Recommended and notable shows and releases with critics’ insights for the week of January 12
MUSIC
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PICK OF THE WEEK
ALL AGES
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CONCERT PREVIEWS THURSDAY12
Local improvisers Ken Vandermark and Tim Daisy renew their collaboration by composing new material for each other
Sick Day Grace Bloom headlines; Reggie Pearl and Sick Day open. 8 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport. 21+ F In December, Olivia Wallace launched an email newsletter for her Chicago indie-rock band, Sick Day. The first message included info about upcoming shows, photos from home-recording sessions, and a crudely drawn cartoon about self-doubt, awkwardness, and creating art in an economy that’s built to make it unsustainable. The newsletter’s simple design and casual language have a refreshing, down-to-earth intimacy that social media apps seem only able to simulate, despite their promises of hyperconnection. It’s earnest in the way that indierock zines were in ages past, and so is Wallace’s band. Sick Day evoke the scruffy homemade eccentricity of many of the great 80s K Records acts, but Wallace and her bandmates treat the familiar style of that bygone era as a suggestion, not as a template—and that lets them break new ground, even on turf that’s been claimed many times over. On Sick Day’s self-released debut album, September’s Love Is a State of Mind, they play shambolic, sometimes stripped-down songs with a youthful giddiness that makes their most well-worn sentiments about romantic longing and blossoming crushes feel new. They sound so easygoing that it’s easy to forget how skilled and sharp they are as musicians; on the taut “Take a Little Bit of Love From Me,” by the time Wallace’s bouncing multitracked vocals deliver the hook, Sick Day have already made their case as one of the city’s next great emerging indie acts. —LEOR GALIL
Ken Vandermark & Tim Daisy Duo See Pick of the Week at left. 8:30 PM, Elastic Arts, 3429 W. Diversey #208, $15. b ANDY MOOR
STEVE KAISER
KEN VANDERMARK & TIM DAISY DUO
Thu 1/12, 8:30 PM, Elastic Arts, 3429 W. Diversey #208, $15. b
THE EPISODIC PARTNERSHIP OF reeds player Ken Vandermark and drummer Tim Daisy is an ongoing study in ceaseless change. Since Daisy joined the Vandermark 5 at the end of 2001, the two of them have played together in a variety of settings, using different methods to arrive at different sounds. Their output has included the Vandermark 5’s tightly charted, rock-tinged jazz; Made to Break’s electronics-infused experiments with shuffled structures; and the all-acoustic, intricately contrapuntal ensemble music on the 2017 album Triptych, which the two men made with clarinetist Michael Thieke. Between 2007 and 2011 they worked steadily as a duo, creating totally improvised music typified by the 2011 performances on the download-only 2020 release Consequent Duos: Series 2a. On that recording, they use their deep knowledge of each other’s playing to fuel lengthy, open-ended investigations of bluesy grooves, slowly changing textures, and lightning-quick geometric reconfigurations. This concert is the first time Vandermark and Daisy have played as a duo since summer 2011. It’s also the first date of a brief midwestern tour, and it initiates another new phase in their collaboration: for the first time, both musicians have prepared compositions, with the hope that a new method will yield new ideas. —BILL MEYER
48 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 12, 2023
FRIDAY13 Archers of Loaf Weird Nightmare open. 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 1375 W. Lake, $30. b Last year was particularly stellar for some of the life-affirming bands who helped write the vibrant 1990s indie-rock movement into the history books. Built to Spill, Superchunk, and Guided by Voices dropped new albums that stack up to their classics, while Pavement embarked on another successful reunion tour. But Archers of Loaf might have one-upped all of their brothers-in-arms. In their heyday, the North Carolina-born band (singer and guitarist Eric Bachmann, guitarist Eric Johnson, bassist Matt Gentling, and drummer Mark Price) were beloved for their smartass noise-punk, whose gloriously shambolic tongue-in-cheekiness made anthemic nuggets such as 1993’s “Web in Front” scuzzily charming. They called it quits in 1998 after their fourth full-length, White Trash Heroes, but re-formed in 2011 for sporadic tours scheduled around day jobs, family life, and solo projects.
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