WBEZ 91.5 Chicago

“It’s a really simple, natural, reactionary record after the three-year process of writing the autobiography,” Bob Mould says in a recent chat with Rolling Stone, describing Silver Age, his hard-to-believe-it 10th solo album (and that ain’t counting the prolific outputs of the sublime Hüsker Dü or the overrated Sugar). He goes on to cite two inspirations for this new album from everyone’s favorite indie Merge: Copper Blue, the 1992 debut by Sugar, and a stint last year opening for… the Foo Fighters. 

In my book, neither of those are promising harbingers. As tipped a moment ago, Sugar always seemed like a rather desperate and pandering move by a musical groundbreaker who’d missed the alternative-era gravy train even though he’d helped enable it, and it not only fell short of his mighty accomplishments with the Hüskers, but paled in comparison to his stellar early solo efforts Workbook and Black Sheets of Rain. As for Dave Grohl’s brainlessly catchy, hard-wrocking, corporate-stooge Foo Fighters… well, they’re about as far as one can stray from the intense Mr.

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The line that Baltimore-to-Brooklyn transplants Chris Keating and Anand Wilder have been floating to describe the third release by their psychedelic-pop/electronic worldbeat quintet Yeasayer is that it was strongly inspired by the late R&B icon Aaliyah. By that, they certainly don’t mean her creepily titled, R. Kelly-helmed debut Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number, but her last two albums, in particular her collaborations with producers Timbaland and Missy Elliott, which remain some of the most expansive and inventive music the genre ever has produced.

What this boils down to on Fragrant World is an increased emphasis on the rhythms, which, for all the love showered upon the group’s ethereal but effective melodies, have always been every bit as important a part of the mix.

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I’ve mentioned this a few times before (here, for example), but I first met the indefatigable Chicago singer and songwriter Tom Schraeder more than a decade ago, when he was 16 or 17, lived across the street and sat on his front porch constantly playing Dave Matthews songs on acoustic guitar.

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Continuing with our effort to catch up on noteworthy releases from recent weeks, we have two strong dispatches from alien lands—one from a singer and songwriter’s dark night of the soul, the other from a band dedicated to putting a Brooklyn spin on the sounds of Nigeria.

Passion Pit debuted on the pop scene with one the most memorable back stories in pop music this century: The young singer and songwriter Michael Angelakos began crafting his music as a one-man band in an attempt to woo a woman at Boston’s Emerson College. He didn’t get the girl, but the song “Sleepyhead” took off when he floated it on the Web via MySpace, and soon enough he was signed to Columbia Records and playing in front of huge audiences with a full-blown band. Three years later, we have a follow-up, Gossamer, arriving amid Angelakos’ statements that he’s been dealing with manic-depression. The longing and intimacy of that heartsick bedroom artist remain, but they’re joined by much deeper existential soul-searching this time around.

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Time to catch up on some noteworthy releases from recent weeks, starting with two hugely influential bands from the pre-alternative era.

With one foot in L.A.’s hardcore punk scene and the other in timeless power-pop (they were raised in suburban Hawthorne, which also gave us the Beach Boys), the McDonald brothers made four excellent albums with their band Redd Kross in the ’80s and early ’90s before being overshadowed by grunge—though in a just world, 1990’s Third Eye would have been every bit as popular as Nevermind. They haven’t given us a new album since Show World in 2007, but they return with a vengeance on Researching the Blues, delivering their timeless mix of effervescent energy and indelible melodies as frantically as ever, while showing a new, welcome maturity in much of the subject matter (a trend that’s been increasing since the immortal “I Don’t Know How to Be Your Friend” from Third Eye).

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In rock ’n’ roll today, the words mean absolutely nothing. Except, of course, when they are no less vital than life and death itself.

This dichotomy exists among audiences worldwide—and, indeed, sometimes within the same listener, depending on the circumstances. There can be no better illustration of this bizarre divide than the contrast between two recent stories, one from the former Soviet Union and the other much closer to home.

The tale of Pussy Riot is, by now, old news. Heck, no less a tired old authority on calculated outrage than Madonna has even weighed in.

On Friday, the three young Russian women—two of them mothers of toddlers, all of them better described as members of a performance-art collective than as the more frequently used “punk band”—were sentenced to two years in a penal colony for staging a piece they called “Punk Prayer” at Moscow’s main orthodox cathedral in protest of the policies of dictator-in-all-but-name Vladimir Putin.

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UPDATED WITH NEW MATERIAL BELOW, 1 p.m. THURSDAY (and a slight clarification added, 2:45 p.m.)

With their usual lack of healthy reportorial skepticism about Walmart on the Lake, both Chicago dailies, assorted TV stations and other local media earlier this week regurgitated a press release from Lollapalooza promoters C3 Presents assuring residents that this year’s post-concert cleanup of Grant Park will not linger into the fall as last year’s did, and that it will cost a mere $150,000 versus the alleged $1 million tab for 2011.

Can we imagine journalists taking anything a politician says at face value, much less—heavens forbid!—Drew Peterson? Sources say the repairs will take a lot longer and cost much more than has been reported.

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