File Under Anglo
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Gospel Morning, a collection of decidedly retro but well-executed melancholy Anglophile pop, is Junior’s most accomplished recording yet, and he’s hardly a newcomer to the Chicago music scene. Between 1987 and 1993 he fronted the glam-rock outfit Mystery Girls, then spent two years with the Rosehips, who were heavily influenced by the romantic, boozy folk-rock of England’s Jacobites. (He still dresses the part.) A few years earlier the guitarist had befriended the Jacobites’ Nikki Sudden and his brother, Epic Soundtracks, both of whom first made their mark in the influential late-70s band Swell Maps, while they were on separate solo tours in the U.S. With the demise of the Rosehips, he began playing guitar for both brothers, often on the other side of the pond.
Junior says his stint with Soundtracks was instrumental to the genesis of the Chamber Strings. “I was inspired by his ability to get his complete vision down without the help of anybody else, and I learned a lot musically from playing with him,” he says. “In order to get what you really want it’s really tough to have a democracy.” Lava Sutra drummer Anthony Illarde soon joined Soundtracks’s band too, and in their downtime the two Chicagoans put together the first incarnation of the Chamber Strings. They began recording Gospel Morning in late 1996, planning to split time between Soundtracks’s band and their own.
Pope Gets Religion
