Slight Returns
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In March Loosegroove was folded into the Seattle label Will (original home of Grandaddy), pushing back the release of Debutante by a week, but from the sound of the album you’d think it’d been on the cutting-room floor for five years. It’s a heaping dose of retro rock so dumb it makes Urge’s thin line between smug and sincere look like the Berlin Wall. There are dozens of meaningless pop culture references–“Octoroon” name-drops Victoria’s Secret model Laetitia Casta, “Born in the Eighties” is a sloppy pastiche of tweaked ad slogans like “Gimme gimme gimme empty MTV” masquerading as social commentary–and I can’t detect even an ounce of irony in Kato’s cover of Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work.” He revamps Supersonic Storybook-era Urge licks when he runs out of new ideas, and backing vocalists the Soul Sistahs sound like they’re moonlighting from a jingle job.
An only slightly more listenable return to Chicago alt-rock’s glory days is aptly titled Just What the World Needs…A Tribute to Material Issue, released by the local Veronica label. A few of the 13 local bands on the disc attempt to do something original with Jim Ellison’s classic power-pop tunes–namely the Marvel Kind, who turn “Trouble” into twitchy electro-tweaked paranoia, and Box-o-Car, who give “A Very Good Idea” a Cars-like sheen–but most of them merely recorded vastly inferior takes of the songs. Part of the problem is that, for better or worse, most of these songs relied heavily on Ellison’s snarling charm to begin with. Nearly all of the bands–including Muchacha, Land of the El Caminos, Ness, Today’s My Super Spaceout Day, and Joygirl–will perform at a record-release party Saturday night at Double Door.
Original Soundz
