Local Release Roundup
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
CATH CARROLL Cath Carroll (Lilypad/Heart & Soul) A gorgeous collection of smoky, very adult ballads written and performed by low-profile chanteuse Cath Carroll and her husband, Kerry Kelekovich (formerly of the Wildroots and Michael McDermott’s band). Carroll remains best known in indie-rock circles as the object of a long-standing fixation of Teenbeat Records honcho Mark Robinson, who covered a tune by her old British band, Miaow, wrote a song about her, and even released her last album. But if you want to know why he’s obsessed, check out this record: Carroll’s voice is similar to, if huskier and less flexible than, Sally Timms’s, but her songs, filled with couples in trouble and loners grappling with their solitude, are much darker and more reflective.
DANIEL GIVENS Age (Aesthetics) Givens, a photographer and a onetime member of the DJ collectives Deadly Dragon Sound System and Atmospheric Audio Chair, has finally made a record of his own, and you can’t really dance to it: not content to simply emulate the hip-hop, jazz, and dancehall sounds he was fond of spinning, Givens mixes expansive beat programming, elusive electronic textures, spoken word, cosmic electric piano, and hypnotic kalimba with contributions by a slew of musicians and singers from the local jazz scene, among them bassist Josh Abrams, cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, guitarist Jeff Parker, flutist Niki Mitchell, and vocalist Glenda Baker. Givens doesn’t write compositions so much as he creates moods, but most of the pieces eventually locate a compelling intersection of the cerebral and the sensual.
