expanding their sound and transcending the ‘dolewave’ tag other indie groups from down under have been labeled as (most notably, Courtney Barnett). There’s a kitchen sink-yet-measured approach to experimentation present, that keeps the album engaging even beyond the stellar one-two opening. The trio take turns in the lead, singing about topics like missed calls, refracted public perception, even crooning about material desires denied to many young folks. They sound ready to play anywhere between smaller dives to mid-sized theaters to festival stages, and I am ready for them wherever they might turn up.
This record feels like an alternate history high-water mark (or diamond in the rough) of NYC art-rock had it come out a few decades earlier. Anchored by the production and drumming of James Krivchenia (Big Thief), it’s a bewitching, quiet yet assured record from the Erin Birgy’s Mega Bog project. Bowie is listed as an influence alongside other historic and contemporary artists though I don’t believe “Station to Station” is a cover here. I can see myself returning to this somewhat frequently.
Perhaps you’re one of the many people who found the disruptions of the pandemic conducive to starting a new hobby or other activity you wanted to pursue but hadn’t previously. (Crow’s Nest is that for me, for what it’s worth.) Among discussions on how to build back better different institutions upon return, 3024 label head Martyn started a mentoring program to help cultivate upcoming dance music talent for said return. The fruits of that effort are starting to blossom, including this 3-part compilation of recent work from said mentees. Some of the names (Talik, CCL) seem to be sprouting up all over the place from what comes on my radar, others are new to me. It’s a great listen, and part 2 is out in a couple of weeks.
This experimental group came onto my radar recently. An eight-piece contemporary minimal group centered around a 3-piece post-punk group, caroline make stark, austere music centered around a very organic-seeming improvisation/looping sound. The terms ‘atmospheric’ and ‘environmental’ no doubt spring to mind when listening, though I feel they’ve got a bit of that je ne sais quoi to them that differentiates them from others who might be labeled similarly. I hear bit of Still House Plants in them though the two remain separate beasts. An album is forthcoming which ought to be well worth it.
No Bandcamp for this one. A rarity since I can usually find a link from there for each release in an issue for a quality embed. Anyway, this is a cavernous, krautrock heavy electronic release from NYC’s Pat Mahoney (LCD Soundsystem) and Dennis McNany. Between the artwork, band name and others names it certainly comes across like a tight fit, provided we’re after hours in said museum.
I’m not a positive person by nature or disposition—it’s frustrating when others don’t appear to be taking things as seriously as you or assume things will work out fine by default—but it’s also no fun to be a constant downer. God bless those whose relentless positivity has helped make the pandemic more bearable when such optimism has been hard to come by. I can’t imagine what it took Peter Solo and the rest of Vaudou Game to record this through lockdown, but spinning it recently has been a nice ray of sunshine even when the atmosphere suggests otherwise. Just try to put this slab of West African funk on and maintain a frown.
This is the quiet one mentioned above. Jay Duncan is a new name to me but her collaborator, saxophonist Ben Vince, has been on my radar since his 2018 EP with Joy Orbison. (Speaking of Joy, his forthcoming debut full-length, a ‘soul’ mixtape, will be out in about 2 weeks and is on notice for the next Crow’s Nest.) These are twitchy experimental numbers combining weird synths gurgles with off-beat kicks and Vince’s fluttering wails. Villalobos rearranges and somewhat straightens out the A-side into his signature manner as well.
Here we have a good answer to a speculative question: what if James Murphy wasn’t as existentially anguished, and instead was a Northside party rocker? That’s certainly the vibe I get from this dance-punk record from the trio and their collaborators. It’s not apolitical but it also doesn’t wallow in itself in that self-aware manner LCD Soundsystem frequently does. This isn’t really serious music but the band takes playing it seriously, to their benefit. I certainly expect a good party in a few weeks when they play a cheap beer night at Sleeping Village.
This EP of “acid pop” from France reminds me of how strong the futurist leanings of that country can be. It’s certainly a strongly different flavor from my own Anglo-leaning tastes, as evidenced through most of what I highlight. You’ve got gabber-lite kicks, 303 squelches and other space age novel, off-center sounds throughout, which is a nice reminder of how much more expansive music could be compared to its current foci.
I have to say I remained at distance from Emma-Jean Thackray as she initially came onto my radar, but having finally given this a listen Yellow has won me over. Another excellent album from the wonderful London jazz scene, Thackray melds in influences from her background in brass bands of Yorkshire in the mix as well. Even on record it seems primed for call-and-response audience participation, hopefully there’s an opportunity for that soon.
Something I forgot happens with live music is not just the sense of discovery or revelations a performance can contain compared to home listening of the studio recordings, but also the reinforcement seeing a band live can have. Some things just click or stick with you after seeing them live, and you live with a record much more strongly afterwards as a result. I didn’t have the best of a time seeing previous Crow’s Nest feature Moontype a few weeks ago (my first full-capacity show back + crowd vibes), but since then I’ve gotten a few songs I didn’t consider highlights have come to the forefront for me. But I have really been listening to the practically-power pop ‘About You’ and downcast ‘Your Mom’ on repeat since then, which I don’t believe I would have if I didn’t go. Funny how things work like that.
And with that, I’ll call it an issue at this point. If you’ve gotten here past the significant number of words within, thank you for reading. I hope you found something you enjoy within, and whether you are heading out or continuing to stay in, take it easy, we all still could use some space.