SYRUP USA 10/31, LOUNGE AX The true glory of prog rock wasn’t in the music; it was in the iconography–the airbrushed Martian landscapes, the knights and alchemists, “The Trees!” So no matter how many layers of irony I have to peel away, there’s still something I have to like about a band that’s willing to put a unicorn on the album cover and dress up in Renaissance Faire costumes for the inner fold. Musically Syrup USA’s All Over the Land (Flydaddy)–the new album from the new band of ex-Swirly Seana Carmody–is pleasant, complex pop. I hear a little Spinanes, a little Portishead, a little Breeders, a little Emerson, Lake & Palmer. But that cover–Yes!
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
ROZZ WILLIAMS 10/31, CONGRESS THEATer You can keep your Cures and your Xmal Deutschlands and all those other hollow weenies; if it’s gotta be goth, it’s gotta be someone like Rozz Williams, veteran of Christian Death–that seemingly invincible hydra that’s survived enough serious messianic delusions to lick a dozen David Koreshes. Williams’s second solo effort, The Whorse’s Mouth (Hollows Hill), is a creaky, funereal thicket of excess, with rickety piano and grim effects underscoring Williams’s flat delivery of his macabre poetry. (“You gyrate for a dead world, try to raise / Erections from its corpse / Roll over and bite hard on that dead meat,” he intones on “Maggot Drain.”) He performs on the first night of Expo of the Extreme, on a bill with (deep breath) Mortiis, Bile, All the Pretty Horses, Boyd Rice & Non, Psywarfare, Sceptre, Hell on Earth, Yeah Right, Bloodyminded, Thanatos, and Baltazar.
POWERMAN 5000 11/5, RIVIERA Seven of the 13 tracks on Powerman 5000’s Dreamworks debut Mega!! Kung Fu Radio were directly inspired by TV or movies, making its fist-pumping, bombastic, vaguely hip-hoppish metal the perfect vicarious rush for couch potatoes whose greatest treasure is mom’s Blockbuster card. Remember, folks–guns don’t kill people. Teenagers with no grounding in reality kill people.
